If you like this shower thought you’re gonna love this video: https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE
I mean, can anything exist entirely on its own?
The elements come to mind…
Sounds like a thing we talked about in a philosophy class I took.
You have a room, with nothing but a blank piece of paper in it. There is one thing in the room.
You fold the paper. There is now a crease in the paper. It is still in the room.
How many things are in the room?
A “crease” (like the corner of a table) is a distinct thing, yet it is part of the paper. There is no increase in mass in the room. Yet the crease remains.
What if you fold it into a paper plane or boat? In that case would you go from two things to one?
The truth is there are already many things in the room. Walls, air, paper. Gravitational influence. The arrangement is rife with mass. Between the Planck lengths are quantum fluctuations. A crease introduces a new arrangement of some of this, and the energy required to do so increases entropy. In other words, this philosophy exercise seems completely useless other than putting ignorance on full display.
Nah, it’s supposed to get you to think about what a thing is. You’ve listed random other examples of things but haven’t really gotten closer to differentiating what makes a thing vs it not being a thing.
Thats what philosophy does. It’s a crowbar we shove into the cracks in our models of how the world works to prove for weakness.
In the example above all you did was describe the paper better. It doesn’t matter if it’s blue or creased or whatever, the question is about the physicality (or lack thereof) of information. We’re still not sure what happens to the information that passes through a black hole. Philosophy is a blind person’s cane, helping to feel out unfamiliar territory.
As in, that territory can never be fully known?
Can the crease exist without the paper?
Then in my opinion, it isn’t a separate thing.
I am not aware of this setup, and so I’m musing and winging it, but I think what they’re saying is that if you point at the paper and say “is this a sheet of paper” they’d say yes. And then you point to the crease and say “is this a crease” and they’d say yes, so it has identity, separate from the paper (as in creases and papers are not synonymous), but given that it’s not counted when listing things in the room, it’s also not a thing.
But I think for me it’s not that tricky, because it’s a feature of the paper. Like if there was a coat in the room with buttons, and you asked me what was in the room I wouldn’t say a coat and three buttons, I’d say just a coat. And the coat has three buttons, but those are properties of the coat, not the room. And buttons are something that can stand-alone!
But if I had a sheet of paper with a button placed in the middle of it, but not attached, I wonder would most people say it was a sheet of paper and a button, or a sheet of paper with a button?
Creased is just a different way for the paper to be for a little while.
Now this is a quality shower thought!
maybe it’s not a feature but a bug, they didn’t plan it be there, but there it was
There’s a patch for it called a round table.
That’s just infinite corners.
rounded corners though
I mean isn’t that symbiotic?
You don’t need corners to have a table (it can be round)
But a corner cannot exist without features that form it.
It would only be parasitic if a round table was forced to be square against its desires. If a table wants to be square, the corners are being helpful.
