Do Abstract Objects Exist?

[Veritas Aequitas]

Do Abstract Objects Exist?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39p2ycM7HrY
Kane B - a very popular YouTuber philosopher.

His conclusion is;

I'm a constructivist about all objects
........
I suppose then, Do Abstract Objects Exist?
I want to say yeah actually I'm happy to say that abstract objects exist,
abstract objects exist in they have a sort of equal claim to existence as concrete objects do
they are both concrete objects and Abstract objects are perfectly legitimate objects of construction

I endorse a pretty kind of global constructivism about objects and that's concrete objects
from that point of view then it's perfectly fine to say that hands exist and tables and chairs and on exist but they exist from certain perspectives right
there are certain kind of object Frameworks as it were that we have constructed and
it's within those Frameworks we say that these objects exist
but that’s as far as it goes for [concrete objects]

Essentially, Kane argued that all concrete objects and abstracts objects exist as conditioned upon certain perspectives and object framework.
This is the same as I claimed for Framework and System of Emergence, Realization of Reality and Cognition [FSERC] which conditioned the whole of reality, i.e. concrete and abstracts.

Note his detailed argument is in the [rough] transcripts of the video in the following posts.

Discuss??
Views??

[Veritas Aequitas]

Transcript from the Video above:

.................
[Kane B] I'm a constructivist about all objects
I would say that hands tables chairs planets and so on these objects exist only relative to particular perspectives and they exist in virtue of the fact that we are kind of arbitrarily drawing lines and drawing boundaries in particular ways
we make concrete objects up
how this applies to abstract objects is I would say
just as we can construct concrete objects we can similarly construct abstract objects
to explain this in a bit more detail

the first thing to say is that concrete objects are really weird they're really bizarre there's all sorts of philosophical problems that that can be pushed against the existence of concrete objects

• The problems of vagueness
  the problem of The Many
  under what circumstances two objects compose a further object
  causal problem with concrete objects

for example there are problems of vagueness
if I take a hand
the hand has certain boundaries and
then I can say like this this is there's like an atom here that is part of the hand
then there's an atom here that's part of the arm not part of the hand
but then where exactly is the line between hand arm
there's going to be some sort of Point as you as you kind of move up where it's just not at all clear whether or not something whether or not there's an atom counts as being part of the hand
similarly you can consider at what point if you were to make changes to a hand
we can imagine like altering a hand atom by atom
imagine like a series of objects where you start with this hand then you alter it atom by atom until you end up with a scrambled egg and
then the question is like again Where's the Line like when does it stop being a hand
where in that sort of series of changes do we go from this is a hand to this is not a hand
this is problem of vagueness

another problem is the problem of The Many
the problem with the many is if you take my hand we say that if we say that there's a hand here then there's going to be some set of atoms that is identical with that hand
I mean presumably like the reason why there's a hand here is because there's a set of atoms or I don't know other parts or whatever that that make up this hand
but there's going to be trillions of other sets of atoms that differ minutely from that initial set of atoms and those trillions of other sets of atoms seem to have like perfectly equal legitimate claims to being hands
if you take the set of atoms that constitute this hand then you take one atom away what you end up with is a set of atoms that has a totally legitimate claim to being a hand I mean that set of atoms is is there right
there's basically trillions of sets of atoms that all have perfectly legitimate claim to being a hand
we seem to end up with this conclusion that if there's a hand here then there's actually trillion of hands here that’s a bit strange

there are philosophical problems about under what circumstances two objects compose a further object
like do the objects need to be in contact are they actually need to have physical contact with each other is it enough for there to be some sort of other type of influence or maybe there's some sort of functional role that the two parts play and that's what makes them a further object

there's actually even a causal problem with concrete objects because a lot of the ordinary objects of perception like hands you might argue are causally redundant because whatever like if I say I'm perceiving a hand then I give some sort of causal model for this it's not quite true to say that light hits the hand then bounces off the hand hits my eyes right
I mean what's happening strictly speaking at least on the standard physicalist model is you have photons that are interacting with atoms just on the surface of the hand then that's bouncing off in it the point is that any kind of anything that you claim any kind of causal claim that's made about what this hand is doing it seems that that's preempted by the causal powers of the atoms that compose the hand
actually the hand itself just doesn't have any causal role it's causally redundant
these are just some of the philosophical problems that that arise when we start thinking about concrete objects

cont...

[Veritas Aequitas]

[Kane B] now the sort of view constructing concrete that I have is that is that all of the concrete objects of our perception are actually just I mean we just make them up basically
they're just made up right
I mean you could if you want say I suppose that there just are no concrete objects that at least no ordinary objects
you could if you want to say that maybe there just are no hands on this sort of view what I prefer to say is no there are hands but hands are constructed
like we make things up that there are hands and actually I mean
if you say that there are no hands one sort of view for instance is mirological nihilism a standard neurological nihilist will say that there are no composite objects and there are only simple simple Parts sorry not Parts there are just simples and these simples never compose a further object
we might think of these as being like fundamental particles right
there are just fundamental particles Vehicles arranged hand wise but there are no hands
a neurological nihilist will say that
my view actually is that neurological nihilism is one perfectly legitimate way of constructing objects but I don't take it to have any it's I don't take that to be in any way like more accurate or more true or more legitimate than the common sense way that we construct objects
in the common sense way that we construct objects we we draw all sorts of boundaries around composite macroscopic objects
we kind of project composite macroscopic objects onto the world and we say I have hands

I endorse a pretty kind of global constructivism about objects and that's concrete objects
from that point of view then it's perfectly fine to say that hands exist and tables and chairs and on exist but they exist from certain perspectives right
there are certain kind of object Frameworks as it were that we have constructed and it's within those Frameworks we say that these objects exist
but that’s as far as it goes for [concrete objects]

if we then turn to the question of abstract objects
I mean the way I would say this is that in just the same way that we construct concrete objects
you can construct abstract objects in fact mental abstraction seems like a very straightforward process to me
we can take an object of a particular shape and say oh this object is square right

I mean I'm looking at my computer right now and I guess it's rectangular right I say the screen is rectangular
now of course the screen is not perfectly rectangular if I was to sort of zoom in I would find actually there's all sorts of deviations from a Kind of Perfect rectangle
but what's happening here I think is that I'm looking at this object and then I'm abstracting right from what I see
I'm simplifying
I can take it that the computer obviously it doesn't actually instantiate a perfectly straight line but I can imagine that there is a perfectly straight line there and then I can kind of construct this kind of Ideal rectangle and
one thing I could say is that I mean I could actually just say the computer just instantiates rectangular rectangularity and
that's sort of true enough given the sort of context in which I'm speaking like
in an everyday context it's true enough to say that the computer is just the shape of the computer's screen is just rectangular and
then I just take it as if it instantiated a perfectly straight line and it was a perfect ideal rectangle
what's happening is I'm looking at this object I'm kind of abstracting and sort of treating it as though it was composed of these very simple perfectly straight lines and then I can engage in this other Pro in this other type of abstraction and consider rectangularity-in-general
I can think of like other things that instantiate rectangularity and
then I can investigate the properties of rectangularity in general just like just rectangle angularity
I mean there's no I it doesn't seem to me like there's really any kind of there's there's really any philosophical problem here right like
this is just clearly something that human beings have the cognitive capacity to do is in in the same way I would say that we can sort of draw boundaries in such a way that we create the computer and
when I say create the computer I mean we create it via the sort of boundary drawing
obviously we create it in the sense that we've put the parts together physically but I mean I mean like
I can like walk into a room and then I'm kind of classifying and drawing boundaries in such a way that I I'm conceptualizing this thing is there's a computer
where in the same way that we do that we can construct rectangularity or with numbers right
I can I can say like oh that's a computer that's a phone that's a cup and I now have this thing this threeness right and then I can investigate the properties of threeness and
this is just a product of construction but it's not fundamentally different to the way in which concrete objects are constructed and in fact I would say
from the abstract in the concrete this sort of point of view there really isn't actually a fundamental difference between concrete objects and Abstract objects because when you think about these problems, the problem of vague boundaries, the problem of the many, all of this one way to interpret what is going on when we say that there is a hand despite the fact that we have this problem of vague boundaries that we have this problem of the many and all that stuff
one way to interpret what's going on is that we're abstracting
like I can say like here is a hand here is one hand but I mean actually we have this situation where we could just as say that there are trillions of hands
for pragmatic purposes we kind of project a single hand where we could say that there are trillions and trillions of hands or

maybe another example of this is to think about the sorts of properties that we assign to objects
consider something like the length of a coastline
the coastline is a concrete object but I mean what exactly is the coastline
if you try to sort of if you try to say like what the length of a coastline is
the smaller your unit of measurement the longer the length the coastline will be or
maybe actually another way to put this is like the smaller your unit of measurement you're just going to get a different as you change the units of measurement you're going to get different coastlines
if you take an island you have different units of measurement you can generate different coastlines for that Island
I mean strictly speaking I would say it seems perfectly reasonable to say that there's not really any such thing as the length of the coastline and there's not really any such thing as the coastline
but we adopt a particular unit of measurement and then we kind of apply that and then sort of you apply that unit of measurement and construct this thing the coastline or

think about something like a person's height
I can say for instance Verity's height is five foot six now in fact Verity's height first of all is going to change throughout the day
like As She lays down she'll get a bit taller in in sort of different environments the height will change very slightly
and of course even if you take Verity at One Moment In Time if you zoom in Far Enough there's not going to be any like determinate boundary between Verity and the rest of the environment
because like any sort of particle is I mean first of all you won't be able to specify exactly which particles count as part of verity and even if you could specify which particles count as part of verity particles are more like clouds of probability that like smeared out over space strictly speaking there isn't any such thing as Verity's height
right like Verity's height I mean even if you were to say something like even if you were to make a claim where you make a sort of interval claim where you say Verity's height is between five foot five and five foot seven
no there's still an abstraction going on there because the point is that when you say like verities height is between five foot five and five foot seven you're still presupposing that there is this there is this property of Verity's height that Verity has some determinant height that is that is lying between in that interval and actually no that's not strictly speaking what's going on or
perhaps I should say you can very easily adopt perspectives from which it just doesn't even make sense to talk about things like Verity's height right
Verity's height is something that manifests once we propose a particular classification scheme once we have particular types of instrumentation for measurement and on
like it's within that perspective that you get Verity's height but that's something which it
that's not something that is like a property of a concrete object at least as concrete objects have been traditionally conceived

cont.. next post

[Veritas Aequitas]

cont...

[Kane B] what I want to say is that even when we're talking about concrete objects there's actually a kind of abstraction going on
the abstract and the concrete are already kind of intertwined in a very deep way

what’s the point of all of this
I suppose then, Do Abstract Objects Exist?
I want to say yeah actually I'm happy to say that abstract objects exist
abstract objects exist in they have a sort of equal claim to existence as concrete objects do
they are both concrete objects and Abstract objects are perfectly legitimate objects of construction

I would say that yeah I mean insofar as hands and tables and chairs and on exist I'm happy to say that numbers and sets and other mathematical objects for instance exist or that
I don't know like, triangularity or squareness in the abstract right like, that exists, that's fine
I suppose that I would in some sense like I mean I'm certainly not a platonist right like
I don't think that there are objective mind independent or stance independent abstract objects
but then I don't think there are objective mind Independence stance independent concrete objects either
that’s my view that's my take on the abstract vs concrete distinction
and that is that is all I have to say I think for this video

[Veritas Aequitas]

Notes: KIV

[Lorikeet]

No things.
All is energy - patterned (ordered) and non-patterned (chaotic).
All is dynamic interactivity.
The ancients used fire or water as their representational metaphor.

Abstraction = simplification/generalization of what is present.
Present = manifestation of past - interpreted as appearance.
Since organisms can only perceive patterns, they believe all existence is ordered.
Patterns exhibit different rhythms, sequences, interpreted as different kinds of existence: gas, liquid, solid, relative to the organism's own metabolic rhythms, determining its metabolic rates and speed of perception.

What is too complex, or subtle, is interpreted as dark and void.
What lacks pattern (is chaotic) is also interpreted as dark and void.....producing the confusion between complexity and actual chaos.
Complexity is not chaos, it is simply imperceptible order.
Chaos is what lacks order.
Yin/Yang.

Words refer to interpretations of patterns, and how an organism reacts/relates to them.
Words/Symbols represent abstractions which are, themselves, representations of the organism's a priori method of processing sensorial stimuli, i.e., interpretations.
To convert dynamic fluctuating energies into static forms the mind must reduce them to a level it can process and store as memories.
First conversion occurs when a stimuli is v=converted to neural energies, transmitted to the brain - neurological hub.

The nervous system, including the brain - becomes the divider and synthesizer of mind/body, or of the phenomenal, and their interpretations.
Ergo Plato depicts the human psyche as a triad: Reason/Will/Passion.....corresponding to mind/nervous system/body....but also to the temporal future/present/past....
Body being a manifestation of past.
Past made present, as presence - interpreted as appearance (phenomenon).

Herin semiotics comes into play within the nervous system to symbolically disconnect the mind form the body, or the representation from the represented. A self-defesive method of protecting the ego - lucid part of self - from the implications.
My position nis that this nihilistic disconnection, and subsequent inversion, is a method of protecting the ego from its own self-awarness, and tis own increasing objectivity.
The movement from consciousness to self-consciousness is a movement from first-person, to second-person, and finally to third-person perspectives.
The last is objectivity.
This objectivity is the issue for most, exposing them to a new source of suffering and anxiety.
It is the ability to perceive oneself and another from the vantage point of an indifferent other.
The comparisons are what cause distress and must be negated.

[Atla]

No things.
All is energy - patterned (ordered) and non-patterned (chaotic).
All is dynamic interactivity.
The ancients used fire or water as their representational metaphor.

Abstraction = simplification/generalization of what is present.
Present = manifestation of past - interpreted as appearance.
Since organisms can only perceive patterns, they believe all existence is ordered.
Patterns exhibit different rhythms, sequences, interpreted as different kinds of existence: gas, liquid, solid, relative to the organism's own metabolic rhythms, determining its metabolic rates and speed of perception.

What is too complex, or subtle, is interpreted as dark and void.
What lacks pattern (is chaotic) is also interpreted as dark and void.....producing the confusion between complexity and actual chaos.
Complexity is not chaos, it is simply imperceptible order.
Chaos is what lacks order.
Yin/Yang.

Words refer to interpretations of patterns, and how an organism reacts/relates to them.
Words/Symbols represent abstractions which are, themselves, representations of the organism's a priori method of processing sensorial stimuli, i.e., interpretations.
To convert dynamic fluctuating energies into static forms the mind must reduce them to a level it can process and store as memories.
First conversion occurs when a stimuli is v=converted to neural energies, transmitted to the brain - neurological hub.

The nervous system, including the brain - becomes the divider and synthesizer of mind/body, or of the phenomenal, and their interpretations.
Ergo Plato depicts the human psyche as a triad: Reason/Will/Passion.....corresponding to mind/nervous system/body....but also to the temporal future/present/past....
Body being a manifestation of past.
Past made present, as presence - interpreted as appearance (phenomenon).

Herin semiotics comes into play within the nervous system to symbolically disconnect the mind form the body, or the representation from the represented. A self-defesive method of protecting the ego - lucid part of self - from the implications.
My position nis that this nihilistic disconnection, and subsequent inversion, is a method of protecting the ego from its own self-awarness, and tis own increasing objectivity.
The movement from consciousness to self-consciousness is a movement from first-person, to second-person, and finally to third-person perspectives.
The last is objectivity.
This objectivity is the issue for most, exposing them to a new source of suffering and anxiety.
It is the ability to perceive oneself and another from the vantage point of an indifferent other.
The comparisons are what cause distress and must be negated.

Here abstraction referred to the abstract vs concrete distinction though, which is a central issue of philosophy, it's not about the other meanings of abstraction that you wrote about above.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete

[Lorikeet]

Number are pure abstractions because they are concepts that refer to nothing outside brains.
They can be used to refer to anything because they refer to nothing.

There is no "one" outside the brain.
Like i said....all abstractions, reduce the apparent to a form that can be processed and stored in memory - can be used.
Mathematics is the most abstract form of language.

We use it to refer to any simplification/generalization we've separated from exitance and converted into a singularity in our brains:
For example, one grain of sand, on one mound of rocks, on one mountain, on one continent, on one planet, in one solar system, in one galaxy and so on.
There is no one outside the mind.

Even the concept of universe is a mental construct. Mind projects itself "outside" space/time, existence, and imagines existence as a whole.
This contradicts our experience of existence as a dynamic multiplicity with no singularities at all.

Many paradoxes are founded on linguistics, confusing the represented for the representation.
Mathematics is but another language - the most abstract of them all.
Its 1/0 binary is based on how the brain processes sensory stimuli - the cell's systolic/diastolic cycles.

[promethean75]

I'm not a mathematician but I'll tell ya what i think. Quantities of energy concentrations ('things') do exist in the world... numbers are representations of those 'things'... those quantites exist without, and independently of, being perceived and counted... therefore, while numbers are abstract symbols, what is numbered is not. The fact that energy concentrations are separated from each other in space/time is proved by there being representations at all. That's to say, if the world wuzzint already in a state of innumerable shifting quantities of mass in motion, we wouldn't be able to understand, much less use, an abstract language to describe it.

Indeed there are two apples on the table in a certain kind of universe that allows for dense objects to exist and be separated by space. And nobody needs to be there to see the two apples, either. There's two of em even if there wuzzint a single intelligent animal with sensory organs within eight gazillion light years of em.

And yes I know that everything is just waves and stuff. But what produces individual entities is the way these waves concentrate into solid points of mass. The moment u have a point or more, u have quantifiable things that can be numbered. Remember all this happens without us being there to experience it.

[Veritas Aequitas]

Why do people like PH et. al. [philosophical realists] insist abstract objects do not exist?

First,
There are Two Senses of Reality
viewtopic.php?t=40265
1. Framework & perspective based reality - mind-interdependent
2. Mind-independent reality, i.e. philosophical realism.

The philosophical realists [2 -PH et. al.] insist on things that are independent of the human mind [conditions] exist as real, i.e. concrete objects.
To them abstract objects are conditioned upon the human mind [condition] thus cannot exists as real nor being concrete.

On the other hand those who oppose philosophical realism [anti-p-realists - Kantian] believe reality [all there is] are somehow contingent upon the human conditions.
Reality, All-there-is as such will include concrete and abstract objects.
In this case, the anti-p-realist consider even concrete objective are abstractions themselves.

Here is one critical point to what concrete objects are not seemingly 'concrete'.
Note the examples explained by Kane B on why concrete objects are abstractions:

the first thing to say is that concrete objects are really weird they're really bizarre there's all sorts of philosophical problems that that can be pushed against the existence of concrete objects
-The problems of vagueness
-the problem of The Many
-under what circumstances two objects compose a further object
-causal problem with concrete objects

I would say that hands tables chairs planets and so on these objects exist only relative to particular perspectives and they exist in virtue of the fact that we are kind of arbitrarily drawing lines and drawing boundaries in particular ways
we make concrete objects up
how this applies to abstract objects is I would say
just as we can construct concrete objects we can similarly construct abstract objects

So, because concrete objects exists relative to a framework of varying degrees, abstract objects also exists albeit relative to a framework.

In this case, concrete objects have a different degrees of reality and objectivity from abstract objects.

Therefore, abstract objects exist as qualified to the above conditions.

[Lorikeet]

Neural clusters in a particular sequence store thoughts, sensations, images, ideas.
When a neural energy pulse moves through a neural cluster of cells is triggers them - this is the on/off dichotomy which leads to binary thinking and to dualisms.

Both energy pulse and neuron cells are energies....they are dynamic and interactive vibrations.
Difference between them is their rate.....what is more solid, material, is slower relative to the observer's own processing speeds; that which is faster is interested as gas or liquid or energy, conventionally understood.
But all is energy.

Neural bioenergy pulse moving through (interacting) with bioenergy neurons (cells), trigger noumena.

These neuron clusters can be recombined producing novel forms that refer to nothing outside the brain.

These neural clusters are representations constructed from external stimuli - interaction of sense organ, via a medium like light, with an external phenomenon that has already interacted with it.
So, light interacts with a dog, and then with the eye....the interaction is converted to an energy pulse and transmitted to the brain where it is converted, once again, into clusters of neural cells, linked within the brain.
A thought is triggered by a neural pulse that begins a cascading reaction, experienced as an emotion, a thought, a feeling, an image, emerging spontaneously...as if form nowhere.
The links between these neural clusters determine the associations of images with ideas, with feelings etc.
We can't control this process but only react to it, or rewire our connective links, leading many to believe that we have no free-will.

An abstraction is the detachment of an idea from external referents and its reduction to the simplest possible representation, which in mathematics is 1/0 - binary.
In the context of sight the binary is light/dark, using the medium of light.
In the context of hearing this binary is silence/sound, and the medium is atmosphere.
The binary establishes our percpetual-event-horizon, or the range of our awareness.
Whatever is within our range of perception is 'positive, light, sound.....whatever is outside is 'negative,' silence, dark.
This causes the error between existent and non-existent, confusing complexity and chaos.
This binary refers to the on/off method: neural energy pulse moving though neural cluster (on); no energy pulse moving through neural cluster (off).
This method is the easiest to evolve.
It also refers to cellular systolic/diastolic cycles determining the neural clusters interactive rhythms.
Positive/Negative
Good/Bad
Hot/Cold
Light/Dark
Cause/Effect
Order/Chaos
All dualities based on binaries; based on biorhythms, or how organisms process data, or process interactivity (causality).

Interactivity = attraction/repulsion
Harmony/Disharmony between different kinds of energies determining resistance, experienced as attraction/repulsion.

[Lorikeet]

The degree to which a representation has referents outside the brain determines the degree of its reality.,
An abstraction exists, inside the brain, as a neural cluster, but if it has no external referents then it does not exist independent form brains.

Humans may give it an external referent in the form of a word/symbol.
This is the meaning of Mathew 18:20

Whenever two or three of you come together in my name, I am there with you.

Jesus dies as a corporeal being and is resurrected as pure idea/ideal, given a name.
It is transformed into an idea with no external referents.
So, whenever this name is recollected the idea/ideal is present. It unifies the believer into a collective, represented by the name.

Purification of an ideal is determined by its disconnection form experienced reality.
The ideal only exists as idea, as abstraction, in minds that share it linguistically, via its symbol name and conventional definitions.
Meme.
The meme is propagated through linguistic intercourse, among those who share this definition.