 Philosophy gets a bad rap for asking and answering pointless questions. Here's a great example. Does the chair you're sitting on exist 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. Well I would like to argue for the seemingly absurd. I'm going to make the case that chairs don't exist nor does any other inanimate object. Here's my conclusion in three words. Objects are concepts. They do not exist independent of the mind. This conclusion is not reached for aesthetic or mystical reasons. It's only because arguing for the existence of independent objects creates all kinds of absolutely outrageous conclusions. I'm going to give you several examples to illustrate exactly what I'm talking about. The problem begins with John Locke's undergarments, specifically his sock. Locke wondered to himself, if my sock gets a hole in it and then it's subsequently patched, does it remain the same sock? And then further, what if it were patched twice? What if my sock went through so many repairs that no original threads remained? Would it still be the same sock? Now this dilemma has been thought about for literally thousands of years. Some philosophers have said yes it remains the same sock, while other philosophers have said no it's a different sock. As I will elaborate shortly, both of these answers have big problems. The easiest conclusion is to say, a sock really never existed in the first place. Okay, so I need to clarify a few premises up front to avoid any confusion. I'm not arguing that physical reality doesn't exist or that it's an illusion or that matter somehow disappears when nobody's looking at it. My argument is this. The physical world is real and it is separate from the human mind. Physical reality is made up of fundamental bits of matter, call them atoms or quarks or plank units, whatever. These fundamental units are arranged in different ways. The human mind names particular arrangements of matter as objects for easy reference. Assigning a name to something does not create a new thing, therefore all objects are merely references to bits of matter, not to independent unified things. In other words, objects are concepts. The physical world is indeed real but objects are not part of the physical world. Thus we can easily resolve the problem of John Locke's sock. It never existed in the first place, just bits of matter which are conveniently referenced as a sock. As patches were added, that particular arrangement of matter changed. Whether or not Locke decides to continue referencing the different assortment of particles as a sock is an entirely subjective phenomena. It's only a name. So that's my conclusion. Now I'll explain why it's preferable to the alternative, thinking that independent objects actually exist. One of the biggest problems with objects is their boundaries. Whenever we reference object X versus object Y, we're implying that there's a concrete boundary between them. Objects must have, if you will, real edges, otherwise they could not be differentiated from each other. But several examples will show the difficulties with this idea. Take a simple example, a pile of sand. Imagine a garbage bag full of sand breaks in your house. You can clearly see a pile of sand on your floor so you get a shovel and a mop and you start cleaning up. And you work until there's only one grain of sand remaining. Now you can say with certainty that pile of sand is gone as only one grain of sand does not constitute a pile, but this presents us with a problem. Instead of using a shovel, imagine you removed each grain of sand piece by piece. When does the pile disappear? I mean, when you begin it's certainly there, there's a pile of sand. And when you end it's certainly gone, so that means at some point some threshold must have been crossed by placing or removing that one grain of sand, a pile pops in and out of existence. Consider another example. Let's say you go outside and you find a large stick on the ground. You break it in half and then you break it in half again. And you break it in half again and again and again. At what point does that stick disappear and you're just left with an entirely new thing? A twig. Of course then if you keep breaking the twig you'll essentially be left with sawdust. Now a stick is certainly not sawdust and that means at some point some metaphysical transformation has taken place. The stick pops out of existence while the sawdust pops into existence. Of course there's an easy resolution to this. The stick and the pile of sand never existed in the first place. They only appear as whole independent things but they are not actually greater than the sum of their parts because there's no whole in the first place. Each object is entirely explained by its constituent particles. Therefore the boundary between pile and not pile or stick and twig is merely linguistic. My favorite example is a jigsaw puzzle. Look at a fully assembled puzzle. They can agree and say yes there is a puzzle. Yet each puzzle is quite clearly made up of individual pieces. We wouldn't lay down one piece out of a 10,000 piece puzzle and declare now there is a puzzle. But the same is true for two pieces or maybe even ten pieces. Let's say that 9,999 pieces were all assembled and were just missing one small edge piece. You can imagine it would then become accurate to say ah there is a puzzle. This means even if some people disagree where the boundary is, at some point between the first and the last puzzle piece, a metaphysical puzzle pops into existence. Let's examine that final piece a bit further. For the sake of example let's say somebody is a puzzle stickler and they say ah ah. Only upon assembly of all 10,000 puzzle pieces does the puzzle exist. Examine that moment right when they lay down the final 10,000th puzzle piece. What happens if they only push it down half way? It wouldn't exist yet. So that means by the mere push of a finger moving a puzzle piece down a millimeter in space, somebody can bring an entirely new thing into existence and of course by bumping into it that thing will pop out of existence. And what if that last puzzle piece is a little bit bent so it leaves some empty space in the puzzle? What if it's scratched? What if the piece fits but it's from another puzzle even though it's roughly the same color? Now all of these problems get avoided the easy way. The puzzle is simply a concept. It's not an independent thing. Puzzles do not exist in physical reality and they do not pop back and forth from existence to non-existence by the push of a finger. Alright so let's take a new example in reverse. Imagine a delicious whole pizza. Now cut it up into 8 slices. You still have the whole, it's still in the box, and everybody would agree a pizza that's merely sliced is still a pizza. But you also have something additional, you have 8 slices of pizza. And if you cut the pizza up even further you'll end up with an even larger metaphysical reality. There's more stuff in front of you, there's 16 slices of pizza. And as soon as you pull the slices out of the pizza box, the whole pizza immediately disappears into the ether and you're left only with slices. Alright final example. Consider a very troublesome object that's known by actors as the actors cube. It's simply a cube that's painted black and actors will use it for whatever purpose they need. It can be a chair, a table, a stool, a stair, or even a weapon. In other words you can sit on it, you can eat on it, you can stand on it, you can throw it. But what's going on here? Is the actors cube a chair, a table, a stool, a stair and a weapon all at once? Or is it only upon the actors sitting on the cube that it becomes a chair? You would have a very difficult time arguing that an actors cube is not a weapon when it's hurled through the air at somebody's head. But what if it's not hurled through the air? If everybody only sits on the actors cube, does it still remain a weapon? Or perhaps it's something in between, it's a metaphysical potential weapon. Of course if that were true it would mean that an actor's intention could change the metaphysical nature of objects. If I say accidentally drop the actors cube on your foot, we wouldn't call it a weapon. If you intentionally dropped it on your head to cause damage, we would call it a weapon. Now what an odd situation where the mere intention of somebody can make metaphysical objects pop in and out of existence even though the physical particles didn't change at all? Now a skeptic might say no no, the actors cube is only an actors cube and nothing more. It's merely being used as a table or a chair, a weapon. But this runs into many other problems, not least of which is the horribly sticky question, well, what makes a table a table? What makes a chair a chair and what makes a weapon a weapon? And then this skeptic is stuck trying to define table-ness and chair-ness as some objective criteria, platonic forms if you will. And furthermore who determines what an actors cube is in the first place? I mean you could take an old cardboard box and paint it black, or maybe some old wooden chest or a mini refrigerator, doesn't even have to be black. Does a stack of old luggage that's bound together by straps qualify as an actors cube? I don't see why not. This is a true story, for several months after my wife and I moved to Atlanta we were using a cardboard box as our dinner table. We threw a curtain over it as a tablecloth and we sat on the floor to eat dinner because we didn't own chairs at the time. Now I have direct certain experience with a box actually being used as a table. Consider one more example, perhaps a bit sillier. Think about a humble backscratcher. Surely anybody can point out a backscratcher, but is there some objective criteria for what qualifies something as a metaphysical backscratcher? I mean you can use a stick, a fork, or a golf club, practically anything else to scratch your back. Must it really have some particular shape? My answer is a backscratcher is just a word. There's no metaphysical errors being made if you call a golf club a backscratcher if you so desire. Consider another example. Make a fist and look at it. Surely there is a fist in front of you. Now open your hand. The fist is gone. What happened? The particles are exactly the same, but there are arrangements slightly changed. At some point between open and closed, your fist disappeared. Or it was never there to begin with. Okay, so this brings up another crucial problem. Let's say you're trying to argue that the following is true. Objects take up space. Okay, we also know that one, that object is made up of particles. And two, those particles also take up space. So the question is this. Does an object occupy the exact same space as the particles which make it up? Either way that you answer yes or no creates very difficult problems. Let's say the answer is yes. Objects occupy the exact same space as the particles which constitute them. And this implies that every object has an exact number of particles. When that number changes, the object changes. That means when your chair gets a scratch, it would no longer remain the same chair as it lost some of its constituent particles. It would become a metaphysical chair with a scratch. And even if you gently rubbed the chair, microscopic particles would be removed and its metaphysical existence would change again. That means a practically infinite number of objects exist and they're constantly popping in and out of existence with the slightest breeze. In fact, this way of thinking implies that no concrete object exists for more than an instant, as atoms are constantly bumping into each other and changing. This scenario is logically possible, but it strikes me as utterly absurd and unnecessary. So then we're only left with one answer. No, objects do not occupy the same space as the particles which constitute them. But this answer might even be more peculiar. What exactly would a chair occupy space with, if not particles? Is it just pure chair-ness? It's concrete space that's not filled by particles, but with some kind of non-particle spatial stuff. I can't even imagine what that would look like. This would also imply that particles are unnecessary and we could remove them without changing the chair at all. Take a chair, remove the physical particles, and you're still left with a chair. But this is preposterous. I am unwilling to posit the existence of ghost chairs. Surely, if we throw a chair into the fire and let it burn into ashes, it doesn't remain a chair any longer and it doesn't take up space. The only resolution I find acceptable is to say, therefore, objects don't take up space. They are not physical. Now, there's a million other great examples of so-called objects which actually have very fuzzy boundaries when you start examining their constituent particles. Take a bed of nails, for example. One nail is in the bed of nails. Or a digital picture, one pixel is in the picture. Or perhaps a work of art, one drop of paint is not a painting. But this final example highlights perfectly the problem with assigning independent existence to our concepts. The Big Dipper. 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? No, of course not. It's seven stars zillions of miles away from each other. It's only a pattern that humans recognize. It's not some external object. And this is true for chairs, houses, baseballs, puzzles. 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 than the Big Dipper is some independent thing out there floating around in space. Now, again, just because objects are conceptual doesn't mean that physical reality disappears without the mind. The particles still exist whether or not the mind is aware of them. Whereas Einstein famously put, I'd like to think that the moon is still there when I'm not looking. Or if we want to be overly precise, we could rephrase that to say, the particles at which we reference when we use the term the moon will remain regardless of our mental states. All right, so this entire metaphysical theory is not without its own issues, I admit. While it's completely satisfactory as far as I'm concerned with inanimate objects, things start to get much more difficult when you're talking about living things. At some point when you start removing particles from my brain, you actually might end up taking something else out of existence, namely myself or my consciousness or my being. So when we're talking about beings, for example, the boundaries get a lot more difficult to establish. But that's a topic for another time. In conclusion, I'd say that the human mind is extremely effective at carving up physical reality into bite-sized pieces. It names stuff and distinguishes this from that. And thank goodness it does because we would have a very difficult time navigating the world without boundaries. But this phenomenon is entirely in your head. When you experience interacting with objects, you're really only interacting with your concepts and bits of matter that we reference as objects. Now, this does not imply any kind of mystical conclusion that all is one. I mean, physical reality, I think, is indeed divisible, but only between fundamental units of matter. The base particle of physical reality is meaningfully different than other base particles of physical reality. But any other division or abstraction beyond that is merely a useful construction of the mind. So in the words of pretentious, obnoxious, undergraduate students everywhere, no, that chair you're sitting on does not exist. You cannot sit on a concept. If you like these ideas, make sure to subscribe. And if you want to help create a more rational worldview, then please head over to my Patreon page and you can support content like this for $1. To read this article or to learn about my books, check out steve-patterson.com.