

Proof That Chairs Don't Exist - misesed
http://steve-patterson.com/no-chairs-do-not-exist/

======
dalke
Or for the Harry Potter fanfic version -
[http://hpmor.com/chapter/28](http://hpmor.com/chapter/28) . In it, Harry
tries to figure out why it's not possible to transfigure part of an object
using magic.

> Human beings modeled the world using stratified levels of organization, they
> had separate thoughts about how countries worked, how people worked, how
> organs worked, how cells worked, how molecules worked, how quarks worked.
> ...

> But that was all in the mind. ... The implicit belief that Harry's brain had
> in the eraser as a single object wasn't just wrong, it was a map-territory
> confusion, the eraser only existed as a separate concept in Harry's multi-
> level model of the world, not as a separate element of single-level reality.
> ...

> There were no particles, there were just clouds of amplitude in a
> multiparticle configuration space and what his brain fondly imagined to be
> an eraser was nothing except a gigantic factor in a wavefunction that
> happened to factorize, it didn't have a separate existence any more than
> there was a particular solid factor of 3 hidden inside the number 6, if his
> wand was capable of altering factors in an approximately factorizable
> wavefunction then it should damn well be able to alter the slightly smaller
> factor that Harry's brain visualized as a patch of material on the eraser -
> ...

> And he held out a small pink rectangle, a rubber eraser with a bright metal
> patch on it. ...

> "Quantum mechanics wasn't enough," Harry said. "I had to go all the way down
> to timeless physics before it took. Had to see the wand as enforcing a
> relation between separate past and future realities, instead of changing
> anything over time - but I did it, Hermione, I saw past the illusion of
> objects, and I bet there's not a single other wizard in the world who could
> have. Even if some Muggleborn knew about timeless formulations of quantum
> mechanics, it would just be a weird belief about strange distant quantum
> stuff, they wouldn't see that it was reality, accept that the world they
> knew was just a hallucination. I Transfigured part of the eraser without
> changing the whole thing."

