Where does your lap go when you get up?
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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Isn't a table just an arrangement of matter?
Yes but arranged in a shape that we've given a name for.
Is a shelf a table?
Sounds like a thing we talked about in a philosophy class I took.
You have a room, with nothing but a blank piece of paper in it. There is one thing in the room.
You fold the paper. There is now a crease in the paper. It is still in the room.
How many things are in the room?
A "crease" (like the corner of a table) is a distinct thing, yet it is part of the paper. There is no increase in mass in the room. Yet the crease remains.
Information and entropy changed, if you melt ice figures to refrozen the water again you go the other way around, but you have introduced/extracted things during the process, so I stop seeing the philosophical wonder.
To begin with "how many things are in the room?" an in-depth list should include all the energy in all their forms, including matter and organisation, and when you perform processes that change this you logically vary the full list of things in the room.
The truth is there are already many things in the room. Walls, air, paper. Gravitational influence. The arrangement is rife with mass. Between the Planck lengths are quantum fluctuations. A crease introduces a new arrangement of some of this, and the energy required to do so increases entropy. In other words, this philosophy exercise seems completely useless other than putting ignorance on full display.
Nah, it's supposed to get you to think about what a thing is. You've listed random other examples of things but haven't really gotten closer to differentiating what makes a thing vs it not being a thing.
Thats what philosophy does. It's a crowbar we shove into the cracks in our models of how the world works to prove for weakness.
In the example above all you did was describe the paper better. It doesn't matter if it's blue or creased or whatever, the question is about the physicality (or lack thereof) of information. We're still not sure what happens to the information that passes through a black hole. Philosophy is a blind person's cane, helping to feel out unfamiliar territory.
As in, that territory can never be fully known?
Ideas are nouns.
This philophical quandary, I posit, is solved in the mere definition of what a thing is.
A thing is a noun.
A noun is a person, place, object, or idea.
A crease in this paradigm is an idea. It is this a thing. There are 2 things in the room.
There's more, though. There's air presumably. There's walls? What are they made of? Are they painted? How about the floor? A stale fart? Confusion over the number of things in the room?
Still, all nouns.
Can the crease exist without the paper?
Then in my opinion, it isn’t a separate thing.
Creased is just a different way for the paper to be for a little while.
I am not aware of this setup, and so I'm musing and winging it, but I think what they're saying is that if you point at the paper and say "is this a sheet of paper" they'd say yes. And then you point to the crease and say "is this a crease" and they'd say yes, so it has identity, separate from the paper (as in creases and papers are not synonymous), but given that it's not counted when listing things in the room, it's also not a thing.
But I think for me it's not that tricky, because it's a feature of the paper. Like if there was a coat in the room with buttons, and you asked me what was in the room I wouldn't say a coat and three buttons, I'd say just a coat. And the coat has three buttons, but those are properties of the coat, not the room. And buttons are something that can stand-alone!
But if I had a sheet of paper with a button placed in the middle of it, but not attached, I wonder would most people say it was a sheet of paper and a button, or a sheet of paper with a button?
What if you fold it into a paper plane or boat? In that case would you go from two things to one?
Now this is a quality shower thought!
I mean, can anything exist entirely on its own?
The elements come to mind...
But can a particular element exist, without another element or elementary particle. Like I feel like you can't have hydrogen with out a proton and electron, and you can't have an electron without implying the existence on a proton
Hmm, fine, then... uh, quarks and dark matter? lol.
Laws of nature and the fundamental particles that everything is made of - but also, while a table itself is just a collection of atoms arranged in a convenient shape, the thing we mean by the word "table" is an actual thing that has causal power in the universe. A corner, however, cannot exist in a vacuum. It has to be part of an object rather than an object itself.
You're seeking the word "label," not "thing." At what point does it stop being a table, for example? When you take away 1 leg? 2, 3, all 4 (or more if it's a weird kind of table)? What if the removed legs are right next to it? What if the legs are on the other side of the world and new observers of the former table are unaware of this fact? Will they still call it a table or will the legs' absence alter their perception of the label? What if the legs are simply destroyed? What if an object was not originally built to be a table but someone said, "Hey, that's a table," and others around agree with them? Unga-bunga: the invention of language, the messy art of labeling. There is no real, objective table, just as there is no corner; we merely label it as such. Even for a long time I myself confused desks and tables until I realized that desks are basically tables meant to only be used from one side. They're all just made-up labels, every single noun out there.
And even with corners, at what point does it become no longer a corner? When 1cm is shaved off to round it? 2, 3? It therefore actually has substance because you can round it out, but all of these are ultimately labels/descriptors just driven by group consensus to make sense of the world.
The Greek Ship of Theseus comes to mind (fully renovate a dilapidated ship, piece by piece; in the end, is it still the same ship?). These are all human labels based on feelings. Nothing exists independently apart from conscious, sentient minds that apply, and remove, such labels.
maybe it's not a feature but a bug, they didn't plan it be there, but there it was
There's a patch for it called a round table.
That’s just infinite corners.
rounded corners though
Each corner is infinitesimally close to 180°, and there are infinitely many of them. If you dislike corners, you're going to hate circles.
If you like this shower thought you’re gonna love this video: https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE
One of my favorite YT vids of all time
I mean isn't that symbiotic?
More like epiphytic. The table neither gains nor looses with or without the corner.
But it is absolutely definitely not parasitic!
You don't need corners to have a table (it can be round)
But a corner cannot exist without features that form it.
It would only be parasitic if a round table was forced to be square against its desires. If a table wants to be square, the corners are being helpful.
against its desires
Parasitism has nothing to do with will or even awareness. Technically, our gut bacteria could be considered parasites, no? Yet the best of ours even help the body last longer.
I don't think so? Just looked up the definition of a parasite and it needs to live at the expense of the host. Gut bacteria are beneficial I assume, so they aren't parasitic.
Oh. Well, anyway, awareness has nothing to do with it, at least.
Tree trunks are round. At least wooden tables are more likely to desire a circular shape. So corners are likely to be parasitic on wooden tables at least.