Seeking God in Science part 6: Systems and States (opens in new tab)

In the previous two installments we talked about chairs, specifically, what distinguishes a chair from a non-chair. We considered and rejected the "chairness hypothesis" in favor of the atomic theory, which says that chairs — and all physical objects (at least inanimate ones) — are made of atoms. (N.B. I am actually a human, notwithstanding my fondness for em-dashes.) What makes