Do Chairs Exist?

To be fair, it can be hard to define “chair” to the satisfaction of an unsympathetic judge. “Do chairs exist?”: ▶ this video

Given the title, as good an excuse as any to point people to the Vsauce video "Do Chairs Exist?": * ▶ this video (Can't believe a half-hour video on ontology has >13M views.)

Thanks for biting. But I'm also serious. Some evidence that I'm not joking, two more or less prominent examples... From Roger Penrose's "The road to reality", chapter 1.3 "Is Plato's mathematical world ‘real’?": "I am aware that there will still be many readers who find difficulty with assigning any kind of actual existence to mathematical structures. Let me make the request of such readers that they merely broaden their notion of what the term ‘existence’ can mean to them. The mathematical forms of Plato’s world clearly do not have the same kind of existence as do ordinary physical objects such as tables and chairs. They do not have spatial locations; nor do they exist in time." "Do Chairs Exist?" by Vsauce, ~11M views: ▶ this video "How" you ask.. I think we need to trace back when philosophers started to hit on that meme. I think the "multi-thousand-year furniture lobbyists" started to jump on the bandwagon from there and things co-evolved after that. I am determined to solve that humandkind-old mystery.

Love this vsauce video for some examples ▶ this video There’s still a lot of value in philosophy when we use it to think about how we structure and rationalize the world. Even if science gives us ever better models of the underlying reality of the universe, there’s still the understanding of how we conceptualize that reality and what it means to us. Specifically in ways that don’t require religion or supernatural beings, nor in purely psychological means of perception or physiology. I think of it as the study of the emergent properties of complex information processing. It can do things like help us talk about the minds of others, for example future AI, potential extraterrestrial intelligences, or even other terrestrial intelligences (dolphins, octopus, etc)

First off, I think everyone deals with this at some point. I think, also, since you are always changing as a person, what helps you cope at one point of your life might not work as life goes on. Various things have all contributed, in some way or another, to helping me in the past and present. Most recently, I came across a VSauce video from a year ago: "Do Chairs Exist?" by VSauce [1]. Now, the thrust of the video deals with mereology [2]. However, the final line from Michael at the end surprised me a lot, and in the days since watching it, has been an extremely strong comfort for me: "I am not a thing that dies and becomes scattered, I AM death and I AM the scattering." I think it is worth spending the 40 minutes to watch the whole thing, as makes this line make more sense and extremely impactful. Anyway, this helped me recently, maybe it can help someone else :) [1]: ▶ this video [2]: link

"Do chairs exist?" ▶ this video Perhaps the desk is "chairing" in those moments. [EDIT] A little more context for those who might not click on a rando youtube link: it's basically an entertaining, whirlwind tour of the philosophy of categorizing and labeling things, explaining various points of view on the topic, then poking holes in them or demonstrating their limitations.

Of the three linguistic entities in this sentence, only one is well defined. Let's rephrase from a question to a statement and look at the veracity: "Real numbers are real". - "Real Numbers" - this is the one thing we can formally define, but there is implied baggage - does the concept of real numbers exist, or does at least one real number exist ? The former is just ∃x(x ∈ ℝ), √2 proves that, the set ℝ must exist, no major problem there. Really this question asks "For ∃x(x ∈ ℝ), is x 'real, existing in reality'?" For that we need to look to the other two words. - "are" - the copula (is/to be) is a doozy and a perennial semantic footgun, put a pin in that - "real" - this is a nebulous concept, and where the weight of the discussion lies. Basically it is asking can something with infinite information be? And there's that pesky copula. Is/be is tricky, particularly in English, because its usage is heavily overloaded. It is used to express - Strict equality: "Two plus two is four" - Categorization: "A frog is an amphibian" (all frogs are amphibians, not all amphibians are frogs) - Description: Grass is green (grass has the property green, but green is not grass). - Predicates (in general): "It is raining" (in many languages, there is no copula, and the sentence is closer to "Raining." or "It rains." see Zero Copula [0]) (arguably, all the above are involved in predicates, definitions are hard) In "Real numbers are real", I would contend we are talking about the description usage

This sounds like you might be able to gain something from the “Do chairs exist?” video by vsauce.[1] Basically, he goes through the different philosophical reasonings of the past and then explores where each one of those fall apart. He goes explicitly into how small things can create something larger but why philosophers have struggled to make the leaps to change definition. He ends on the latest philosophical reasoning, which I think thoroughly explains your conundrum. I’ll try to explain even if it seems less profound here than in the video. Basically, all concepts are emergent behavior of “stuff.” There really isn’t a chair, but “stuff” arranged chair-wise. And humans decide what that boundary is for both chairs and consciousness as they are concepts we apply to stuff that is “chairing” or “being conscious.” A collection of neurons may or may not be conscious by defining how they behave. And the details on where we draw the line for consciousness is no different than where we draw the line for how many atoms we can scrape away from a chair and it still be a chair. [1] ▶ this video

Sabine's lecture pairs nicely, I think, with a recent Vsauce episode asking "Do Chairs Exist". Both, to my mind, explore elements of empiricism and pragmatism, and unearth subtleties of epistemology that most discussion seem to miss. ▶ this video