>Water is an elementPerfectly reasonable, makes complete sense.>Air is an elementPerfectly reasonable, makes complete sense.>Fire is an elementBut fire isn't a physical thing in the same way as the others. Things clearly cannot be made out of fire?>Earth is an elementBut you can clearly just look at dirt and see that it's composed of many different little bits of things. It clearly has smaller components, which means it obviously cannot be the smallest unit that composes other things>Metal is an elementBut you have metallurgy, you know that metal is made out of other stuff.>Wood is an elementwtf is China smoking?
>>16928535>>>/x/
>>16928535>>Water is an element>Perfectly reasonable, makes complete sense.But you can just boil it and see that some shit gets left behind. Clearly there are smaller components.>>Air is an element>Perfectly reasonable, makes complete sense.Why does some air kill you and some not? Must be different types of air therefore not an element
they forgot plastic
5 elements don't represent physical substances, they are abstractions, more apt description is, water-like, earth-like, fire-like etc, they are element in the astrology sense, not periodic table sense
>>16928542Boiling it and seeing stuff left behind is easily explained as the water being contaminated.
>>16928542>But you can just boil it and see that some shit gets left behindBecause there's some earth in it. Baybe some fire too.>Why does some air kill you and some not?Because there's fire in it. Maybe earth too.
can we express the elements in set notation so I can understand op's image?
>>16928535I have to admit some religious observations. are simple, and they go off on a strange angle.
>>16928535Elemental thinking makes sense if you are willing to put yourself in the mindset. It's an abstraction and philosophical representation of the world not an explanation. Why would it matter that earth is made out of different things? Those different things are all made out of earth. The same with the Chinese metal etc.
