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Do Chairs Exist? — Transcript

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0:06Hey Vsauce!
0:11Michael here.
0:15And here.
0:18Michael here!
0:19hey vsauce!
0:22what is here?
0:24…. what is there?
0:26what is there?
0:28What REALLY exists?
0:30Do waves exist or are there just things that are wavy?
0:35When does a piece of food I’ve eaten stop being food and become me?
0:41Do chairs exist?
0:46Ontology is the philosophy of existence.
0:49And chairs are what philosophers call ORDINARY OBJECTS.
0:58Ordinary objects are the plain old common sense things we deal with every day: spoons,
1:04buckets, rocks, stuff like that.
1:07Their existence is as obvious as possible
1:11but the more we try to sus out where they are, the more sus they become.
1:19First of all, sure, this could all be a dream.
1:24Maybe we’ve all been hallucinating chairs all these years.
1:27Or this could part of the simulated reality pumped into our brains while our bodies are
1:33harvested for energy.
1:36But underneath that skepticism there’s a deeper ONTOLOGICAL question that we need to
1:41answer first.
1:43Regardless of whether this spoon is made of real atoms or simulated atoms, is it really
1:50possible to be “made of” something?
1:55Take a look at these two things.
1:57As we all know, two minus one is … TWO?!
2:02There ARE two things here:
2:04An origami crane AND a piece of paper.
2:07I’m kidding, of course, there’s really just one: the crane and the piece of paper
2:13are the same.
2:15But watch this.
2:25Where’d the crane go?
2:32If the paper and the crane were truly identical, they would share everything in common.
2:37But clearly they don’t: the paper can survive being unfolded, the crane cannot.
2:43Also, I made the crane, but I didn’t make the paper.
2:47And the paper was around before the crane.
2:50For two things that are the same, they sure are different.
2:55This relationship is called CONSTITUTION: paper constitutes the crane.
3:00It’s a one-to-one relationship, but there’s another kind of “being made of” going
3:06on here, too.
3:08This paper is made not of ONE other thing, but of sextillions of things: fundamental
3:14subatomic particles: electrons and quarks, or strings, or physical and virtual fields.
3:21This many-to-one relationship is called COMPOSITION.
3:26Philosophers call whatever it is that matter is ultimately composed of SIMPLES: a simple
3:31is a thing that, unlike a piece of paper, has no parts.
3:36No substructure.
3:37Not even a top or bottom.
3:38It could be the case that there are no simples, that there’s just a never-ending chain of
3:42smaller and smaller substructure.
3:45Philosophers call such a reality a GUNKY universe.
3:50If structure never ends in the other direction and everything turns out to be part of something
3:53bigger with no final complete composite, that’s what’s known as a JUNKY universe.
4:00Point is: believing ordinary objects exist and are made up of smaller things is quite
4:07common.
4:08It’s called ontological reductionism.
4:09It’s the position that wholes are NOTHING MORE than their parts.
4:14But our cranes and our paper challenge that notion. it seems like being MADE OF some things IS different than
4:22just BEING those things.
4:24Let’’s agree on what it means to exist.
4:28Let’s say that for something to exist is simply for there to be more than zero of it.
4:36Pegasus exists if we mean “are there any winged horses in works of fiction and mythology?”
4:42And pegasus does not exist if we mean, “are there any physical, flesh-and-blood winged
4:48horses that evolved on Earth through natural selection.”
4:53okay, so if we can agree on that, then of course chairs exist!
4:56There’s this one right here.
4:58I can see it and feel it and taste it.
5:03yea. It’s dry and .. a little bit salty.
5:07Dry and salty are what we call PROPERTIES.
5:12Properties tell us what things are LIKE.
5:15For example, this slice of cheese is FLOPPY.
5:19By noticing and sharing properties, we can let each other know what to expect from things.
5:25And we all more or less agree on what things there are.
5:29We give names to stuff and if they catch on, we put them in dictionaries with the word
5:33“noun” next to them.
5:36But are all of these nouns an inventory of the universe … or an inventory of things
5:42we MADE?
5:43Let me put it this way: do islands exist?
5:47Well, it’s in the dictionary and a quick look around confirms that there are more than
5:51zero islands, so yes.
5:54Islands exist.
5:56But what about incars?
6:00An incar is a car that is IN a garage.
6:04As a car leaves a garage, an incar diminishes at the threshold until it collapses into nonexistence.
6:11Later, an extremely similar incar may emerge at the same threshold when the car returns.
6:18Are there any cars in garages right now?
6:21If so, then incars exist.
6:25You might be thinking, “that’s not a thing.
6:29you just made that up.
6:31And it’s silly: “being in a garage” is just a property that a car can have.
6:37Stop trying to make incars a thing.”
6:39Ok, first of all, I didn’t make it up, Eli Hirsch did.
6:43And second of all, if you think incars aren’t things, wait till you hear about islands.
6:50An incar might just be a relation between a car and a garage but an island is just a
6:55relation between land and some water.
6:58Now, “island” might be a more useful concept than “incar,” but does that make islands
7:04OBJECTIVELY more real than incars?
7:08And what about trogs?
7:10A trog is an object whose parts are a tree and whatever dog is nearest.
7:16Here’s a picture of one.
7:18Do you see the trog? this is its tree part and this is its dog part.
7:23You might be thinking, come on, how can THAT be a thing?
7:26The tree and the dog aren’t even connected!
7:29well so what?
7:30These two pieces of fabric aren’t connected and yet they’re a thing called a bikini.
7:35Now sure, if we cut down this tree and burn it for warmth, we wouldn’t feel the need
7:40to apologize to what’s left of the trog for destroying its tree part.
7:46But maybe we should?
7:48What if some extraterrestrials showed up and said they thought dogs and trees composed
7:54trogs — would they be wrong?
7:57Could we convince the otherwise?
8:01Ontological realists believe that we could.
8:03That there really is a mind-independent answer to the question, “what is there?”
8:08People like Theodore Sider believe that the universe has “joints” and we can cut up reality
8:14up into objective, real things by finding them.
8:18Ontological anti-realists disagree.
8:21Their position is that what we think there is is just one way to cut up reality.
8:25It’s a good one for us and our needs, but it’s not objectively more true than any
8:30other.
8:31So who’s right?
8:32Hmm… well if these blocks compose a tower … what do they compose now?
8:43Just because we don’t have a name for .. this.. doesn’t necessary mean that I haven’t
8:47accidentally built something. Does it?
8:50When DO two or more things compose something else?
8:56Peter Van Inwagen calls this the special composition question.
8:59In MATERIAL BEINGS he considers possible answers: maybe things compose something only when they’re
9:06in contact.
9:07That’s a good thought, but it doesn’t explain how a BIKINI can be a thing.
9:11Or why two books are still just two books when one is stacked on top of the other.
9:17you know,
9:18Maybe a certain degree of FIXATION is required.
9:22Or a ‘melding’ … if a surgeon sewed us together and the skin healed with no seam
9:28and we shared the same blood supply … you know, even then it would seem wrong to say
9:33that we’d become some new kind of animal.
9:35There’d still just me and you.
9:39But like, stuck together.
9:41The philosophy of parts and wholes is called mereology and
9:46Mereological Universalism is the belief that there’s an answer to the special composition question
9:51and the answer is this: any assortment of stuff, no matter how strange or scattered across time and space
9:59composes a thing.
10:01some pages compose these books but I don't just have two books here. Oh no, there's also a third thing
10:06let's call it a "took" because it's parts are Two Books.
10:10There is also something composed of my left ear, the northern third of every brown trout in
10:17England, and the Eiffel tower.
10:19Just because it has no name and no one’s ever talked about it before just shows a lack
10:23of intrest on our parts.
10:26To a universalist, eliminating some composites but not others is just too arbitrary.
10:31We may as well accept them all.
10:35Eliminativism is any belief that accepts some composites, but eliminates others.
10:41Peter Van Inwagen, for example, believes that there are no ordinary objects, no chairs or
10:47shirts or shoes.
10:50Right here there are just some simples — atoms or whatever — arragned show-wise.
10:55There isn;t something else here called a shoe.
10:58But he thinks that because people believe they themselves exist, and he can’t see
11:02how something could believe it existed without existing in the first place to even think
11:06that, there must be people.
11:09He goes further, though, to argue that ALL living thigns exist.
11:14While admiting he doesn’t have any “knock-down” agruments in their favor, he mentions that
11:18because simples that are part of a living organism maintain the organism —
11:23— while shedding some members and gaining others, all while remaining individuated from
11:28other organisms, unlike, say, waves of water at the moment of collision, clearly, simples
11:35in the act of a life must compose something.
11:39That position is ORAGANICISM.
11:41It’s been called the belief that people exist, but that none of them wear clothes.
11:48Mereological Nihilism is less generous.
11:51It’s the belief that there aren’t any trogs or incars OR dogs or trees.
11:58Because nothing ever composes.
12:00The nihilist doesn’t believe that there is NOTHING here.
12:03There are lots of simples, but that’s it.
12:07That might sound puzzling: how can a bunch of fundamental particles, arranged into atoms
12:12and molecules that are arranged like this NOT be a chair?
12:17That’s JUST IS what a chair is!
12:20Good question.
12:21Let’s call that deflationism: the belief that this is all silly and that all of these
12:27positions are talking past each other: they all agree on what reality contains: they all
12:33believe that there are simples here and that those simples are arranged in a chair shape.
12:39Since that’s just what a chair IS, they all believe in chairs.
12:43Those who say they don’t just being weird and contrarian.
12:49Deflationism has many supporters.
12:50And it truly is the heart of our issue today.
12:54But to address it, we should first see why it would be nice if all of these parts did not
13:01form a chair.
13:02Let’s begin with over-determination: If chairs really do exist, shouldn’t they be
13:09able to interact with us?
13:10The thing is, though, everything this alleged chair can do can be described by referencing the behavior of
13:16simples here and any other simples that come along.
13:20An account of the activities of every ATOM in this room, leaves nothing
13:25for the chair to explain.
13:28Composites are causally redundant.
13:32Believing in chairs is like believing that, while yes, the burning gas from my stove completely
13:38describes why the water in a pot boils, there’s ALSO a magical invisible substance called
13:44boil-o that comes out of my stove that does the same thing as the flame at the same time
13:50and if there was no boil-o the flame would warm the water just the same, but there is
13:54boil-o.
13:57Chairs are no more real than boil-o.
13:59Composites over-determine what happens in the world.
14:04They also lead to over-COUNTING.
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15:16That’s a good deal, but the ontology seemed wrong.
15:21If I count some parts, I shouldn’t also count the whole they compose.
15:26But if you believe in composite objects you MUST do this, right?
15:30After all, the composite exists.
15:32So if this chair contains, say, 100 sextillion atoms, then there are actually AT LEAST 100
15:41sextillion and one things here: all of these atoms and also a chair.
15:47That seems wrong.. but wait, there’s more.
15:52If I take a knife and scrape off a tiny part of this chair … is it still a chair?
15:59I think most of us would say yes.
16:01It would still be a chair even if I removed a tiny bit again.
16:05And again.
16:06A series of tiny innocuous removals is called a SORITES SEQUENCE.
16:13The trouble they cause is that while it seems we must accept that each individual step doesn’t
16:19annihilate the chair, clearly, ENOUGH minute removals WILL eventually leave us with no
16:24chair.
16:26Nothing at all, in fact.
16:27But how can that be?
16:29How subtracting zero over and over again EVER give a different result?
16:34Clearly, there must be a point at which a tiny change DOES make a difference.
16:40Different people might give different answers as to where that line is — but, you know,
16:46we could just stipulate the boundaries: we could define “chair” in some extreamly
16:51precise way.
16:53If we did that, if we defined the shape, function, history, and use that makes something a chair
16:58so precisely that the even the smallest deviation would make or break its status as a chair
17:03… how could we know if it’d done it right?
17:07If we called up God and said, “hey dude, watch this, see this chair?
17:13Okay, now we’re going to remove a single atom from it.
17:17Ta da!
17:18It’s no longer a chair is it?”
17:21Would God would be like, “pwha!
17:24Correct! you guys nailed it.
17:26That is exactly right.
17:28It was a chair before and now, in my infinite wisdom, I can confirm that that single atom
17:33was what made the difference.”
17:38Unless there’s some explanation for why a boundary should be drawn in a precise way
17:43instead of some other way, our stipulations are just arbitrary.
17:48Ordinary objects may be unredeemably vague.
17:53But being vague may actually be a feature of ordinary objects.
17:58For example, how many people is a crowd?
18:0110 people standing together in a huge empty park might be more of a group, but 10 people
18:07standing further apart in a tiny waiting room will feel way more CROWDED.
18:13The fact that our terms depend on context, that they’re PLASTIC, make it seem less
18:18and less like they’re describing THINGS and more and more like they’re pragmatic.
18:23That rather than telling what there is, they tell us to expect.
18:29Peter Unger has pointed out that there’s at least one kind of thing that CAN survive
18:34a sorities sequence without paradox: stuff.
18:38If you innocuously remove pieces from something that is just “some stuff” you will still
18:45have some stuff after each step until you reach a clear and unambiguous boundary: when
18:52the last piece is removed, there will no longer be any stuff.
18:57This might show that there ARE composite objects: stuff.
19:02As soon as we pretend that some stuff is a THING, though, vagueness sets in.
19:08Suddenly we’re talking about a thing that can lose parts but also can’t lose parts
19:13and unless contradictions can exist, words like “chair” don’t really refer to any
19:19thing in the universe.
19:21Sorites seqeunces lead to other problems, too.
19:25Like: the PROBLEM OF THE MANY.
19:29If removing a tiny number of atoms from this chair still leaves me with a chair, how many chairs are
19:36here?
19:37I mean, there’s this one.
19:39And then there’s this one, which is really similar to the first but doesn't have these atoms on top of
19:48it.
19:49I don’t even have to remove atoms for this to be a problem.
19:51All I have to do try to define which atoms here are part of the chair and which aren’t.
19:56At the atomic level, there isn’t a definite boundary.
20:00Near the edge, it will hard to tell whether a particular molecule is part of the moisture
20:05in the chair or part of the ambient humidity.
20:09Instead of there being a single chair here, it seems like REALLY there are billions and
20:14billions of candidates for the chair.
20:18Which one is the chair?
20:21But now, suppose that instead of removing pieces like in a sorities sequences or choosing
20:26pieces like in the problem of the many, we instead discard pieces and replace them with
20:32new, similar pieces.
20:34This is the set up to the famous SHIP OF THESEUS paradox.
20:40Suppose I buy a boat and name it THESEUS.
20:43Over time, parts of the boat wear out and I replace them with brand new parts.
20:48After, say 10 years, I might realize that not a single part of my boat was part of the
20:53boat on the day I bought it.
20:55Do I now own a different boat?
20:57Have I owned TWO boats?
20:59But now suppose the someone has been following me all these years and has been picking up
21:04each old part I throw out and storing them in a warehouse.
21:08After I replaced all the original parts they take them and join them back the way
21:12they way there were 10 years ago.
21:15Which boat is THESEUS?
21:17Both?
21:18If we conclude that ordinary objects don’t exist, the problems of sorites, the many,
21:26theseus, over-determination, and over-counting all evaporate.
21:31If there are only simples and they never compose anything, then which one is the ship of theseus
21:38is easy to answer: neither!
21:41Neither are the boat and nothing ever was the boat.
21:44All that happened was that some simples got moved around.
21:48The simples the scavenger has are the simples I possessed when I bought the boat, but there’s
21:53no mystery of persistence: removing or exchanging a piece of stuff never left me with the same
21:59stuff.
22:00There’s no mystery as to which of the billions of chair candidates here is THE chair and
22:08the removal of no specific atoms will ever stop it from being a chair because it there
22:12is no chair here and there never was.
22:15There are only simples arranged chair-wise.
22:20The illusion that there ARE composites that can survive changes in parts is an artifact
22:26of our minds.
22:27It’s a helpful one that allows us to track certain properties and ignore others, but
22:33when taken seriously, it obviously isn’t really how the universe works.
22:38And that’s okay.
22:39We shouldn’t be embarassed when we talk about boats or chairs.
22:43Our words for ordinary objects really do refer to actual phenomena and therefore are more
22:49correct than believing that, say, the sun turned into a black hole yesterday.
22:55Unlike the false statement that chairs exist, there is NO evidence saying the sun turned
23:00into a black hole yesterday could even be INCORRECTLY describing.
23:04Because of this, Trenton Merricks calls the belief in ordinary objects false but, “nearly
23:10as good as true.”
23:14This is all silly, though, right?
23:16Of course there are chairs.
23:19If you believe that there are some simples arranged chair-wise, then you admit that there’s
23:24a chair!
23:25Because that’s just what a chair IS.
23:27It’s not some additional THING over-and-above these simples: it just IS them.
23:33Each is still an atom or electron or whatever, but TOGETHER they are a chair.
23:39Not so fast there, chair-lover.
23:42What do you MEAN “a chair IS simples arranged chair-wise?”
23:47the phrase “simples arranged chair-wise” just picks out these simples.
23:52There’s nothing else for that phrase to refer to.
23:55There aren’t all of these simples and then ALSO some OTHER simples that are the simples
24:00arranged chair-wise.
24:02So do you mean that “chair” is a disguised plural?
24:06That it refers to lots of things like the phrase “these books”?
24:11Because “these books” only commits us to the existence of this book and this book
24:16but not an additional single object that’s called a “these books.”
24:20Likewise, if “chair” just means this simple and this simple and this simple, then it points
24:27to a whole bunch of things and not one of them is a chair.
24:33Sure, “chairs” exist if by chair we mean a word for all these simples.
24:39But if by chair we mean an actual object in the universe, there just aren’t any, my
24:46friend.
24:47Except… maybe there is no chair over-and-above the simples, but instead something happens
24:53when an assortment of simples are arranged into a chair-shape.
24:57Each member continues to be a single atom or whatever, but COLLECTIVELY they all simultaneously
25:04BECOME one thing: a chair.
25:07Okay, so then either there’s no chair here, just simples; or somehow a miraculous contradiction
25:14has appeared: many things and ALSO one thing that, despite both clearly differing in that
25:20respect, are still identical!
25:24It looks like chairs can’t be identical to the parts they’re supposedly composed
25:28of..
25:30but chairs also can’t be DIFFERENT from their composite parts because there’s nothing
25:34else there and, after counting and accounting for their parts, there’s nothing left for
25:40the existence of a chair to cause or explain.
25:45To rescue chairs from non-existence, we need to find a way to show that a chair is independent
25:52of its atoms — and therefore distinct from them — but not SO distinct that it’s impossibly
25:59over-and-above them.
26:00We need to find a way to make chairs ONTOLOGICALLY INNOCENT.
26:05To have our cake and not have it, too.
26:08Amie Thomasson does this in a very clever way.
26:11She points out that if I ask you, “hey, is there anything in the fridge?” and you
26:16open it, see that’s it empty, and say, “there’s nothing in here” it would be weird if I
26:21came over, looked inside, found a single eyelash in the corner and said, “ummm EXCUSE me?
26:29What is this?! you said there was no THING in the fridge, but there was an eyelash and,
26:35gosh dangit, the whole things is actually FULL!
26:38Of AIR.”
26:40That would be weird because when I asked if there was anything in the fridge, it was implied
26:44that I meant anything TO EAT.
26:48By arguing that the empty fridge is not REALLY empty, I was using the word “thing” in
26:53what Thomasson calls a “neutral sense.”
26:56I used it to mean any and all entities that could possibly be described.
27:01But you took me to be using “thing” in what she calls a “sortal” sense.
27:07A sortal is a term that tells us what a thing is in way that allows us to count how many
27:12there are AND know when there is or isn’t one.
27:16“Water” is not a sortal.
27:18If I told you there was water in my basement and you asked, “how many waters?”
27:22I’d have to use a sortal to answer you.
27:25For example, “gallons of water.”
27:27Thomasson argues that the neutral use of “thing” is meaningless when used to ask questions.
27:33For example, if I used thing in a neutral sense and asked how many orange things are in this video
27:40you would have no idea how I wanted you to carve it all up
27:43thus, there would be no would be no single correct answer.
27:46You might say, "uh, one orange thing? Your shirt?"
27:50But then I could say, “what, no there's my left sleeve, my right sleeve, the inside of the shirt, the outside of the shirt. Come on, there's way more than one."
28:00Unless we use a sortal net, any search for what things there are will end in confusion.
28:06Not because there are no things, but because it hasn’t been made clear what conditions
28:10to apply when searching.
28:13For Thomasson, this means that what we find depends on what APPLICATION CONDITIONS we
28:19use.
28:20If I ask if there’s anything here that the condition “smaller than a molecule” applies
28:25to, you could note each such thing and give me an inventory.
28:30“Chair” would not be on the list.
28:33But if I asked you if there were any medium-sized rigid-acording-to human strength things here,
28:39“chair” would probably go on your list, and no single atom would.
28:44If an application condition is satisfied in the wrold, then the thing is descrbes exists.
28:51So CHAIRS do exist.
28:55If the application conditions for one thing are also sufficient for something else, then,
29:00if we find the first thing, we have found the other because it’s existence is entailed
29:05ANLYTICALLY by the existence of the first thing — that is, by meaning and logic alone.
29:12For example, if I say that I live in a house you can conclude — without looking! — that
29:16I live in a building.
29:18There’s no paradox here, I don’t live in a house AND a building — two distinct
29:23things that defy the laws of physics by being co-located.
29:25Instead, the conditions that apply to a house are also sufficient for building.
29:32So a single chair is not impossibly identical to some collection of many.
29:38Nor is it somehow over-and-above its parts.
29:41Instead, atoms arranged chair-wise merely logically ENTAIL a chair.
29:47The entailment connects things differentiated by distinct application conditions.
29:52When we ask which one is the ship of theseus, a puzzle erupts because we’re being too
29:58neutral.
29:59We need to say what we mean by “ship of theseus”: if we mean the original parts,
30:04then this is it.
30:05Do we mean the thing registered to me by the boat authorities?
30:08well then it’s this one.
30:10“But which is the REAL one” is an incomplete pseudoquestion.
30:14When it come to sorites sequences, I think we need to just stipulate where the boundary
30:20is.
30:21I don’t think there’s an objective answer provided by the universe or God as to exactly
30:26what is and isn’t a chair, but that doesn’t HAVE to mean that there aren’t any chairs,
30:31it can just mean that every single collection of simples is it’s own unique object independent
30:38of our minds and that we get to decide which we will call chairs.
30:43Vagueness comes from our minds and our language but there are no vague objects in the universe.
30:50We don’t have to believe that our reality is simulated, but I do think we have to believe
30:57that it’s stipulated: it is a reality that contains not what intelligent machines have
31:02decided to give us, but what we have decided we have.
31:07There’s no fact of the matter as to whether calling this a star is the TRUE way to carve
31:13up this stuff.
31:14It’s a pretty useful way to do it, and helpful for at least human purposes, but “STAR”
31:20is a thing WE imposed on the world.
31:24As Michael Jubien puts it, “there are no things, but as a consequence there are as
31:29many things as we like.”
31:32As for the problem of the many, we can simply just admit that there really are billions
31:37of slightly different chairs here.
31:40Some include a few boundary atoms that others don’t, but since they all act and react
31:45pretty much in unison, in our daily lives it doesn’t matter which exact material collection
31:51we mean when we say “this chair.”
31:53However, let’s go back to our cranes.
31:59When we talked about holes we said that holes might be ONTOLOGICALLY parasitic.
32:04That their existence seems to require the existence of something ELSE: something that
32:09can HOST the hole.
32:12Perhaps this crane is holey, too.
32:16Not a physical thing in its own right, but a disturbance IN some paper.
32:21There is no material crane here, there is only some paper that is arranged crane-wise.
32:26But once we start entertaining that notion, we realize that nearly EVERYTHING we see and feel
32:31all ordinary obejcts and even ourselves are ontological parasites
32:38Michael Jubien calls our tendency to think that what is true of a “chair” is true
32:42of the material that is chairing OBJECT FIXATION or PROPERTY REPRESSION.
32:49Object fixation is useful and “nearly as good as true” but when paradxoes loom, we
32:55should remember that while chairs exist, they aren’t made out of matter and can’t be
33:01touched or or felt or tasted.
33:04All I can do is taste some stuff while it chairs.
33:08If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s not a
33:14duck, but it is arranged duck-wise.
33:18I think that the only concrete physical things in our universe are simples — or, since
33:25our universe could be gunky — the material world only contains stuff.
33:31And yes, this stuff is chair-ing, but the road paved by the idea that that makes this
33:37stuff A chair leads to paradox.
33:41To see how we could have made that mistake, let’s remember the famous Clintonian dictum
33:45that often “it depends on what the meaning of “is” is”
33:51There’s the “is” of predication, which tells us what some thing is like, as in, this
33:57cheese IS floppy.
34:00And then there’s the “is” of identity which tells us what is the same as what for
34:05example, 2+2 IS 4.
34:09To believe that chairs are made of matter — to be believe that YOU are made of matter
34:14— is to confuse these two ISes.
34:18When a collection of properties are extremely thorough in telling us what to expect from
34:22some stuff, we tend to just go ahead and NOUN them: collapse them into a single word and
34:28believe it doesn’t just describe some stuff, but REFERS to it.
34:34I think we have an intuitive sense of the thoroughness of properties and this can be
34:38seen in how we order our adjectives.
34:41“Big” can mean many things.
34:44A big diamond and big house are very different in size.
34:49“Blue” tells me a bit more about what to expect, but CHEESEBURGER, oooh that’s
34:55specific.
34:56So specific, in fact, that we call it a noun.
35:00This increasing thoroughness may be partly responsible for the fact that “big blue
35:05cheseburger” sounds fine, but blue big cheeseburger” sounds kind of weird.
35:12When we embrace the idea that cheseburgers are not physical objects, but instead, exist
35:18as an abstract set of properties like juicy, warm, soft, and so on, the specter of ontolgical
35:25paradox dissipates.
35:28You and I are not physical objects either.
35:32“Michael-ing” is a bunch of different properties and most of them are very vague.
35:37They include things like, “knowing who Kevin is, being more or less a certain height, having
35:43a roughly continous relationship with the stuff that Mcihaeled yesterday and that that’s
35:46Michael-ing today” and so.
35:48Some of what it means to Michael does concern composition, like, the fact that I will still
35:54exist even if I shave off the stuff I call my beard.
35:58If I shaved off my beard, there would still be some stuff Michael-ing, but it would be
36:03different stuff than before.
36:05We’re able to lose parts and change and grow because we aren’t made of matter, we’re
36:15hosted by matter.
36:16There’s no thing that is you and no thing that is ME.
36:18As Alan Watts would say, the universe doesn’t contain people, the universe PEOPLES.
36:24Chairs and tables and rocks and buckets and people are not made of atoms, they are preformed by atoms.
36:33We are disturbances in stuff and none of it is us.
36:40This stuff right here is not me. It's just me-ing.
36:44We are not the universe seeing itself, we ARE the seeing.
36:50I am not a thing that dies and becomes scattered, I AM death and I AM the scattering
37:00And as always, thanks for watching.
37:18as always, links to read and learn more can be found in the description down below
37:22there's also a link down there to subscribe to the curiosity box
37:26if you subscribe now, this will be your first box
37:29but remember, use code BOGO and we'll you are summer box as well completely free
37:34give your brain a treat.
37:36support vsauce, support Alzheimer's research, and creators everywhere
37:38by joining today
37:42I'll see you there. And as always, thanks for watching.

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