Comment by nakedneuron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nakedneuron | Hacker News Reader

Has anybody made the same observation? :

Philosophy seems to be concerned with furniture a lot. I'm compiling a list of examples I encountered where in a philosophical (sometimes not philosophical) context someone brings up the table (rarer so the chair) as an instance of a physical thing. I started compiling this list when I was convinced this is a thing.

Further examples (book citations, links) greatly encouraged if you can contribute. My list is still small but only because I was so late to take action.

I have an idea of why this is. But I want to corroborate my empiric base before going to the greater public with this.

>I have an idea of why this is.

Because they are convenient examples of things everybody in their audience has seen and knows about, and are quite simple too?

One could use dogs for example, to make somebody understand the Platonic Ideas (in this case, dogness), but they have a lot more aspects and variables than tables (even questions about unique personality and soul might creep in, whereas for tables it wont).

While this is true, there are billions of convenient examples everybody knows. Also there are things that have a lot less variables than a table.

I'm not convinced. (I don't thing so.)

I will bite. How do these multi-thousand-year furniture lobbyists continue to conspire to successfully frame our contemporary ideas toward their agenda?

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: https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE

"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.

>While this is true, there are billions of convenient examples everybody knows.

Well, in those days they had a billion less examples than we have today - or at least tens of thousands of common today product categories and things not yet existing.

But they also used weaponry (Zeno on infinite division), chariots (Plato on soul), pots (Plato on art), caves (Plato on reality), dice (Heraclitus on chance), and many other things.

Plus, famous examples tend to be re-invoked (same how computer vision students re-used Lena).

Both are fair points. Still, a table - or chair - is/was one of thousands of options to choose. So you might be right that good examples tend to be reproduced. Question remains why it would be a good example to begin with.

Personally I think at some point such choice became baked in into the concept of physical existence because people think in pictures and physical existence in itself is such an abstract thing. The choice of furniture however is kind of hilarious.

Personally I have always attributed my tendency of that to the fact that I sit on chairs or at a table when I talk about these types of things. So they are convenient examples to use in the moment, examples of objects that people have a good understanding of (or so they think).

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