Originally Posted by Suave

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.