In the Vsauce video "Do Chairs Exist?" (I highly recommend it!), Michael talks about the concept of vagueness and how defining boundaries can lead to paradoxes.

In the Vsauce video "Do Chairs Exist?" (I highly recommend it!), Michael talks about the concept of vagueness and how defining boundaries can lead to paradoxes. While it was primarily dealing with an ontological perspective, the linguistic perspective of a particular line has always stood out to me. Perhaps it makes a bit more sense in context of the full 40-minute video, but it is: >"Composites are causally redundant. Believing in chairs is like believing that, while yes, the burning gas from my stove completely describes why the water in a pot boils, there’s ALSO a magical invisible substance called boil-o that comes out of my stove that does the same thing as the flame at the same time, and if there was no boil-o, the flame would warm the water just the same, but there IS boil-o... Chairs are no more real than boil-o. Composites over-determine what happens in the world." Like your example with lift and fluid dynamics, simple explanations like "plane pushes air downwards" or "faster flow sucks the plane upwards" might be insufficient, but they're at least useful to the layman. It also reminds me of how Richard Feynman answered the question, "What is the feeling between 2 attracted magnets?" by explaining that it would be impossible to give a complete answer. Feynman pointed out that when you ask why two magnets attract each other, there are different levels of understanding depending on your background knowledge. For someone with no knowledge of physics, the simple explanation would be the existence of a magnetic force causing the attraction. However, delving deeper into the question raises complexities that can be challenging to explain. Feynman highlighted the difficulty of answering "why" questions in general. Explaining magnetic attraction in terms of something else that we are more familiar with, like rubber bands, would be misleading and circular, as it ultimately comes down to electrical and magnetic forces. He acknowledged that some aspects of the natural world may need to be accepted as fundamental elements without a more profound explanation. This is echoed in the Vsauce video, where defining boundaries and attempting to explain everything can lead to paradoxes and vagueness. The concept of "boil-o" illustrates how composites, like chairs, can over-determine what happens in the world and our own perception, making their actual explanation even more elusive.