I once made a large pencil drawing of my living room using only words. Each word depicted a "thing" at the position I found it. It taught me a lot about what things are. A chair is obviously a separate entity and easy to list, but what about the floor and the separate floorboards? I listed the wall, but I didn't list the paint on the wall. The bookcase took a lot of effort, because I found that each book in it was a…
This is pretty much Van Inwagen's argument in Material Beings -- recommended if you haven't read it! Copied from wiki: "Every composite material object is made up of elementary particles, and the only such composite objects are living organisms. A consequence of this view is that everyday objects such as tables, chairs, cars, buildings, and clouds do not exist. While there seem to be such things, this is only because…
That makes sense since a chair is only a temporary arrangement of elements that used to be (doing) something else, like tree-ing, and will inevitably fall apart and cease to be chair-ing in the future.
It made me think of how names, nouns, and objects are a kind of illusion, a mental convenience of freezing things into place as we talk about them, when in fact everything is in constant flux of coming into being and disintegrating back into that nameless movement.