[FredPret]

Totally agree with you that it’s practical to think of apples and horses as more or less alike. We evolved this mental tendency because it works.

But it is a style of thinking that is adopted because it is useful to human lives on human timescales, not because it is true.

The truth is there are no apples, no people, no objects even. There is just an immense swarm of subatomic particles interacting woth one another across the universe.

If you could observe the particles in that “apple” over a billion years instead of a more human timescale, it won’t make any sense to think of it as an object anymore. The particles started out in stars far and wide, are briefly frozen together in a fruit on earth, and will soon be spread apart widely again.

Some of the particles in the universal soup have combined into a chemical reaction that thinks it is you, and has evolved useful ways of perceiving patterns in other particles (for instance, object permanence). Because this phenomenon (you) is able to perpetuate itself by thinking in this way (perhaps by, among other things, finding and eating apples?), these thought patterns are sticky. Or in your words, practical. But not the whole picture.

[Koshkin]

This looks like a classical case of someone missing the forest for the trees.