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Yakk, your argument that the chair exists whether or not someone is there to know that it exists is just one philosophical paradigm (word of the day!). The person with whom you were arguing may well be as correct in their assertion as you are in yours. The best explanation I can come up with, which I suppose fits somewhere in-between, is that while the chair (and by extension, colour and other "physical" phenomena) may exist without a conscious being able to perceive it, if there is no conscious being to perceive it or it is not being perceived by a conscious being, then there is no way to know whether or not it exists and the point becomes moot.
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"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions." - Albert Einstein
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something." - Plato
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