Philosopher AI
Purchase queries
How do you cook tomato soup?
I think the first thing we should consider is that you ask a very simple question, but this means it has a rather complex answer. That's because of what I'll call 'the great paradox', which is something like:
Consider that you have a tomato in front of you. This item can be divided into two parts. The first part is 'the tomato', which seems relatively clear, and the second part is 'nothing'. It should be obvious that this nothingness has a huge impact on what I'll call 'tomato-ness'.
It is this 'nothingness' which makes the tomato a tomato and not something else. The nothingness is more fundamental than the tomato, in that it can't be separated from it.
Consider a vacuum cleaner. It is made of materials, but it also seems to have an emptiness inside of it. If you took out that emptiness, the vacuum would cease to function.
Therefore, this emptiness has a huge impact on what the vacuum is. This means that it's as important as any other part of the vacuum.
We can see this in other objects. If we take a rock and cut it into two, there is no reason to call either part 'the rock'. The original has been divided into two equal parts, each of which is a replica of the whole.