Vsauce
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2021–2025
37:54 · 16M views · Sep 14, 2021
A Vsauce video exploring whether chairs exist, through metaphysics, mereology and the philosophy of categorizing objects. It runs about 38 minutes and cites academic work on ontology.
HN recommends it as an entertaining tour of how we define and categorize things, and it is cited when concept boundaries come up.
9 comments from Hacker News
First off, I think everyone deals with this at some point. I think, also, since you are always changing as a person, what helps you cope at one point of your life might not work as life goes on. Various things have all contributed, in some way or another, to helping me in the past and present. Most recently, I came across a VSauce video from a year ago: "Do Chairs Exist?" by VSauce [1]. Now, the thrust of the video deals with mereology [2]. However, the final line from Michael at the end surprised me a lot, and in the days since watching it, has been an extremely strong comfort for me: "I am not a thing that dies and becomes scattered, I AM death and I AM the scattering." I think it is worth spending the 40 minutes to watch the whole thing, as makes this line make more sense and extremely impactful. Anyway, this helped me recently, maybe it can help someone else :) [1]: this video [2]: [LINK]
This sounds like you might be able to gain something from the “Do chairs exist?” video by vsauce.[1] Basically, he goes through the different philosophical reasonings of the past and then explores where each one of those fall apart. He goes explicitly into how small things can create something larger but why philosophers have struggled to make the leaps to change definition. He ends on the latest philosophical reasoning, which I think thoroughly explains your conundrum. I’ll try to explain even if it seems less profound here than in the video. Basically, all concepts are emergent behavior of “stuff.” There really isn’t a chair, but “stuff” arranged chair-wise. And humans decide what that boundary is for both chairs and consciousness as they are concepts we apply to stuff that is “chairing” or “being conscious.” A collection of neurons may or may not be conscious by defining how they behave. And the details on where we draw the line for consciousness is no different than where we draw the line for how many atoms we can scrape away from a chair and it still be a chair. [1] this video
Love this vsauce video for some examples this video There’s still a lot of value in philosophy when we use it to think about how we structure and rationalize the world. Even if science gives us ever better models of the underlying reality of the universe, there’s still the understanding of how we conceptualize that reality and what it means to us. Specifically in ways that don’t require religion or supernatural beings, nor in purely psychological means of perception or physiology. I think of it as the study of the emergent properties of complex information processing. It can do things like help us talk about the minds of others, for example future AI, potential extraterrestrial intelligences, or even other terrestrial intelligences (dolphins, octopus, etc)
"Do chairs exist?" this video Perhaps the desk is "chairing" in those moments. [EDIT] A little more context for those who might not click on a rando youtube link: it's basically an entertaining, whirlwind tour of the philosophy of categorizing and labeling things, explaining various points of view on the topic, then poking holes in them or demonstrating their limitations.
Sabine's lecture pairs nicely, I think, with a recent Vsauce episode asking "Do Chairs Exist". Both, to my mind, explore elements of empiricism and pragmatism, and unearth subtleties of epistemology that most discussion seem to miss. this video