Philosophy gets a bad rap for asking and answering pointless questions. Here’s an example of the kind of question Max was writing an essay on today: Is the chair you’re sitting on real or not? Most people roll their eyes at such a question because the answer seems obvious. Of course the chair exists; you’d be sitting on the floor if it didn’t. It seems like a waste of time to even ponder something so obvious.
When you look up at the sky, everybody knows exactly what you’re talking about when you reference the Big Dipper. But what exactly is it? Is the Big Dipper actually a concrete thing? Of course not – it’s seven stars billions of light years away from each other. It’s a pattern that humans recognize, not some external object.
Chairs, houses, baseballs – all of these things are like constellations. They are patterns that we observe, and then we give those patterns a name, for easy reference. Our words do not reference actual unified “things”, any more that the Big Dipper is some independent “thing” floating around in space.
This theory is not without problems. Things start getting more difficult when you’re talking about living things. At some point, when you start removing particles from a human, you might actually end up taking something additional out of existence – namely, life. When we reference beings and/or consciousness, the boundaries get a lot more difficult to establish. Am “I” my brain? Am “I” fully explained by my heart? I delivered a baby last night that was 23 weeks and lived for just a few seconds. Although the mother didn't know that she was even pregnant, she was having a hard time grieving someone she didn't know existed until a few minutes before she came to the hospital.
I’d say the human mind is extremely effective at carving up physical reality into bite-size pieces. It names stuff and distinguishes “this” from “that”. And thank goodness it does, because we’d have a very difficult time navigating the world without boundaries.
