For four years, I photographed, indexed and classified my entire house
katalog-barbaraiweins.com
katalog-barbaraiweins.com
Each word depicted a "thing" at the position I found it. It taught me a lot about what things are. A chair is obviously a separate entity and easy to list, but what about the floor and the separate floorboards? I listed the wall, but I didn't list the paint on the wall.
The bookcase took a lot of effort, because I found that each book in it was a thing by itself and should get listed separately. However, when I was nearly finished, I found a bag in a cabinet, holding ~200 pins. I just counted them and noted down "207 pins"; I didn't feel that each pin was unique enough to warrant separate entries.
I now try to stop believing in things. It's mostly just molecules that happen to be in a certain configuration for some time.
This is the way. The real and/or important things have a tendency to impinge upon your perceptions in such a way as to render your belief in them or lack thereof moot and/or meaningless.
(The link did not work for me. Archive did: https://web.archive.org/web/20240426090908/https://philsci-a...)
For now, it seems that I feel most comfortable with the "instrumentalist" view, even though Wallace seems to reject this quite easily. To me it seems clear that most abstractions only exist in the mind, and the recent successes with large language models suggest that the underlying mechanisms for that are not even very complex. Insisting that a fluid must exist somewhere simply because we observe it, does not strike me as a good argument. Centuries of looking for God did not help much to find that entity either.
The anecdote about the person who is shown a university, but who still insists on asking "But where is the university?" also comes to mind. I think most of this is simply a categorical mistake.
So, sure, the things are real, but "real" has a different meaning depending on who you ask.
As an analogy, if you take the natural numbers to be real (I’m not saying that you do), then for example the fact that there are prime numbers, and which exact numbers those are, (or in other words, the pattern of prime numbers within the natural numbers) is just as real.
I doubt that we use the same definition for something being "real". I'd like to avoid that discussion, and talk about what constitutes a thing.
To me, _things_ merely exist in someone's brain, and their corresponding physical representation sure is real, it exists there in reality. But the physical "thing" does not have any relevant meaning other than to us observers. For all the universe could care, the chair is just a bunch of atoms, similar in value to a chunk of space on the left of it.
Consider also some problems, such as the chair not being in an absolute position in time. It is constantly moving with the earth, and with the solar system, at an incredible speed. Also, the chair will probably not be here anymore in 1 billion years. Also, if you zoom in, all the atoms are moving like crazy. It just works fairly well as a chair to us human observers, but it seems irrelevant to aliens with different life spans.
With regard to “meaning”, I would agree that meaning only exists in our heads. But that is true concerning the fundamental description of reality just as with regard to emergent “things”. Reality doesn’t have any inherent meaning. Meaning is something that only exists in our psychology.
And so are we.
Interesting thought on the books vs pins, made me think. A sheet of paper is a thing. So maybe the book is the bag rather than the shelf.
Oh, and the idea breaks down entirely for fluid or gaseous things.
You could also run the drawing by an image generator and get a livingroom both like and unlike your own.
Copied from wiki:
"Every composite material object is made up of elementary particles, and the only such composite objects are living organisms. A consequence of this view is that everyday objects such as tables, chairs, cars, buildings, and clouds do not exist. While there seem to be such things, this is only because there are elementary particles arranged in specific ways. For example, where it seems that there is a chair, Van Inwagen says that there are only elementary particles arranged chairwise."
That makes sense since a chair is only a temporary arrangement of elements that used to be (doing) something else, like tree-ing, and will inevitably fall apart and cease to be chair-ing in the future.
It made me think of how names, nouns, and objects are a kind of illusion, a mental convenience of freezing things into place as we talk about them, when in fact everything is in constant flux of coming into being and disintegrating back into that nameless movement.
That is some hardcore disassociation right there. Interesting that you use the word 'try' which implies that it requires effort to overcome the faith in the meaning of things.
1. Convert the images to WEBP or AVIF or at least run them through something like TinyPNG to compress them better.
2. Save two versions of each images; a 75x75 version that gets used for the 75px thumbnails shown on the page, and a 500x500 version that appears in the lightbox after a thumbnail is clicked.
3. Only load a few dozen thumbnails at first and then load more after the user scrolls down or clicks a "show more" type button.
I recommend and use Cloudinary. Cloudinary can take care of all that for you!
For point 3:
You can add laoding="lazy" to the image tag, and get lazy loading for free, supported by the browser:
* https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Performance/Laz...
And it doesn't matter how typical or not, I'm referencing the case in point.
You may rail on about how npm != node, but everyone considers npm to be 'node package manager', no matter what the initialism actually stands for.
HTH
No more "where does this go" or "where do I find X"..
Using the phone is just too much friction. I print out a checklist and check items off.
This is not the flying car future I was hoping for, but it works well enough.
There's a modern version.[1]
This is a bit much for a house, unless you have way too much house, or several houses.
Interestingly, by her own admission Barbara Iweins (the artist whose work TFA features) self describes this project as being rooted in neurosis, specifically one that seems to be a response to lack of stability in her life.
Similar projects seem always to have an unbound quality... like the labors of Sisyphus. So I guess my question to her would be "how would you know that this project is complete?" Is it complete now? According to TFA it is, yet I suspect that even with all the effort she has put into it, the itch is not yet scratched.
(or archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240624140531/http://katalog-ba...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hYUnkW4sNA
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/jan/27/like-wi...