Hacker News Reader

Comment by smokel | Hacker News Reader

I once made a large pencil drawing of my living room using only words.

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.

View on HN

This is pretty much Van Inwagen's argument in Material Beings -- recommended if you haven't read it!

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."

Vsauce has a great video on that if he’s your style - https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE?si=Ul6FLtlffINuKLrT

Something I read, not sure if it's true, that the language of a certain Native American tribe (Navaho?) has no nouns. Instead verbs are used to describe things like tables and chairs, as table-ing and chair-ing.

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 makes the way the Navajo Code Talkers described things make a lot more sense.

> I now try to stop believing in things. It's mostly just molecules that happen to be in a certain configuration for some time.

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.

I considered stuff that I could manipulate freely to be a separate thing. This meant that sheets of paper (being glued to the book) were not separate things. I don't recall checking for loose leaves that I stuck in books, though. I wasn't as critical back then as I'm now :)

Oh, and the idea breaks down entirely for fluid or gaseous things.

You don't actually act or behave in accordance with that "belief". You would be incapable of perceiving anything, taking any action, or making this post.

> 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 things are real, they are emergent patterns. Both each individual pin as well as the whole bag are real. See also https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23307/1/wallace_rp%20for%20....

Great read, thanks.

(The link did not work for me. Archive did: https://web.archive.org/web/20240426090908/https://philsci-a...)

Thank you for that link, that is a fascinating read! I have to study the text and its references some more before I can say something sensible.

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.

A fluid, or an object like a chair, is not an arbitrary or imaginary structure. The way they behave is factually real, and necessarily so. They are not structures that are invented, they are discovered. This fact of the matter is an objective reality. They are real in that sense. Given the underlying reality (substrate, particle and/or fields or whatever), these patterns couldn’t have been any different. They are real in their nature as structures formed by the underlying substrate. It’s not that a fluid exists “somewhere” (that sounds like a misunderstanding, or a category error as you say), it’s that it’s an observable pattern that emerges as a necessary logical consequence of the underlying substrate. You couldn’t have the latter and not also have the former.

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.

Hm, I think we are discussing different topics here.

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.

I believe that the properties that give a “thing” meaning to observers are by and large independent of the observers. They are properties of the thing more than they are properties of the observer. That’s why I believe they are real in their own right, and not (just) as a function of observers (which may or may not be present).

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.

> I now try to stop believing in things. It's mostly just molecules that happen to be in a certain configuration for some time.

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.

Deep philosophical insights gained through pedantic accounting - I genuinly love it.

Anthropological too.

I love this idea. You could generate a 3d world like that so that you can zoom in and out combining the objects like pins in a map.

You could also run the drawing by an image generator and get a livingroom both like and unlike your own.

There is for sure a difference between things in language, and things in fact. Cool project.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com