And yet, the atoms of the chair come together to be a chair, merely by following their own laws. Multiple systems can give rise to the same mind; this does not imply that those systems are doing anything than following their usual laws.
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient
The chairness is not in the atoms, but in the form and function of the thing that they compose, and the reality of its form and function cannot be reduced to the atoms. Knowing only about the atoms doesn't let you point to chairs or talk a out how to use them.
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Replying to @ReferentOfSelf
The chairness of the collection of atoms exists in the mind of the person looking at it. An alien with no limbs would have no concept of chairness and would never see one the way we do.
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient
And that alien would simply not know about chairs, rather than some awkward notion of the chair existing for us and not for them. "The atomness of atoms exists in the mind of the person" "the x-ness of the fundamental building block of the universe exists in the mind..."
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Replying to @ReferentOfSelf @CurlOfGradient
This implies there is no substance in the world (no x-ness for any x), only undifferentiated matter of which nothing objective can be said.
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient
Right, so you are completely denying the ordinary sense of real, reality, objectivity, and you will go on to deal with things in the world as if they have their own objective existence anyways. This is false consciousness.
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Replying to @ReferentOfSelf @CurlOfGradient
You've made a reductio of this train of philosophical thought because you have come up with statements that are entirely in contradiction with what you started your philosophical investigation on in the first place
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient @ReferentOfSelf
My point is, if I start from my fundamental premise that everything arises from the laws of physics, I end up with a world full of people who see meaning, purpose, chairness, etc. I don't need to add anything extra on top of physics to get these.
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I believe that purpose, meaning, chairness, and all those things exist in your head. I am not saying they aren't *real*, any more than computer programs aren't *real*. Just because they exist in your head doesn't mean they aren't important.
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient
But you haven't done that. You haven't started with things arising from the laws of physics and worked from there. You started with purpose and meaning and chairness and this drove you to look at physics, and you learned something *on top of* your existing knowledge and capacity
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Replying to @ReferentOfSelf @CurlOfGradient
You then turn around and try to replace all this knowledge and ability that allowed you in the first place to understand and do physics with that physics itself, and base all that understanding on top of the physics
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