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huehehue | 1 year ago

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."

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lioeters|1 year ago

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.

RecycledEle|1 year ago

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