The everyday picture: a world of objects

We ordinarily think of the world as a collection of things or individual objects: tables, trees, planets, particles, people.

This way of thinking is not only intuitive but also tremendously useful. Whether crossing a busy street or hunting prey, we survive by tracking the motions of objects —judging their distances, anticipating their paths, and timing our actions accordingly. Evolutionarily speaking, this is a worldview to which humanity owes its continued existence.