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
I can make objective claims about reality such as "this chair exists". No, an alien would not perceive a chair there. There is no existing chair there, but only undifferentiated matter, the chair is just interpretation in your mind.
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Replying to @ReferentOfSelf
We would both agree there is a collection of atoms there, and we would agree about its shape, size, color, etc, anything physical we could think of. We just wouldn't agree what it's *purpose* is, or what its name is.
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient
Would we agree that the atoms are there? What's an atom? What is size, shape, colour? Why does the alien have these concepts and not chair?
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Maybe the alien *doesn't* have these concepts! Maybe it organizes its thoughts on physics differently and jumps from molecules to quantum field theory in a completely different way! But in the end, if physics has a "floor", as it were, we would end up agreeing on it.
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