May 18, 2026

Some of the most interesting ideas to me are ideas which seem trivial. But, for many of these ideas, the triviality is just a facade. The idea is like some sort of divine figure dressed as a pauper. Uninteresting, ignored, and even seen as contemptible by some but, spend enough time with him and take authentic interest in him, and he will reveal his glory. His disguise is a test for those who truly care. Those who are willing to sincerely sit down with the ordinary and the ‘obvious.’

One of these ideas which may seem trivial on the surface is the question of “what is a ‘thing’”? Many might find this question uninteresting or exceedingly dry.

“Well, a thing is just anything that I see as a thing.”

“Things are just things which differ from other things.”

“A thing is all that makes up that thing and nothing else but the thing.”

That last definition is the best of those three. But the person uttering that may then say “Duh.” But think about it for a minute. Ask some questions.

“Why do we say that thing consists of those properties? Why not some other properties?”

The answer, I think, highly depends on whether the thing is trying to be that thing or not. Let me explain.

A rock is not doing anything to keep being that rock. It just is. If one day there’s an extreme windstorm and it falls down a cliff, it doesn’t try to keep being that rock. If the fall is from high enough and the material it’s made of weak enough, it will break apart. Someone who never knew about the initial rock might come across the former rock’s components one day and say “look at all these rocks.”

The rock’s “rockness” was never some objective property of it (unlike the chemical composition of its constituent materials). It was a category we projected onto it. But why would we project that category onto it? The cliff and the rock may be composed of the exact same material. So why not refer to both the rock and the cliff collectively as “the rock”? Because our categories come into existence for describing a function. They are centered around our own survival. A rock, (depending on its size) can be moved by an individual. A cliff most definitely cannot. Things that are hard and movable can be used to hurt you. They can also be used as components in building a house. If we were to perceive the rock and cliff as a collective, we wouldn’t be able to see and then make use of the properties of the rock and this might end up being a disadvantage for our own surviving and thriving.

There are other contexts though where seeing the rock and cliff as a collective would be advantageous. Consider the task of surveying some chunk of land to determine the main materials different sections of it are made of. In this case, considering the differences between the rock and cliff is completely arbitrary and not relevant to the task at hand. Seeing them both as just “a granite deposit” or whatever is the best way of perceiving them.

The point is this: what is perceived is a matter of the usefulness of what is perceived. What determines “usefulness” is a matter of the goals, time constraints, etc. Usefulness is a function of the context. So the relative value of some perceptions over others is determined by the context. And what is the root of us needing and wanting to find uses in the first place? The desire to survive.

Not all bounds of things are purely a matter of what is most useful for us to see, though. For example, if we had a diamond which was surrounded by a bunch of sand and we wanted to come up with some “natural categories” of the materials, we could rely on objective properties as the differentiators like the elements which make up the two. We could say “there is a bunch of silicon and oxygen things (the sand) and then suddenly it changes to pure carbon for a couple inches and then back to silicon oxygen stuff. Therefore there are at least two distinct categories.”

There are other bounds, though, which are natural and not necessarily based on the materials of what is inside the bound vs. outside the bound. Instead, what determines the bounds is that what is in the bounds must try to continue to be what is in those bounds. Take a cat for example. A cat is made up of elements that are found all throughout nature in different forms (e.g. carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc.). But the cat is different. Unlike the rock which just let’s what’s gonna happen happen, the cat will protest if what is happening will lead to it losing its “catness.” In other words, it tries to keep being a cat when what is going on outside of it is unfavorable conditions for catness.

So, being a cat means trying to counter forces which are contrary to maintaining catness. But some of these forces are natural and unavoidable. To name one: the second law of thermodynamics. Put simply, the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy of an open system increases indefinitely. In other words, the trend of the current arrangement of things is towards maximizing the possible arrangements/combinations of those things.

Entropy wants the cat to stop being a cat and instead become a gas version of its parts. But the cat resists. And resisting entropy takes energy and some sort of internal representation of

Replace cats and catness with lizards and lizardness or humans and humanness, etc. and it’s still the same set of principles.

In short: the universe (as a whole) does not want you to be a human. It wants you to be some mixture of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, etc. gas. But your entire being is dedicated to keeping you as you where “you” is defined by your mind, DNA, etc.

It’s also not just that you are separate from your environment, you also don’t have access to noiseless information about your environment. Even if you did, you would need to pick and choose the information to hold in your mind and that would constrain what can be represented. Thus we don’t hold “certain truth” in our mind, we hold an internal model of the world. This internal model is biased towards attributes and modes of thought which benefit our survival chances.

So we’re never quite dealing with reality. We’re dealing with models of reality. Ideally, then, we want our models of reality to represent all of that which can contribute to hurting us and helping us so that we can make decisions based on it. We want what doesn’t contribute to either of those to be absent. We want all that which we do represent to match reality as closely as possible. Since we don’t have access to the ground truth for comparison (and if we had access to ground truth we wouldn’t have to do any comparing), we instead measure the success of our models via predictive power and our continued survival.

All of what I just wrote may remind some of you of an informal description of Karl Friston’s free-energy principle and how Markov blankets are used. I could keep going on about all those but this is just a jotting after all and its scope has grown too large.