(May 11, 2014 at 6:59 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Maybe in chemistry or physics, that's true. But when I look at my desk, I see it as smooth. I perceive the flatness of its surface as a single, continuous form. Redefining flatness to refer to the standard deviation of particles from a virtual plane or whatever doesn't SOLVE this duality in thinking-- it brings it to the fore. Clearly, your definition of "solid" begs the question: it demands that all perceptions be redefined to conform with the "objective reality" of the physical monist model-- and then goes on to show that all reality conforms with the physical monist model!
This is cheating. If we are talking about the relationship between subjective and objective realities, then you must accept experiences as they are experienced.
By volume, many solid things are mostly empty space even on our level of experience. Buildings, cars, aircraft carriers. The fact that they are mostly empty things doesn't make them not solid to our perception. I'm not trying to redefine what solid means, but rather point out that even our colloquial understanding of solidity allows for a lot of wiggle room.
Take two steel balls, only one is hollow and one is not. Even to our everyday understanding, they are still both very solid objects, even though one may be more gas than solid, by volume.
What I'm saying is, your desk is thick and sturdy to our perspective, mostly empty on the atomic scale, yet solid on both levels. I'm not attempting to redefine anything. Something which isn't in the proper atomic configuration to produce a solid state is something we probably wouldn't identify as solid on our own level, unless we were using the term in a somewhat more poetic sense, to describe something that isn't actually solid at all, but shares characteristics which evoke solidity (such as, "solid wall of sound").
