Quote Originally Posted by Jimbo View Post
I can see the thread title, therefore it exists.

James.
What 'is' a thread anyway?

What you see on your screen is 'a' representation of some information that exists on the platters of our hard drives. There are dozens of different representations of that information, depending on how you are viewing it. Even ignoring the different browsers and mobile viewers, this thread looks compeltely different when looked at as an entity in the admin control panel, the MYSQL interface or a disk dump.

Even ignoring all that, if we say this thread 'is' the collection of magnetic particles on the platters, there is so much protocol overhead and redundancy that it is hard to identify that anything really is uniquely representative of anything.

And even ignoring all that, at a quantum level, the particles representing the thread information simultaneously have no size, and are spread out (exist) over the entire universe, superimposed on the quantum state of all other particles in existence. It is everything and nothing.

So if you can comprehensibly describe that it means for something to 'be' something, you'll earn yourself a nobel prize.
What is 'is' anyway?