At work we somehow landed on the topic of how many holes a human has, which then evolved into a heated discussion on the classic question of how many holes does a straw have.
I think it’s two, but some people are convinced that it’s one, which I just don’t understand. What are your thoughts?
Relevant Vsauce video https://youtu.be/egEraZP9yXQ
I can’t wait for Super AI to help humankind resolve these existential issues once and for all.
If you make the straw less long, it’s a donut. And a donut obviously has 1 hole. So a long donut only has one hole. Q.E.D
It contains one hole. While it appears to have two holes, if both are closed, you get a hollow sphere, which has -1 hole.
I can’t even understand the thinking that produces 2.
What about zero? If you start with a flat sheet of paper, it has zero holes, loop it around on itself, does that creat a hole?
It’s just a flat plane with no holes curved around on itself.
I mean, while I agree with the sentiment, I can understand the 2 holes side of the argument.
If you want to break it all down and super simplify it, you could argue that your digestive tract is a straw, so why do you differentiate between the start hole and the end hole?
I will not take that position though, because as I said, it’s over simplified.
I would argue that because a human is more complex than a straw, we need to differentiate between the holes we have.
A straw is simple. One straight hole all the way through. Maybe it has lots of curves but the ends of the straw are the same.
For a human, we have lots of curves to our “straw” but diffrent openings on each end.
I mean, we also have multiple sphincters, so there are many ‘holes’ in our straw, hence why I said in as many words as possible that I don’t believe that, and am not arguing it, but that I can understand the “supersimplified” understanding of things that can lead to that understanding using the human body as the common point that the ‘common sense’ 2 hole argument could originate from, whereas the person I was replying to said they couldn’t understand that kind of reasoning.
