Short essay on dualism, idealism, & materialism as concerns Q: What is a table?

[bennyboy]

But my concern is what is the "stuff" of a table -- does it exist independently of my experience?

By the same token you could ask if anything exists outside your experience. How do you know that the world does move on when you're not looking? Maybe it only loads whereever you are to give you the impression of existing. Is red the same red as you believe to see?

If you are out to open that can of wirms, the questions are endless.

Yep.  Interestingly, though, we've been able to answer some of those question.  For example, there's no color anywhere in the universe: color is not a property of material.  We know that only to be something we experience.  I'd argue the same goes for shapes, even something so simple as flatness.  There are no flat things in the universe-- there cannot be, since flatness implies a contiguous, uninterrupted surface, and molecules, under any configuration, cannot match that description. True flatness is clearly an idea and cannot be other than an idea.

So we don't know what things ARE, exactly, but we have figured out more and more about what they are not.