As a software developer, no it isn't. Actually some notions like "a set is just all of its members" is downright wrong in the real of software, for example, the set [1,2] is not the same as [2,1] even if their members are the same because the set has more properties than the members contained like order, length, etc. If you mean useful as in it will make devs think, yeah, but to the point that's correct it is also meaningless, since it would help anyone, not just devs and it is not particularly useful for software development.
This reminds me of discussing things that have matter and things that don't with my 8th grade science students. They would make good philosophers - how can I say for sure that feelings like love and hate don't have matter? Aren't they represented by physical occurrences in the brain? Or my favorite semantic argument - love and hate have matter because they MATTER, in terms of making an impact on a person or persons
William James's 'Varieties of Religious Experience' is a decent Western psycho-philosophical analysis of mysticism that sheds some light on the kinds of experience that might lead people such as Plato to believe in forms, or a wide variety of other metaphysical beliefs based on atypical subjective experiences.
I think there isn't a clear dividing line between concrete and abstract objects, but there is a clear continuum between concreteness and abstractness, with the actual occasions of our experiences ("pixels" of vision, "samples" of hearing, etc) being the most concrete things, almost all of the ordinary objects we talk about being abstractions of patterns in those occasions of experience, more hypothetical but still physical things like electrons and quantum fields being more abstract still (useful things to hypothesize to explain those patterns in our experiences), and at the extreme abstract end, the mathematical objects used to model those physical theories, and the more elementary mathematical objects that they're made up of, all the way down to numbers and sets, are the most abstract of things.
I think abstract objects are simply useful linguistic and informational tools that don't actually exist anywhere but our brains. They all boil down to memory. You read or watch Hamlet and you remember it as an entire play because that's just how our brains categorize that kind of memory. But because it's a somewhat shared memory, you can discuss it as if that memory exists in some abstract realm, and pretend you're all accessing this singular entity that is Hamlet, but really, all that's happening is that you're all recalling a memory of your experiences with Hamlet. Memories are physical objects implanted somewhere in the brain, so there is no abstraction to be found there, except within our minds.
But we can know the properties of abstract objects. And the properties would be true whether anyone were there to think about them or not. These objects seem to me like they really exist, though they are abstract And what about experiences, like red? They seem to have a place and time, but remain ineffable and abstract. Not simply the neuronal connections in your brain (we can describe those), but the actual concious experience. I think it's completely abstract, but if it didn't exist, how could you "have the experience"?
Sets have their axiomatisation in Zermelo Frankael Theory, while numbers are defined by the axioms of Peano Arithmetic. These are formal systems which fully specify the assumptions we have made of these abstract objects and allow us to derive results about these objects within that framework, though thanks to some famous results in mathematical logic there are some shortcomings of such systems in that they cannot establish their own consistency (godel's incompleteness theorem) or define a notion of truth (tarski's undefinability theorem). As a mathematical formalist I believe that certain abstract objects which are defined mathematically 'exist' to precisely the extent they are defined, and who's properties are precisely described by their axioms. A set is merely an object which we have asserted obeys the string manipulation rules that are the axioms of set theory. If you change the axioms you get different objects who's formal properties you can investigate separately. The status of the formal systems which specify sets and numbers as mathematicians know and love them is a product of the history of the subject and has no obvious intrinsic justification (at least to me, and I am only an undergraduate student of mathematics!). If you adopt a formalist view, then mathematically well defined objects, and indeed objects described by any possible formal system, exist in precisely this sense. They need not have anything to do with physical reality, so if that is what you require for existence then they (probably!) do not exist. But what do you require for 'existence'? I think I have dealt briefly with the epistemic and ontological status of formally defined objects but for other abstract objects I think you would run into problems due to with subjectivity? Is it at all meaningful to talk about love, say, when no two people can precisely agree on what love actually is? Or even if they agree on a definition in terms of other words, their subjective experiences and understanding of love would surely always differ. Until psychologists and neuroscientists pinpoint a set of biological phenomena which they then choose to refer to formally as 'love', perhaps the notion of love or any other emotion can only exist as a 'vague, approximate consensus' (I'm sure there's a term in linguistics which expresses what I am trying to say here.) Anyway, these are some of my musings on the subject. I really love watching your videos Olly, please keep them coming. I'd love to see some on the philosophy of mathematics which deal with results in mathematical logic. These ideas need to be shared and enjoyed far more widely than they currently are so kudos for making that happen! Adrian
Isn't it possible to say that abstract things are states of our brains used to classify our experience of the world. To impose more feature of the world than the directly observable.
+Tor Djärv We create abstract things because concrete things can have properties in common. Our minds are advanced enough to think of things that are not concrete and our thoughts don't have to be real themselves, man.
I'm more interested in Schopenhaur's aesthetics. As others have already pointed out: I think that referring to "abstracta" as extant objects is just a short-hand for referring the ideas that are physically encoded (neuronal) in a collective group of people's minds. The numbers 2 and 4, for example "exist" insofar that different people agree on what they mean. I don't think this subtracts from the verisimilitude of a statement like "2+2=4". When we talk about abstracta, we are talking about the meaning of the things that are eventually all physically encoded in the brain. (I know it takes some work to prove that these things are ultimately encoded in the mind, but I think this can only be proved empirically by studies of the brain. I believe it, nonetheless, because it's more parsimonious than invoking another "type" of existence)
Is it just me, or does materialism clean this up? Consider abstracta as patterns of chemical interactions in brains which are interpreted in a certain predictable fashion by those brains. They "exist" and have causal effects because they have a physical manifestation as interpretable chemical signals, but are distinct from non-abstracta in that we only experience them meaningfully as thoughts - the interpretation of those signals (as opposed to physical structures, which we experience as light, tactile response, etc.). Software *exists* physically as varying electrical charges in computer memory, but it is only experienced meaningfully as it is interpreted by a computer. Hamlet *exists* physically as the chemical reaction that happens in our brains when we read "Hamlet," but it is only experienced meaningfully by us when we process those reactions & imagine or act out the play.
Idk what Olly would say to this (except to point out that there are other problems with materialism??) but I'd like to up this because it seems like a very clever way of looking at how "abstracta" are able to affect the world without technically being in the world. They're the emerging sensations as a result of perceptions rather than the physical things that we perceive.
"Hamlet exists physically as the chemical reaction that happens in our brains when we read "Hamlet," but it is only experienced meaningfully by us when we process those reactions & imagine or act out the play." But the subjectiv experience of reading Hamlet (i.e. the feelings, visualizations and considerations it invoke and beeing conscious of this and the act of reading) surely exists aswell? Also the reading of Hamlet would be the experience of "the copy of Hamlet" and not the one 'idea of Hamlet'. Even if we were to conclude that the physical chemical reactions in the brain were the cause of the subjective experience (ignoring the fallacy) it surely does not exclude it's existence (i.e. mind)? If Abstracta is chemical reactions in the brain, they are not Abstracta. If the experience of 'a copy of Hamlet' invoked the meaningful 'Idea of Hamlet' through chemical interaction in the brain, it does not follow that 'the copy of Hamlet' nor the 'chemical interaction' is the Abstracta. The One Idea is the Abstracta, and it is completely true that the meaningful experience of f.x. 'The Idea of Hamlet' could invoke those physical reactions in the brain, but this is a rationalistic view, not a material one. There is no room for Abstracta, by definition, in Materialism. The paradox of the existence of 'One and The Many' to me essentially boils down to the existence of mind, and it's interaction on the physical world. This is essentially the ontological paradox of 'The Becoming' and 'The Beeing'. Good, but heavy, reading on this subject is Plato's 'Parmenides'
HushGod Your last paragraph sort of ends where I would begin. Inasmuch as Hamlet could still exist even if no written copies had existed. The person who imagined it could still convey it orally and the memory of that oration would be present in the actors and then their performance becomes a permanence of those who witness it. Ontologically it's all there and it exists. The crazy part is the notion of copies of an object, and the set that those copies create, is a concept that actually extends to memory as well. The experience of an actual event creates a subjective memory of that event for every person who witnesses it. The retelling of that event creates even further copies all of which are also subjective. The event then exists subjectively in many iterations yet are all causally linked to the original objective event, all collectively referred to as the event itself and never do we acknowledge that our memories of that event are really a modified version of it. How subjective does the recall of that event have to get before it no longer bears resemblance to the original objective version.
Consider things with the viewpoint of a more consistent and powerful theory which explains the behaviour of particles through which these chemical phenomena are decided. There's a function called Schrödinger wave function, it contains 'all the information' about a particle and predicts it's behavior. Now, there are four NUMBERS which actually are a description of the behaviour of a particle (implicitly) they are called Quantum Numbers. Now these numbers are merely numbers, nothing more. So they are abstracta. Purely abstract. Also, all the (value of) physical constants. the Newtonian Gravitational Constant (G), Planck constant (h), cosmological constant, the speed of light, the absolute permittivity of free space, and the absolute permeability of free space. These values are absurdly precise. And these values have SOME meaning attached to them, but if you consider the spin quantum number, you have nothing but a number. So deep down at this (perhaps) fundamental level of nature you have this numbers controlling things. This abstractum deciding the nature of a particle which will in turn decide the structure of the chemical process i.e. reading all this.
probability distributions are abstract objects which affect your life, like they're not the ocncrete -> and they don't actually relate to the concrete situation, BUT say you're playing poker the generative process of the concrete is from said distribution which leads to some base level implications about the existing state.
When you talk about the four ways conflicting and use the example of Hamlet as not being an abstractus according to the way of negation (4:35), I think you sort of assume nominalism in your argument. > "[Hamlet is] surely located in time and space. It was written at some point between 1599 and 1601 so it had a beginning; it can't have existed timelessly before Shakespeare even wrote it. And it's surely located more on Earth than it is on Jupiter, so it kind of has a location." (Taking a platonist position for sake of argument) Incorrect, sir! The first *copy* of Hamlet was written by Shakespeare circa 1600, and all *copies* exist on Earth rather than Jupiter, but do not assume that this says anything about the abstract object itself. Hamlet the abstractus exists timelessly, independent of its creative discovery by a human. You have implicitly assumed that a concrete copy of Hamlet must exist in order for the abstractus to exist, even though you clearly identify this as class nominalism previously (2:55)! Harumph, sir! > "What if you said something like 'Hamlet makes me feel sad or introverted or self-critical'? Well then it surely had a causal effect on you." Again, sir, you beg nominalism in your phrasing. Hamlet *itself* has done dothing; what has affected you is a certain *copy*, *performance*, or *reading* of Hamlet, or perhaps your own *understanding* of it. Poppycock, sir! You offend my reason! I don't know why the platonist struck me as particularly old-timey, but whatever.
I think about the nature of being in terms of abstraction. I had a chance to look up on types and tokens last week (just out of curiosity) and how one is related to a specific medium of expression (tokens) and what it possibly could be (types). Bear with me, I'm still learning about it. Overall, both seem to pick at being "particular" things. It's interesting to say that without letters or numbers; these seemingly human abstract concepts, could we know about the properties of physical, worldly concepts if we didn't have a means to record its information? It seems that the realism of abstraction is not that it doesn't exist physically but that it needs to make sense when it possibly could or could not exist without an identity. We (humans) know that "A" exists. It is a part of a stream of human-made information that allows us to associate a particular thing of the world. However, "A" is just one of many different letters, and these different letters have meaning to us, with association with the world around us. They are abstract forms that are given purpose to us. They make words, words create sentences, and so on and so forth, but it's abstract information that we understand. One of many sets of words and particular one of many sentences and languages. You can say that anything that is written by a human is an abstraction, but the human being itself and the forms around us are concrete because they serve as tools of identification to these abstract concepts that we created.
What's funny is that I always believed that I didn't exist and that the rest of the world didn't exist either. This was due to experiences I had growing up where suddenly all of my perceptions became distorted and the world seemed to be foreign or alien to me. It was as if I was a newborn child and I was experiencing sight and sound for the first time. People I loved were not people, or at least I could not recognize them as people. I was so scared. I couldn't even recognize my own mother as anything more than some object with no value. Needless to say, my memory would eventually return, but every time I would come back to this so-called "reality" I would be shell-shocked form the experience. Ever since these experiences started happening I've come to the conclusion that I don't exist, and that all the abstracta you mentioned could be just as valid as concrete reality. I don't know, maybe I'm just crazy, but when you've had to question your reality for as long as I have, you would begin to believe strange things too. That's what I think. I would would to hear your take on that :)
I would argue that we don't actually have access to abstracta, we just have access to something like "instances" of abstracta. Granted, that doesn't work if abstracta don't exist in space or time. Since ideas don't exist outside of a context of associations to other ideas and sensory information (and that's all just a configuration of neuron activity), and sensory input is constantly changing, ideas exist uniquely in one place at one time. What your concept of Hamlet exists in reference to is different from mine, and it will be different from what it was before you read this sentence, after you read this sentence. The "abstract realm" (as anyone can access it) is just the set of configurations of neurons, which just leads to the question: Are you a class nominalist?
I don't know undefined concepts are almost always taken as axiom in math and although sets can simply be all the elements within them a line, a continues arrangement of points, or a point, a line of infinitesimal length, do not have an equivalent in the real world. One refers to place in space the other to the connection between spaces. Abstract objects seem to have looping definitions that involve other abstract objects. They are incomparable to real objects.
Abstracta are a byproduct of a pattern seeking consciousness. As they are necessarily contingent upon consciousness, they exist only experientially as processes. As agents employing these processes, abstracta _can_ have an effect on the world. We might buy the red shirt instead of the blue one because (perhaps) red is our favorite color. We can build tall skyscrapers utilizing certain rules of physics and math to allow for more stable structures. We laugh at jokes. We cry over sad stories. We move and organize huge amounts of matter around the planet for commercial gain. The concepts of color and physics and math and commerce all arose from building and refining patterns within a conscious mind, and passing those concepts to others where they are (possibly) further refined. We can do this through another byproduct of consciousness, and one which is intrinsic to pattern recognition, which is association. We can take two or more unlike things and form a new concept around them. We categorize, label, and build upon, and construct new patterns by associating concrete things with abstracta, and by associating abstracta with other abstracta. Language is probably the biggest example of this. Consciousness is a two way street. We can label and categorize and process reality through abstracta, and we can utilize abstracta to alter concrete reality in specific patterns in order to pass abstracta to another consciousness. In fact, since there is no mind-to-mind communication in which abstracta in one consciousness can simply appear in another, it is necessary to alter reality just to say hello. What consciousness actually is and how it arose is another question entirely.
That's not necessarily so. Mathematical Platonism is just one framework which holds that abstracta can exist independently of minds. At least independently of *our* minds. You might ask, "then where are abstracta?" and the answer (in aprt) is that they are nowhere because they are not physical, but they can also be all over the place when manifested in physical approximations or equivalence classes or representation classes; e.g., every approximation to a perfect circle is in a class of geometric objects "close to" the abstractum of a perfect circle. So "where is a perfect circle?" is not a stupid question, it is wherever the essential properties of circles get materially or otherwise manifested in approximate representations. This does not require consciousness. Consciousness is just one way in which abstractions get known about.
*All of our exchanges are abstractions.* The issue is about WHAT is being referenced in our abstractions as to whether such is concrete or not. If the reference is (or was) an object in the observed world, then what is being spoken of is (or was) concrete - and any aspect of that object is a descriptor of the object and/or its effects. This distinction seems to work well, until one deals with the past and the determination of what is or was concrete, since, we are left to sift though abstractions which may well make no distinction and frankly the authors may not in fact have had a distinction. We can't have meaning without abstractions, since, meaning is an abstraction.
If your talking about abstracta having a physical effect on your emotions and/or feelings we are essentially saying that all abstracta can be concrete objects without them being real or not. This could be supported by saying something like " the color combination of blue and purple made the movie feel sad and dark" even though these colors could be considered abstract objects they are interpreted as objects that leave a mark or impact on the world therefore making them concrete.
i got a sort of intuitive grasp of this subject thanks to the people who approach it via metaphor/analogy & the structure of human cognition and language - "Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking" {my beloved} is where i got into that subject
The whole space-time might be a special case of "abstract" object nested is a wider space of abstract objects. It just seems concrete to us because we live in it and observe it through our senses.
Regarding the person from the last video who asked the question that amounted to why would anyone want to look at stolen nude photos when there's picture out there that were released consensually, I think the people who ask that question are sadly missing the connection to rape culture; it's the fact that they were not meant to see those pictures, that those pictures were meant only for the taker and/or their spouse/partner that is the turn on for them. That looking at those photos is a violation for that specific type of person is very much a feature not a bug (if I'm using that metaphor right).
It seems like abstracta come as an extension of dualism, where the ideas and conceptions of objects are separated from their physical bodies. The main problem that I see with it is that it boils down to "if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, it does not make a sound". Essentially, since "Hamlet" and "that copy of Hamlet on my desk" are two different things, it would seem that "that copy of Hamlet on my desk" serves only to provide the physical form for the abstract "Hamlet". Then the logical progression would be that my physical eyes would experience "that copy of Hamlet on my desk" which is conveying the abstract idea of "Hamlet". My physical eyes would pass it on to my brain, which would then somehow pass it on to my abstract mind (as Descartes would have it). The problem is that this implies every single object in the world essentially has an infinite regression of abstracta, comprising every possible combination of its individual parts, yet which do not exist outside of perception by other essentially abstract entities. "That copy of Hamlet on my desk" does not only possess the abstractum of "Hamlet", but also the abstracta of "ink", "paper", binding, "page numbers", and on and on. The question is how do these abstracta "inhabit" their respective corporeal forms? There would need to be a mechanism for this interaction, but since abstracta cannot cause anything (as Olly said), it would be logically contradictory.
About the hamlet, Can't one argue that Shakespeare didn't wrote the abstract play of Hamlet, instead he wrote a copy of (first copy) Hamlet and all the other copies are build by coping some qualities of that first copy? also that one doesn't feel sad by the abstract play instead he feel sad by reading a copy of hamlet? Also doesn't this whole problem depends on the definition of existence? or what does something require for it to be considered as an existing object?
Philosophy Tube i see no problem with dealing with abstract things. things that are abstract can also be different degrees of abstract purely based on how many interactive properties it has. In this way, i suppose non-abstract things are merely things that have properties that we are used to using as a standard of 'realness' like rather defined locality and inertia (mass/energy [see mass-less photons] ) . i can see no reason why abstract things would be so different than 'real' things because as you said, many of them have substantial effects on the world around them due to their definable properties. that sounds pretty real to me.
The way of abstraction does not work for an additional reason: Every 'concrete' thing can actually be seen as an abstract thing, by invoking the Ship-of-Theseus argument. The way of negation has the problem of simply eliminating the concept of abstracta, as it ignores that abstracta bind concrete objects together. My belief is that we can hardly analyze the world in terms of objects because those are not really definable, only in concepts that are sets of properties - eliminating the possibility of distinction between abstracta and concrete. Basically I agree with the great comment by Gary Malarkey.
Maybe there are eternal abstract objects which always existed and always will (like a square, pi, or a set), and temporal abstract objects that are created at some time and likewise may be destroyed (like Hamlet). Perhaps eternal abstract objects cannot cause things (over time), but temporal ones can. As for how we came up with eternal abstract objects in the first place... maybe they represent some sort of transcendent truth and structure that is inherent to existence/our universe/whatever. An eternal abstracta is omnipresent
I think most of the abstracta you mentioned can be thought of as characteristics that one would be used to describe an object. It's easy to see how this would apply to the color red, some things are more red than other things. But I think you can apply this idea to more intricate abstracta, like Hamlet. Imagine that you have a pice of paper with the play Hamlet written out on it, except that I've deleted one word at a random point in the play. Certainly this new play would be similar to the one that we call Hamlet. You could get away with calling this new play Hamlet because it's very Hamlet-y. On the other hand you could not get away with referring to the Odyssey as Hamlet because it's not very Hamlet-y.
Some abstract objects being characteristics seems to make sense. But even putting aside Hamlet for a moment, I'm not convinced some things can be "redder" than others. I think that's wrongly conflating red as an experience and red as a measure of red light brightness, like in an RGB colour value. At first it would seem like some experiences *can* be measures, such as pain for example. One experience can be "more painful" than the other. But I think this is again a mistake. If one experience is "pain 1", and another, more painful experience is "pain 2", I wouldn't say that pain 2 is "more pain 1" than pain 1.
Concrete and abstract unnecessarily create a bimodal perspective. A spectrum makes more sense, requires less entities. It might go from very physical (like a single specific atom or sub particle) to less physical like (a person, who can change) to more abstract (like mercy, justice, etc.) then to further abstract (like fictional characters) to perhaps the most abstract (everyone in room A is six feet tall, no one is in room A)
Yay! Comment featured! +2 to Self Esteem. I really want to hear you talk about Another Earth and I want to learn more about metaphysics because it breaks my brain....so Possible Worlds.
- Newton's law of gravity, abstract and with causal power ? - An algorithm, abstract with causal power (as soon as it is "activated" in a computer) ? - A shadow, abstract and located in space ? - Pythagorean theorem, seems like it naturally follows the description of an abstract object, not located, no causal power (it just seems to describe a relation mathematically) Generally, it seems hard to ever be able to create an air-tight definition of abstract objects.
Everything abstract that has a casual effect is one concrete instance of that. Example: Every letter Z that has a casual effect is ink on paper or electrons symbolising ones and zeros that in turn are symbolising the letter Z, or it's vibrations in the air that conveys information a listener will interpret as the letter Z. You never use an abstract object. You use a concrete representation of an abstract object. Did anything abstract exist before the creation of this universe?
as far as i know, in metaphysical naturalism abstract objects are explained as mere patterns recognized in the physical world (and that recognition can just be described as a pattern of neurons firing.) i personally don't really see how anyone can have serious objections to this. i think just saying patterns are being recognized here and recognize the pattern of this happening all the time would clear this up. so, according to this view: 1. the way of example - saying some things are abstract doesn't really define it so i don't know what to do with this, i could just say a unicorn is a wazzuppadup, and then what is wazzuppadup? exactly. it just doesn't mean anything, if it's not defined 2. the way of conflation - sets are also patterns recognized, then it's not the members but (at least the possibility of) the recognizing of that pattern. 3. the way of abstraction - again, the concept of the set is not the set itself, so 3.a. a red thing is not part of the color red, it is a thing in which one can recognize the pattern called red (refracting mostly a certain wavelength interval of light) 3.b. avengers are not just the list of heroes, but the concept that somehow they are together, they interact, they can even get new members, so basically it's just the recognizing of the pattern that some beings call themselves the avengers, or maybe some other beings call these beings the avengers 3.c if all copies of hamlet would be destroyed, and all traces of it were deleted there would still be a possibility (for example lots of monkey with lots of typewriters and lots of time, or just a random long text generator) of something happening that would result in the pattern of hamlet the play being recognized (maybe even with it's historical context also written there) 3.5 "we're talking about a specific copy and ignoring it's specificity" recognizing a pattern means exactly this, that we ignore the uniqueness and concentrate on the shared properties, and this can get very far away from the original concrete things, but for example i think numbers seem very abstract but one can simply do basic calculations with one's fingers. 4. the way of negation - this is false because patternrecognizing is a function of a computer or a brain, which is a physical object in space and time and has causal powers. 4.5 "hamlet was written at some point so it had a beginning" well yes but if you suppose a time machine you could go back and again find a random set of characters and recognize in them the pattern of hamlet, so the possibility was there before. but just because something is possible doesn't mean it exists, and it's way more practical to talk about actually existing cases i guess. i mean isn't this whole book you showed and the whole whether abstractions exist debate is really about whether merely possible things exist? and you could say they do, but definetly not like concrete things, so using the same word is problematic, so maybe you need three-value logic as with fictional universes. now i guess after all this, i should define pattern and define recognization, and i admit i can't do it on a level i would like to but i think the definitions found in dictionaries aren't so bad either for our purposes. so i really think rephrasing it as recognizing patterns pretty much solves all the problems, but i'm 100% amateur so i'd love to hear my arguements destroyed.
Philosophy Tube I think an even better if not the best way to determine if 'something' is an abstract object, as a opposed to concrete object, or has concrete existence would be to imagine or ask oneself: would what the specific language refers to still be knowable, experienceable, perceivable, et cetera, if language in general did not exist? For instance, would we still be able to know, experience, or perceive, the colour red if we were not able to verbally identify it? Yes? Does our experience of any particular depend upon its formal distinction? But nigh nothing is absolutely abstract in my personal opinion, since the entirety of language is abstraction of that which we experience in one way or another to begin with, whether it's an abstraction of actual phenomena or the spoken word itself. Considering that, this method probably still would not be effective or yield practical results. However, you can get damn near close to 'something' that is completely abstract if that 'something' is an abstraction of an abstraction, perhaps ad infinitum. Mathematics is pretty much (if not?) absolutely abstract. I am certain we would not experience '2+2=4' or any other mathematical equation if we had not formulated and formalized it. But from did the idea come?!
I'm basically at the point where I consider language in terms of mapping (whereby each word is a coordinate or even a street sign) or measurement (whereby each word is, say, a notch on a ruler). Language is a system of ultimately false distinctions and is absolutely functional insofar as it allows us to alter our functionality.
There isn't an uncontroversial account of the distinction between abstract objects and concrete objects. That's because it's far from clear what account of abstract objects is correct (i.e. Platonism, Nominalism, Aristotelianism, Conceptualism, etc.).
What about the moderate realist approach, where universals exist only when instantiated in particulars and more fully in the intellect considering it? Nominalism and Platonism clearly aren't the only options here.
My thinking is that we are only capable of perceiving abstracta. Your sensory input may be directly caused my a thing in itself, but the you're still only receiving a projection. On top of this, raw sensory input is useless to the mind until we process it and perceive it as discrete entities with abstract properties.
Sorry to be a bit late on the reply, I have a query on the last thing said. If Hamlet does make you feel something, it has had a causal reaction but its only caused a mental state, which - unless you are a severe physicalist - one would argue is another abstracta. Wouldn't one ague that abstract only has causal reactions with other non-spatiotemporal things? Or does the theory state it has no causal relationships with anything
is a 'pure' object in the realm of forms (not defined by its properties but 'a thing in itself'), by necessity, abstract? or, can an object represent a 'pure' concrete archetype, and exist in both the realm of forms and objective reality?
I'm no metaphysicist, but it seems to me that Abstracta are like adjectives, qualia, which don't make sense/exist concretely until they are qualified. It's hard to comprehend "red", "round" or "slow" without ascribing it to an object or identity. Likewise with numbers - they need to be qualified. The number "348,723,965" is a row of 9 separate symbols which have not been qualified - the largest number of concrete _things_ said to exist by this is 9: 9 separate symbols, adjectives describing one object each. Writing such a number down does no more to prove it exists than if i drew a dragon - the only thing said to exist from that is a poorly drawn dragon on a bit of paper. *You have to ascribe to qualify the adjective*. Ergo something like Graham's number cannot exist beyond abstracta because its digits exceed the number of Planck lengths in the known universe. Likewise with infinity, even 10 divided by three = 3.3 recurring: there are not enough concrete objects to qualify it! I have a feeling there's something wrong with my logic. But that's how I see it...
abstracta are just concepts of things that we create within our minds for some use. the color red is abstract because it is a descriptive term, just as big, small, heavy and other descriptive terms are abstract and have no physical form. it is created within the human social mind that we make by communicating and sharing our knowledge and thinking on it and continuing to better our ways of communication and thinking.
Schopenhauer's Aesthetics would be a great topic because it would introduce people to his concept of "Will" I do think that video would be more practical than the possible worlds video for now.
Schopenhauer please! It's tempting to try and define abstracta in terms of 'information' or 'patterns', but I'm afraid there isn't a single position I'm happy to take which doesn't have obvious holes in it. I would say that there is nothing metaphysical about abstracta. All the abstracta you can mention only occur inside a conscious brain. So treating them merely as thoughts instead of a category of (meta)physical objects seems like the most parsimonious stance.
What about objects that exist only in a fictional sense like dragons, Harry Potter, or working homoeopathic medicine? These are "abstract" ideas about fictional concrete things. Which I think hints towards them existing not in a real sense but rather in people's minds where they are physically encoded in a real concrete way. And when we talk about them we talk about the set of all encoded versions of these abstract objects. Also similarly if we talk about a webpage or a youtube channel or facebook post, we are talking about the set of encoded representations of those ethereal objects that only physically exist in brains and servers.
Red does exist as a concrete thing. It is a particular band of the light spectrum. And we call things "red" when they absorb other bands and reflect that band of the light spectrum.
I'm a big fan of counterfactual logic so that's my vote. I haven't done as many nerd studies on the issue as I'd like though, I'd be interested in finding out if there are any more famous philosophers who consider the many worlds model valid but only if the universe isn't 100% causally deterministic.
How about ideas? Do we consider it/them as abstract or concrete? If we say it is abstract, then why do we have laws that protect patents and copyrights? By the way, how about human rights? How do we classify them? We have laws that affect the real world although things like justice and ethics exist primarily in the mind and will as proposed by Kant and other philosophers.
In his 1898 book, Metaphysics, Borden Parker Bowne clears up the confusion admirably well, distinguishing between real and phenomenal existence. He denies, in effect, that abstract objects have an independent ontology of their own, saying, e.g., "The unity of the world-ground...is incompatible with any plurality of fundamental being. Hence it follows that truth and necessity themselves must in some way be founded in the world-ground. If we should assume a realm of truth to exist apart from being, it could have no effect in being unless we should further assume an interaction between it and being. But this would make truth a thing, and would compel the assumption of another being deeper than both truth and reality to mediate their interaction...A law of nature is never the antecedent, but the consequence of reality. The real is first and only, and being what it is, its laws result as a consequence, or, rather, are but expressions of what the things are...Natural laws are the consequences of reality, and never its grounds or anything apart from it."
How about this: Concrete objects have boundaries. Abstracta start and stop. A cat has a beginning and continues to the end - the boundaries of the cat. One copy of Hamlet is here,another is there. It starts and stops. It's still a set,but the set itself is located where all the instantiations are, so the set extends over Earth just as copies of Hamlet do, but not into space. For another example: a concrete beehive stops where the physical hive stops. The abstract hive stops where all the bees which belong to that hive stop. The functional hive is abstract not because it's not physical but because it has parts which are separated.
It's an interesting topic but the thing with metaphysics is it raises so many interesting questions, but how many does it answer in a satisfactory manner? So here are the questions / thoughts that I have... First of all, without a method to distinguish abstracta from attracta then we will not be capable of knowing their difference; therefore we need to ask if we can construct such a method. Perhaps the method of 'conflation' as described in the video is one such criterion; although it does suffer from the problem of foundations. But then, there is no theory that doesn't suffer from that, so it's a moot criticism. Observing how closely related their distinction is to language (in the broader sense) is enticing to say the least. I find that based on this observation we can dismiss the 'method of example' by noticing that it is a thinly disguised behaviourist theory of language acquisition. However, by considering the question in these terms are we not already conceding too much to essentialism? Would that not make our argument circular? It might be even interesting to consider abstracta alongside Cartesian dualism, and theories of mind in general. The existence of objects that are different from physical objects and do not (necessarily) interact causally with them (in any direct way) sounds quite similar to the description of mental objects, does it not? Also, could we be inferring to much from the statement that "x exists"? It seems that this statement cannot be used on its own to infer anything about "x", so perhaps the question "do abstracta exist" attempts to derive more than what can be derived from statements of the type "there exists x" Do the *possible worlds* videos, they sound boundlessly more interesting than Schopenhauer.
It occurs to me that although abstract objects might not technically exist in our world, and arguably in any other, they most certainly exist in our minds. They are merely a product of pattern recognition taking patterns from the real world and setting them on some sort of pedestal as being things all of their own, detached from the things that seem to follow them. Arguing the existence of abstract things as separated from material things is equivalent to talking of perceptions as separate from what is being perceived. It's all in your head, man! And that's all I have to say about that.
There are concrete things (like my fork), and then abstract things. I consider abstract things as, rather than "objects", they're actually ideas. The color color red is an idea, it just so happens we see this idea exhibited in the objects around us. Like seeing "2" bunnies in the lawn. You use the idea of the number "2" to quantify concrete things in the world around you.
Would the set of everything on Earth not be Earth itself? Maybe sets just appear as abstract from our perspective? It seems like if you 'zoom out' far enough on a set of physical things, they will appear to be one concrete thing. On the other hand, if we were to 'zoom in' on ourselves, all we will see is a set of individual molecules/cells and, from this perspective, our existence as a whole human would be abstract.
Is there really a difference between them if we consider the ship of Theseus? after you replace allt he ship parts is Theseus's ship the physical object or the abstract idea of it.....
Could this link in to the idea of the distinction between the Noumenal and Phenomenal worlds? i.e only concrete objects exist in the noumenal world but the phenomenal world has both abstract objects and images of concrete objects? Is 'images' the right word? Could these 'images' of concrete objects be considered as abstract objects? If so, does that mean that concrete objects exist in the noumenal world and the brain creates the phenomenal world populated with abstract objects, some of which it creates using sensory data to reflect concrete objects in the noumenal world (what we'd previously have just called 'concrete objects' e.g. a piece of bacon) and some of which it creates its self to help organise and make sense of the sensory data its receiving (what we'd previously have just called 'abstract objects' e.g. 'china').
Doesn't it seem like class nominalism would be the best explanation, at least of those provided? It's far and away the simplest, and you can say that a set acts as a cause, as in the case of Hamlet making you sad, because of one or many members of that set. What's the counterargument?
I know that this video is several years old, and that it's meant to be an introduction to the ontological discussion about abstracta, but I thought I'd make a brief point, anyway. It seems like the decision to use such things as Hamlet and Platonist numbers as examples makes Lewis's worries for realism about abstracta seem fairly unresponsive to the realist's position. This is because they are vague cases. For example, Hamlet is an artifact, and is therefore automatically a part of the "causal flux", so to speak. So, given the definition of an abstract thing as being non-local and causally intert, Hamlet is disqualified from the get-go. Platonic numbers are similarly problematic. On the one hand, we might think of, say, the number two as being "THE" cardinal number of every set of pairs. On the other, we might think of it as being the abstract structural specification that every set of pairs satisfies. It's hard to see how this latter definition is vulnerable to Lewis's concerns.
I think a problem with calling Hamlet a set that is it's members, is that when we're talking about Hamlet, we're only discussing certain properties of the members of that set. Back in the day when Hamlet only existed on paper -- it would still be kind of silly to say something like "Hamlet contains a lot of cellulose". Also, Wikipedia does not say that abstract objects can have no causal effects, but rather that abstract objects have "no physical referents". Does this need correcting? If not, how would you deal with money? You might say that the money on my bank account exists physically as patterns on a hard drive -- but if that drive were to suddenly explode, the bank would have a backup, and I would still have my money.
The fact that we can discuss only certain properties of a set, seems to be what makes abstract concepts useful. An instance of Hamlet written in English, but with the Theban alphabet (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theban_alphabet) wouldn't have a lot of physical similarities with any other member of the set -- but it would still be Hamlet.
Isn't both are mere concepts in our mind. Concrete - directly associated with a real world object. Abstract - a grammar construct sort of used for deeper thinking..
It is possible that Hamlet did always exist and was simply discovered, plucked out of the pool of all possible ideas by Shakespeare. There could be other beings in other worlds/universes who also discover it. If so, who really "has" it? There could even be a world that IS Hamlet, where it is real. When I create art it feels more like I'm discovering it, exploring for it, uncovering it or trying to bring it out of the abstract realm without breaking it too much with my shoddy skills, than it does me creating it from scratch.
It seems to me that abstracta exist only in our minds, in order to describe, or group, or otherwise help make sense of the outside world. "This apple is red" is true, but "red" is an idea created and defined by humans. In this way, abstracta do exist in the physical world, in that they are represented electrochemically in our brains, but really they are merely definitions, groups, characteristics, and generalizations of things that exist outside of our heads.
I don't know if this is a technically correct term, but on on episode of TNG they reference emergent systems, where an object that is greater than the sum of its parts can be formed. Is that an actual thing or just some plot device star trek made up, and Could we think of the idea of Hamlet as a system (all the copies of it, every quote from it, its impact on society, and everything tangentially related to it) as a sort of emergent system where the combined whole is greater than any of its individual parts. after all if all you ever talked about with Hamlet was the kind of paper it was printed on or the font used for the letters, you really wouldn't be getting at the real importance of it would you?
What if all the copies of Hamlet were destroyed and everyone forgot about it. Then, 1000 years later someone came up with a "new" idea for a play called Hamlet and it is word for word of the original. Does that mean that mean it's a brand new concept or does it mean that the old one just just had a rebirth? Are they two separate ideas or just one? (Of coarse the major flaw with this question is that the original would be written by Shakespeare and the new one would be written by a different person even if they shared the same name.)
What you could do is say that sets can include past and future members. So Hamlet doesn't just include all the current copies and memorised parts, but ones in other times too.
Technically the force of gravity is an abstractus because it is not a physical thing, a wave of anything like that. So Abstracta actually can affect things, like you said about Hamlet making one sad. I think that abstracta just non-physical objects, anything not made of matter/anti-matter. Actually I'll put energy in there too because E=MC2. So I guess like ideas, concepts and stuff are abstracta
I didn't hear about that, could you point me to the story? But from what I understand it would be impossible to ever observe a graviton because of it's low interaction with matter and background neutrino interference would be too much of a problem. And I imagine (and I don't know how accurate this is) that gravitons would interact in a graviton field, like the higgs field for example. However, assuming your assertion is correct I'll replace gravity in my example with magnetism or any of the nuclear forces. (hopefully that will solve my dilemma)
You may not be able to observe the thing itself (I mean, I hate to be _that person_ who goes QUANTUMQUANTUMQUANTUM) but we _can_ empirically observe its effects (like all quantum particles now). The discovery was based around patterns found in the cosmic fingerprint - phys.org/news/2014-03-elusive-graviton.html . But I see where you are coming from - forces and energy are non-physical. However, re-watching the video, Olly defines a _concrete object_ as "made of matter and energy and stuff". Energy is not causally inert: on the contrary, essential to causation! It also necessarily exists in specific spacetime scenarios.
yes yes! So my idea is that 'things' that aren't matter or energy, say phenomena like the mind, society or ideas are abstracta because they have no physical/energetic presence, they are only represented in the world by symbols, like the binary code in a computer. What do you think? Am I just repeating what Olly said, am I off?
I think I understand. You seem to be saying that things such as consciousness and morality and ideas are abstracta yet capable of causation, and ergo are not necessarily causally inert. I'm not sure what I think of that really - I'd be tempted to say that they are concrete rather than abstract purely because they can generally be anchored in spacetime. But I don't know! I wrote a comment somewhere below about how I associated abstracta with adjectives - how they cannot be comprehended until they are qualified, akin to what you call "symbols" which represent programs, mathematics etc. As soon as an abstracta is qualified it becomes concrete. So I guess I would say that, although conceptual, acts which ascribe something symbolically can cause an abstracta to become concrete. To a degree, of course.
Abstract is usually something from us in the world created in order to overcome the seemingly insurmountable barrier between the outside world and ourselves An example. Make 1cm for me from a material. It is not possible, because no matter (the human body) can never make exactly 1cm. Especially if one perception of a human additionally doubts.
Seems like another example of philosophers reasoning themselves into a corner that doesn't have to exist. Look at our brains. Our cognitive abilities. We naturally find and refine patterns from input. We build categories around prototypes. We store schemas related to a phenomenon at _various_ levels of specificity (hence it's strange to ask if something is "really abstract"). Abstract structures affect us all the time. Whether they are "really objects" or whatever is just philosophers playing with words again.
One would not have a concept of a circle without first encountering an approximation of one at some point in life. The same goes for the color red, for example, someone blind from birth would have no notion of red. Furthermore, red is a sensory experience and may be different from one perceiver to another. I am willing to say, tentatively, that abstract objects are most likely the product of real-world experience and the internal processes of the mind and do not exist in some way independent of these two things.
Yes, my problem with the idea of a National Anthem being abstract and therefore having not causal effect on anything. Wars are fought and people die over these, the emotions they stir and the things they represent. :\ Most where commissioned specifically in order that they do just that. Sounds to me like it's the _idea_ abstracted from the thing that idea represents. So, "the colour red" isn't a thing, but it is a commonly understood idea which we can all associate with, fast cars, warning signs, ripe berries, valentine roses, socialism, gift wrapping / presents, (particularly in east Asian cultures) hot coals / embers / metal / lava, dangerous insects and animals etc. etc. I suspect the fact that there are so many associations with these abstract "objects" is a key too. There are many ways of looking at any play, and Shakespeares' works have been re-interpreted far more than any others etc. but interpretations may, or may not alter a manuscript. They're still "Shakespeares' Hamlet". What do "numbers" mean, as opposed to any particular number? What is a "numbers"? (the phrase has become meaningless through over generalisation) 32768 is an example of some numbers, or a number, depending on how you read it, and 8000 could well be the exact *same* number, if read as hexadecimal, and compared to the first set of numbers, read in decimal notation. That's pretty "abstract", and illustrates that the _physical_ thing, as a single example written on a page, or video screen, isn't in any way representative of the idea associated with it's abstraction. A number, or even all the numbers in the world _right now_ are not as useful, agile and informative as the simple idea of "numbers".
I think I'd prefer for the time Schopenhouer because learning something close to Eastern philosophy would be interesting. Otherwise my favorite philosophers were Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche... I'd love to see a video relating to one of those philosophers.
axayacatl14 I've already done two videos on Camus a while ago, a short one and an extended lecture I gave on him. Short one: The Philosophy of Welcome to Night Vale - Philosophy Tube Lecture: Philosophy in Welcome to Night Vale - Extended Lecture
Well its interesting that there is a dichotemy between abstract and concrete but ignoring the category of mental completely. (are you implying any stance on the mind-body problem here? The way I understand abtracta is that its a place where all ideas rest and while its not physically able to enact any change, it can be referred to cognitively, thus us knowing about it. To me it seems that abstracta is a set of all possible things, orders, and propositions, and we cognitively point to specific ones when thinking about them. the same way you dont have an actual chair in your head when imagining a chair, but rather a cognitive referral to a chair you can have cognitive referrals to things that do not exist as matter such as numbers. another way to think about abstracta is thinking about propositions. If i have a proposition "its raining outside" this can that mean the same thing as draußen regnet es, because the meaning isnt tied to the sound or writing of the word but rather the sound points to the meaning
so i got into an argument with my mom, over whether people who break the law are "bad guys". Like, the way i view it, even though i dont justify their actions, you should not be ethically judged for things you are not responsible for, and it's usually outer conditions that result in making you do illegal stuff (unless you have a mental condition). So idk, what do you think?
What would a class nominalist say about the problem of the Ship of Theseus? If I have a ship, and gradually replace all his parts with newer, equal ones as soon as they break, would I have a different ship by the end or would it be the same? Wouldn't this suggest that there is an abstracta or Form of ship? I also vote for Schopenhauer's Aesthethics and ask why you will avoid Eastern philosophy and what is it especifically :)
Antonio Abello It's not that I'm avoiding Eastern philosophy by choice, no no; I try to make the episodes on topics that I have studied so I know what I'm talking about, and I haven't been taught any Eastern philosophy because it isn't often included in the analytic tradition. Schopenhauer is very tangentially related to it, so it's the closest I can take you.
Hammlet actually did exist before Shakespeare wrote it. As prooven by the fact that a monkey could have written it, going by the famous phrase, given enough time even a monkey would write a Shakespeare play. This just means an infinitly long input of random keys of a keyboard will eventually contain every piece of literature l, dialog and documentary ever concieved and ever to be concieved. Creative creation like writing or painting is inherantly more a matter of discovery and rearrangement of already existing parts of the universe. Because according to one of the laws of thermodynamics, at least I believe it's from them, matter can neither be created nor destroyed only transformed. Yes the creation of a play is not the same like creating matter, nevertheless, looking at the monkey on keyboard phrase there is a fitting parallel to be found.
I don't disagree that abstract objects exist, but I don't think I'd consider "red" an example. I think I'd consider red and green and blue and every other color a VERB, at least in the technical sense; it's not an object, it's a WAY objects can move. Red is what happens when photons move a certain way, and also we look at them with our red-perceiving eyes.
Nice videos! In the intro the greek and latin sayings are messed up, I don't know if that is on purpose. οὐδείς ἑκών ἁμαρτάνει Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
Just to better direct the confused:
1:30 The way of example
1:57 The way of conflation
2:28 The way of abstraction
3:22 The way of negation
Cheong Cheng Wen thank you sir
Sincerely,
The confused
This is Useful for Software Developers
As a software developer, no it isn't. Actually some notions like "a set is just all of its members" is downright wrong in the real of software, for example, the set [1,2] is not the same as [2,1] even if their members are the same because the set has more properties than the members contained like order, length, etc.
If you mean useful as in it will make devs think, yeah, but to the point that's correct it is also meaningless, since it would help anyone, not just devs and it is not particularly useful for software development.
@@eleSDSU
Sets by definition don't have an order. You're thinking of lists or strings.
@@eleSDSUsets in SWE & CS are defined without order.
Came to learn how to be the "abstract thinker" my teacher says I need to become, and left with an existential crisis and added depth to theology.....
Also, I really liked this video. It definitely made me think the most out of all of your videos so far. So yeah, fantastic.
This reminds me of discussing things that have matter and things that don't with my 8th grade science students. They would make good philosophers - how can I say for sure that feelings like love and hate don't have matter? Aren't they represented by physical occurrences in the brain? Or my favorite semantic argument - love and hate have matter because they MATTER, in terms of making an impact on a person or persons
UA-cam suggested this to me and all I could think was "oh my God he's such a baby"
Olly had such a glo-up
Now it's Abby😁
William James's 'Varieties of Religious Experience' is a decent Western psycho-philosophical analysis of mysticism that sheds some light on the kinds of experience that might lead people such as Plato to believe in forms, or a wide variety of other metaphysical beliefs based on atypical subjective experiences.
I think there isn't a clear dividing line between concrete and abstract objects, but there is a clear continuum between concreteness and abstractness, with the actual occasions of our experiences ("pixels" of vision, "samples" of hearing, etc) being the most concrete things, almost all of the ordinary objects we talk about being abstractions of patterns in those occasions of experience, more hypothetical but still physical things like electrons and quantum fields being more abstract still (useful things to hypothesize to explain those patterns in our experiences), and at the extreme abstract end, the mathematical objects used to model those physical theories, and the more elementary mathematical objects that they're made up of, all the way down to numbers and sets, are the most abstract of things.
I think abstract objects are simply useful linguistic and informational tools that don't actually exist anywhere but our brains. They all boil down to memory. You read or watch Hamlet and you remember it as an entire play because that's just how our brains categorize that kind of memory. But because it's a somewhat shared memory, you can discuss it as if that memory exists in some abstract realm, and pretend you're all accessing this singular entity that is Hamlet, but really, all that's happening is that you're all recalling a memory of your experiences with Hamlet. Memories are physical objects implanted somewhere in the brain, so there is no abstraction to be found there, except within our minds.
But we can know the properties of abstract objects. And the properties would be true whether anyone were there to think about them or not. These objects seem to me like they really exist, though they are abstract
And what about experiences, like red? They seem to have a place and time, but remain ineffable and abstract. Not simply the neuronal connections in your brain (we can describe those), but the actual concious experience.
I think it's completely abstract, but if it didn't exist, how could you "have the experience"?
Sets have their axiomatisation in Zermelo Frankael Theory, while numbers are defined by the axioms of Peano Arithmetic. These are formal systems which fully specify the assumptions we have made of these abstract objects and allow us to derive results about these objects within that framework, though thanks to some famous results in mathematical logic there are some shortcomings of such systems in that they cannot establish their own consistency (godel's incompleteness theorem) or define a notion of truth (tarski's undefinability theorem).
As a mathematical formalist I believe that certain abstract objects which are defined mathematically 'exist' to precisely the extent they are defined, and who's properties are precisely described by their axioms. A set is merely an object which we have asserted obeys the string manipulation rules that are the axioms of set theory. If you change the axioms you get different objects who's formal properties you can investigate separately. The status of the formal systems which specify sets and numbers as mathematicians know and love them is a product of the history of the subject and has no obvious intrinsic justification (at least to me, and I am only an undergraduate student of mathematics!). If you adopt a formalist view, then mathematically well defined objects, and indeed objects described by any possible formal system, exist in precisely this sense. They need not have anything to do with physical reality, so if that is what you require for existence then they (probably!) do not exist.
But what do you require for 'existence'? I think I have dealt briefly with the epistemic and ontological status of formally defined objects but for other abstract objects I think you would run into problems due to with subjectivity? Is it at all meaningful to talk about love, say, when no two people can precisely agree on what love actually is? Or even if they agree on a definition in terms of other words, their subjective experiences and understanding of love would surely always differ. Until psychologists and neuroscientists pinpoint a set of biological phenomena which they then choose to refer to formally as 'love', perhaps the notion of love or any other emotion can only exist as a 'vague, approximate consensus' (I'm sure there's a term in linguistics which expresses what I am trying to say here.)
Anyway, these are some of my musings on the subject. I really love watching your videos Olly, please keep them coming. I'd love to see some on the philosophy of mathematics which deal with results in mathematical logic. These ideas need to be shared and enjoyed far more widely than they currently are so kudos for making that happen!
Adrian
Isn't it possible to say that abstract things are states of our brains used to classify our experience of the world. To impose more feature of the world than the directly observable.
+Tor Djärv We create abstract things because concrete things can have properties in common. Our minds are advanced enough to think of things that are not concrete and our thoughts don't have to be real themselves, man.
@@ArcaneFlamez69 I don't know. Don't our thoughts have to be real? Otherwise what are they
I'm more interested in Schopenhaur's aesthetics.
As others have already pointed out: I think that referring to "abstracta" as extant objects is just a short-hand for referring the ideas that are physically encoded (neuronal) in a collective group of people's minds. The numbers 2 and 4, for example "exist" insofar that different people agree on what they mean. I don't think this subtracts from the verisimilitude of a statement like "2+2=4".
When we talk about abstracta, we are talking about the meaning of the things that are eventually all physically encoded in the brain.
(I know it takes some work to prove that these things are ultimately encoded in the mind, but I think this can only be proved empirically by studies of the brain. I believe it, nonetheless, because it's more parsimonious than invoking another "type" of existence)
Schopenhauer's Aesthetics please.
Is it just me, or does materialism clean this up?
Consider abstracta as patterns of chemical interactions in brains which are interpreted in a certain predictable fashion by those brains. They "exist" and have causal effects because they have a physical manifestation as interpretable chemical signals, but are distinct from non-abstracta in that we only experience them meaningfully as thoughts - the interpretation of those signals (as opposed to physical structures, which we experience as light, tactile response, etc.).
Software *exists* physically as varying electrical charges in computer memory, but it is only experienced meaningfully as it is interpreted by a computer. Hamlet *exists* physically as the chemical reaction that happens in our brains when we read "Hamlet," but it is only experienced meaningfully by us when we process those reactions & imagine or act out the play.
Idk what Olly would say to this (except to point out that there are other problems with materialism??) but I'd like to up this because it seems like a very clever way of looking at how "abstracta" are able to affect the world without technically being in the world. They're the emerging sensations as a result of perceptions rather than the physical things that we perceive.
"Hamlet exists physically as the chemical reaction that happens in our brains when we read "Hamlet," but it is only experienced meaningfully by us when we process those reactions & imagine or act out the play."
But the subjectiv experience of reading Hamlet (i.e. the feelings, visualizations and considerations it invoke and beeing conscious of this and the act of reading) surely exists aswell? Also the reading of Hamlet would be the experience of "the copy of Hamlet" and not the one 'idea of Hamlet'. Even if we were to conclude that the physical chemical reactions in the brain were the cause of the subjective experience (ignoring the fallacy) it surely does not exclude it's existence (i.e. mind)?
If Abstracta is chemical reactions in the brain, they are not Abstracta. If the experience of 'a copy of Hamlet' invoked the meaningful 'Idea of Hamlet' through chemical interaction in the brain, it does not follow that 'the copy of Hamlet' nor the 'chemical interaction' is the Abstracta. The One Idea is the Abstracta, and it is completely true that the meaningful experience of f.x. 'The Idea of Hamlet' could invoke those physical reactions in the brain, but this is a rationalistic view, not a material one. There is no room for Abstracta, by definition, in Materialism.
The paradox of the existence of 'One and The Many' to me essentially boils down to the existence of mind, and it's interaction on the physical world. This is essentially the ontological paradox of 'The Becoming' and 'The Beeing'.
Good, but heavy, reading on this subject is Plato's 'Parmenides'
HushGod Your last paragraph sort of ends where I would begin. Inasmuch as Hamlet could still exist even if no written copies had existed. The person who imagined it could still convey it orally and the memory of that oration would be present in the actors and then their performance becomes a permanence of those who witness it. Ontologically it's all there and it exists.
The crazy part is the notion of copies of an object, and the set that those copies create, is a concept that actually extends to memory as well. The experience of an actual event creates a subjective memory of that event for every person who witnesses it. The retelling of that event creates even further copies all of which are also subjective. The event then exists subjectively in many iterations yet are all causally linked to the original objective event, all collectively referred to as the event itself and never do we acknowledge that our memories of that event are really a modified version of it. How subjective does the recall of that event have to get before it no longer bears resemblance to the original objective version.
Consider things with the viewpoint of a more consistent and powerful theory which explains the behaviour of particles through which these chemical phenomena are decided. There's a function called Schrödinger wave function, it contains 'all the information' about a particle and predicts it's behavior. Now, there are four NUMBERS which actually are a description of the behaviour of a particle (implicitly) they are called Quantum Numbers. Now these numbers are merely numbers, nothing more. So they are abstracta. Purely abstract. Also, all the (value of) physical constants. the Newtonian Gravitational Constant (G), Planck constant (h), cosmological constant, the speed of light, the absolute permittivity of free space, and the absolute permeability of free space. These values are absurdly precise. And these values have SOME meaning attached to them, but if you consider the spin quantum number, you have nothing but a number. So deep down at this (perhaps) fundamental level of nature you have this numbers controlling things. This abstractum deciding the nature of a particle which will in turn decide the structure of the chemical process i.e. reading all this.
Indeed, THUNK. I asseverate that all abstracta are interactions among the physical.
probability distributions are abstract objects which affect your life, like they're not the ocncrete -> and they don't actually relate to the concrete situation, BUT say you're playing poker the generative process of the concrete is from said distribution which leads to some base level implications about the existing state.
When you talk about the four ways conflicting and use the example of Hamlet as not being an abstractus according to the way of negation (4:35), I think you sort of assume nominalism in your argument.
> "[Hamlet is] surely located in time and space. It was written at some point between 1599 and 1601 so it had a beginning; it can't have existed timelessly before Shakespeare even wrote it. And it's surely located more on Earth than it is on Jupiter, so it kind of has a location."
(Taking a platonist position for sake of argument) Incorrect, sir! The first *copy* of Hamlet was written by Shakespeare circa 1600, and all *copies* exist on Earth rather than Jupiter, but do not assume that this says anything about the abstract object itself. Hamlet the abstractus exists timelessly, independent of its creative discovery by a human. You have implicitly assumed that a concrete copy of Hamlet must exist in order for the abstractus to exist, even though you clearly identify this as class nominalism previously (2:55)! Harumph, sir!
> "What if you said something like 'Hamlet makes me feel sad or introverted or self-critical'? Well then it surely had a causal effect on you."
Again, sir, you beg nominalism in your phrasing. Hamlet *itself* has done dothing; what has affected you is a certain *copy*, *performance*, or *reading* of Hamlet, or perhaps your own *understanding* of it. Poppycock, sir! You offend my reason!
I don't know why the platonist struck me as particularly old-timey, but whatever.
One of my favorite 20 questions choices with which to test others' logic is paint.
I think about the nature of being in terms of abstraction. I had a chance to look up on types and tokens last week (just out of curiosity) and how one is related to a specific medium of expression (tokens) and what it possibly could be (types).
Bear with me, I'm still learning about it.
Overall, both seem to pick at being "particular" things. It's interesting to say that without letters or numbers; these seemingly human abstract concepts, could we know about the properties of physical, worldly concepts if we didn't have a means to record its information? It seems that the realism of abstraction is not that it doesn't exist physically but that it needs to make sense when it possibly could or could not exist without an identity.
We (humans) know that "A" exists. It is a part of a stream of human-made information that allows us to associate a particular thing of the world. However, "A" is just one of many different letters, and these different letters have meaning to us, with association with the world around us. They are abstract forms that are given purpose to us. They make words, words create sentences, and so on and so forth, but it's abstract information that we understand. One of many sets of words and particular one of many sentences and languages. You can say that anything that is written by a human is an abstraction, but the human being itself and the forms around us are concrete because they serve as tools of identification to these abstract concepts that we created.
What's funny is that I always believed that I didn't exist and that the rest of the world didn't exist either. This was due to experiences I had growing up where suddenly all of my perceptions became distorted and the world seemed to be foreign or alien to me. It was as if I was a newborn child and I was experiencing sight and sound for the first time. People I loved were not people, or at least I could not recognize them as people. I was so scared. I couldn't even recognize my own mother as anything more than some object with no value. Needless to say, my memory would eventually return, but every time I would come back to this so-called "reality" I would be shell-shocked form the experience. Ever since these experiences started happening I've come to the conclusion that I don't exist, and that all the abstracta you mentioned could be just as valid as concrete reality. I don't know, maybe I'm just crazy, but when you've had to question your reality for as long as I have, you would begin to believe strange things too. That's what I think. I would would to hear your take on that :)
I would argue that we don't actually have access to abstracta, we just have access to something like "instances" of abstracta. Granted, that doesn't work if abstracta don't exist in space or time. Since ideas don't exist outside of a context of associations to other ideas and sensory information (and that's all just a configuration of neuron activity), and sensory input is constantly changing, ideas exist uniquely in one place at one time. What your concept of Hamlet exists in reference to is different from mine, and it will be different from what it was before you read this sentence, after you read this sentence. The "abstract realm" (as anyone can access it) is just the set of configurations of neurons, which just leads to the question: Are you a class nominalist?
I don't know undefined concepts are almost always taken as axiom in math and although sets can simply be all the elements within them a line, a continues arrangement of points, or a point, a line of infinitesimal length, do not have an equivalent in the real world. One refers to place in space the other to the connection between spaces. Abstract objects seem to have looping definitions that involve other abstract objects. They are incomparable to real objects.
Abstracta are a byproduct of a pattern seeking consciousness. As they are necessarily contingent upon consciousness, they exist only experientially as processes. As agents employing these processes, abstracta _can_ have an effect on the world. We might buy the red shirt instead of the blue one because (perhaps) red is our favorite color. We can build tall skyscrapers utilizing certain rules of physics and math to allow for more stable structures. We laugh at jokes. We cry over sad stories. We move and organize huge amounts of matter around the planet for commercial gain. The concepts of color and physics and math and commerce all arose from building and refining patterns within a conscious mind, and passing those concepts to others where they are (possibly) further refined.
We can do this through another byproduct of consciousness, and one which is intrinsic to pattern recognition, which is association. We can take two or more unlike things and form a new concept around them. We categorize, label, and build upon, and construct new patterns by associating concrete things with abstracta, and by associating abstracta with other abstracta. Language is probably the biggest example of this.
Consciousness is a two way street. We can label and categorize and process reality through abstracta, and we can utilize abstracta to alter concrete reality in specific patterns in order to pass abstracta to another consciousness. In fact, since there is no mind-to-mind communication in which abstracta in one consciousness can simply appear in another, it is necessary to alter reality just to say hello.
What consciousness actually is and how it arose is another question entirely.
This is also my view on the matter.
That's not necessarily so. Mathematical Platonism is just one framework which holds that abstracta can exist independently of minds. At least independently of *our* minds. You might ask, "then where are abstracta?" and the answer (in aprt) is that they are nowhere because they are not physical, but they can also be all over the place when manifested in physical approximations or equivalence classes or representation classes; e.g., every approximation to a perfect circle is in a class of geometric objects "close to" the abstractum of a perfect circle. So "where is a perfect circle?" is not a stupid question, it is wherever the essential properties of circles get materially or otherwise manifested in approximate representations. This does not require consciousness. Consciousness is just one way in which abstractions get known about.
Is this implying that abstracta requires consciousness? If so what about animals, androids and young children?
I agree with your view as well.
I disagree. Abstracta can be encoded in computers, and I wouldn't say those are conscious just yet.
*All of our exchanges are abstractions.* The issue is about WHAT is being referenced in our abstractions as to whether such is concrete or not. If the reference is (or was) an object in the observed world, then what is being spoken of is (or was) concrete - and any aspect of that object is a descriptor of the object and/or its effects. This distinction seems to work well, until one deals with the past and the determination of what is or was concrete, since, we are left to sift though abstractions which may well make no distinction and frankly the authors may not in fact have had a distinction.
We can't have meaning without abstractions, since, meaning is an abstraction.
If your talking about abstracta having a physical effect on your emotions and/or feelings we are essentially saying that all abstracta can be concrete objects without them being real or not. This could be supported by saying something like " the color combination of blue and purple made the movie feel sad and dark" even though these colors could be considered abstract objects they are interpreted as objects that leave a mark or impact on the world therefore making them concrete.
i got a sort of intuitive grasp of this subject thanks to the people who approach it via metaphor/analogy & the structure of human cognition and language - "Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking" {my beloved} is where i got into that subject
The whole space-time might be a special case of "abstract" object nested is a wider space of abstract objects. It just seems concrete to us because we live in it and observe it through our senses.
David Lewis also rocked the world of modal logic. He's basic reading for anyone studying it.
Regarding the person from the last video who asked the question that amounted to why would anyone want to look at stolen nude photos when there's picture out there that were released consensually, I think the people who ask that question are sadly missing the connection to rape culture; it's the fact that they were not meant to see those pictures, that those pictures were meant only for the taker and/or their spouse/partner that is the turn on for them. That looking at those photos is a violation for that specific type of person is very much a feature not a bug (if I'm using that metaphor right).
It seems like abstracta come as an extension of dualism, where the ideas and conceptions of objects are separated from their physical bodies. The main problem that I see with it is that it boils down to "if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, it does not make a sound". Essentially, since "Hamlet" and "that copy of Hamlet on my desk" are two different things, it would seem that "that copy of Hamlet on my desk" serves only to provide the physical form for the abstract "Hamlet". Then the logical progression would be that my physical eyes would experience "that copy of Hamlet on my desk" which is conveying the abstract idea of "Hamlet". My physical eyes would pass it on to my brain, which would then somehow pass it on to my abstract mind (as Descartes would have it).
The problem is that this implies every single object in the world essentially has an infinite regression of abstracta, comprising every possible combination of its individual parts, yet which do not exist outside of perception by other essentially abstract entities. "That copy of Hamlet on my desk" does not only possess the abstractum of "Hamlet", but also the abstracta of "ink", "paper", binding, "page numbers", and on and on. The question is how do these abstracta "inhabit" their respective corporeal forms? There would need to be a mechanism for this interaction, but since abstracta cannot cause anything (as Olly said), it would be logically contradictory.
About the hamlet, Can't one argue that Shakespeare didn't wrote the abstract play of Hamlet, instead he wrote a copy of (first copy) Hamlet and all the other copies are build by coping some qualities of that first copy? also that one doesn't feel sad by the abstract play instead he feel sad by reading a copy of hamlet?
Also doesn't this whole problem depends on the definition of existence? or what does something require for it to be considered as an existing object?
Philosophy Tube
i see no problem with dealing with abstract things. things that are abstract can also be different degrees of abstract purely based on how many interactive properties it has. In this way, i suppose non-abstract things are merely things that have properties that we are used to using as a standard of 'realness' like rather defined locality and inertia (mass/energy [see mass-less photons] ) .
i can see no reason why abstract things would be so different than 'real' things because as you said, many of them have substantial effects on the world around them due to their definable properties. that sounds pretty real to me.
The way of abstraction does not work for an additional reason: Every 'concrete' thing can actually be seen as an abstract thing, by invoking the Ship-of-Theseus argument.
The way of negation has the problem of simply eliminating the concept of abstracta, as it ignores that abstracta bind concrete objects together.
My belief is that we can hardly analyze the world in terms of objects because those are not really definable, only in concepts that are sets of properties - eliminating the possibility of distinction between abstracta and concrete.
Basically I agree with the great comment by Gary Malarkey.
Maybe there are eternal abstract objects which always existed and always will (like a square, pi, or a set), and temporal abstract objects that are created at some time and likewise may be destroyed (like Hamlet). Perhaps eternal abstract objects cannot cause things (over time), but temporal ones can.
As for how we came up with eternal abstract objects in the first place... maybe they represent some sort of transcendent truth and structure that is inherent to existence/our universe/whatever. An eternal abstracta is omnipresent
I think most of the abstracta you mentioned can be thought of as characteristics that one would be used to describe an object. It's easy to see how this would apply to the color red, some things are more red than other things. But I think you can apply this idea to more intricate abstracta, like Hamlet.
Imagine that you have a pice of paper with the play Hamlet written out on it, except that I've deleted one word at a random point in the play. Certainly this new play would be similar to the one that we call Hamlet. You could get away with calling this new play Hamlet because it's very Hamlet-y. On the other hand you could not get away with referring to the Odyssey as Hamlet because it's not very Hamlet-y.
Some abstract objects being characteristics seems to make sense.
But even putting aside Hamlet for a moment, I'm not convinced some things can be "redder" than others. I think that's wrongly conflating red as an experience and red as a measure of red light brightness, like in an RGB colour value.
At first it would seem like some experiences *can* be measures, such as pain for example. One experience can be "more painful" than the other. But I think this is again a mistake. If one experience is "pain 1", and another, more painful experience is "pain 2", I wouldn't say that pain 2 is "more pain 1" than pain 1.
Looking to answer this question and stumbled upon this video only to realize its "philosophy tube". I didnt know this channel had such a crazy arc
Hahaha yup
Concrete and abstract unnecessarily create a bimodal perspective. A spectrum makes more sense, requires less entities. It might go from very physical (like a single specific atom or sub particle) to less physical like (a person, who can change) to more abstract (like mercy, justice, etc.) then to further abstract (like fictional characters) to perhaps the most abstract (everyone in room A is six feet tall, no one is in room A)
Yay! Comment featured! +2 to Self Esteem.
I really want to hear you talk about Another Earth and I want to learn more about metaphysics because it breaks my brain....so Possible Worlds.
- Newton's law of gravity, abstract and with causal power ?
- An algorithm, abstract with causal power (as soon as it is "activated" in a computer) ?
- A shadow, abstract and located in space ?
- Pythagorean theorem, seems like it naturally follows the description of an abstract object, not located, no causal power (it just seems to describe a relation mathematically)
Generally, it seems hard to ever be able to create an air-tight definition of abstract objects.
Everything abstract that has a casual effect is one concrete instance of that.
Example:
Every letter Z that has a casual effect is ink on paper or electrons symbolising ones and zeros that in turn are symbolising the letter Z, or it's vibrations in the air that conveys information a listener will interpret as the letter Z.
You never use an abstract object. You use a concrete representation of an abstract object.
Did anything abstract exist before the creation of this universe?
as far as i know, in metaphysical naturalism abstract objects are explained as mere patterns recognized in the physical world (and that recognition can just be described as a pattern of neurons firing.) i personally don't really see how anyone can have serious objections to this. i think just saying patterns are being recognized here and recognize the pattern of this happening all the time would clear this up.
so, according to this view:
1. the way of example - saying some things are abstract doesn't really define it so i don't know what to do with this, i could just say a unicorn is a wazzuppadup, and then what is wazzuppadup? exactly. it just doesn't mean anything, if it's not defined
2. the way of conflation - sets are also patterns recognized, then it's not the members but (at least the possibility of) the recognizing of that pattern.
3. the way of abstraction - again, the concept of the set is not the set itself, so
3.a. a red thing is not part of the color red, it is a thing in which one can recognize the pattern called red (refracting mostly a certain wavelength interval of light)
3.b. avengers are not just the list of heroes, but the concept that somehow they are together, they interact, they can even get new members, so basically it's just the recognizing of the pattern that some beings call themselves the avengers, or maybe some other beings call these beings the avengers
3.c if all copies of hamlet would be destroyed, and all traces of it were deleted there would still be a possibility (for example lots of monkey with lots of typewriters and lots of time, or just a random long text generator) of something happening that would result in the pattern of hamlet the play being recognized (maybe even with it's historical context also written there)
3.5 "we're talking about a specific copy and ignoring it's specificity" recognizing a pattern means exactly this, that we ignore the uniqueness and concentrate on the shared properties, and this can get very far away from the original concrete things, but for example i think numbers seem very abstract but one can simply do basic calculations with one's fingers.
4. the way of negation - this is false because patternrecognizing is a function of a computer or a brain, which is a physical object in space and time and has causal powers.
4.5 "hamlet was written at some point so it had a beginning" well yes but if you suppose a time machine you could go back and again find a random set of characters and recognize in them the pattern of hamlet, so the possibility was there before. but just because something is possible doesn't mean it exists, and it's way more practical to talk about actually existing cases i guess. i mean isn't this whole book you showed and the whole whether abstractions exist debate is really about whether merely possible things exist? and you could say they do, but definetly not like concrete things, so using the same word is problematic, so maybe you need three-value logic as with fictional universes.
now i guess after all this, i should define pattern and define recognization, and i admit i can't do it on a level i would like to but i think the definitions found in dictionaries aren't so bad either for our purposes.
so i really think rephrasing it as recognizing patterns pretty much solves all the problems, but i'm 100% amateur so i'd love to hear my arguements destroyed.
Philosophy Tube I think an even better if not the best way to determine if 'something' is an abstract object, as a opposed to concrete object, or has concrete existence would be to imagine or ask oneself: would what the specific language refers to still be knowable, experienceable, perceivable, et cetera, if language in general did not exist? For instance, would we still be able to know, experience, or perceive, the colour red if we were not able to verbally identify it? Yes? Does our experience of any particular depend upon its formal distinction? But nigh nothing is absolutely abstract in my personal opinion, since the entirety of language is abstraction of that which we experience in one way or another to begin with, whether it's an abstraction of actual phenomena or the spoken word itself. Considering that, this method probably still would not be effective or yield practical results. However, you can get damn near close to 'something' that is completely abstract if that 'something' is an abstraction of an abstraction, perhaps ad infinitum. Mathematics is pretty much (if not?) absolutely abstract. I am certain we would not experience '2+2=4' or any other mathematical equation if we had not formulated and formalized it. But from did the idea come?!
I'm basically at the point where I consider language in terms of mapping (whereby each word is a coordinate or even a street sign) or measurement (whereby each word is, say, a notch on a ruler). Language is a system of ultimately false distinctions and is absolutely functional insofar as it allows us to alter our functionality.
There isn't an uncontroversial account of the distinction between abstract objects and concrete objects. That's because it's far from clear what account of abstract objects is correct (i.e. Platonism, Nominalism, Aristotelianism, Conceptualism, etc.).
What about the moderate realist approach, where universals exist only when instantiated in particulars and more fully in the intellect considering it? Nominalism and Platonism clearly aren't the only options here.
My thinking is that we are only capable of perceiving abstracta. Your sensory input may be directly caused my a thing in itself, but the you're still only receiving a projection. On top of this, raw sensory input is useless to the mind until we process it and perceive it as discrete entities with abstract properties.
Sorry to be a bit late on the reply, I have a query on the last thing said. If Hamlet does make you feel something, it has had a causal reaction but its only caused a mental state, which - unless you are a severe physicalist - one would argue is another abstracta. Wouldn't one ague that abstract only has causal reactions with other non-spatiotemporal things? Or does the theory state it has no causal relationships with anything
is a 'pure' object in the realm of forms (not defined by its properties but 'a thing in itself'), by necessity, abstract? or, can an object represent a 'pure' concrete archetype, and exist in both the realm of forms and objective reality?
I'm no metaphysicist, but it seems to me that Abstracta are like adjectives, qualia, which don't make sense/exist concretely until they are qualified. It's hard to comprehend "red", "round" or "slow" without ascribing it to an object or identity. Likewise with numbers - they need to be qualified. The number "348,723,965" is a row of 9 separate symbols which have not been qualified - the largest number of concrete _things_ said to exist by this is 9: 9 separate symbols, adjectives describing one object each. Writing such a number down does no more to prove it exists than if i drew a dragon - the only thing said to exist from that is a poorly drawn dragon on a bit of paper. *You have to ascribe to qualify the adjective*. Ergo something like Graham's number cannot exist beyond abstracta because its digits exceed the number of Planck lengths in the known universe. Likewise with infinity, even 10 divided by three = 3.3 recurring: there are not enough concrete objects to qualify it!
I have a feeling there's something wrong with my logic. But that's how I see it...
abstracta are just concepts of things that we create within our minds for some use. the color red is abstract because it is a descriptive term, just as big, small, heavy and other descriptive terms are abstract and have no physical form. it is created within the human social mind that we make by communicating and sharing our knowledge and thinking on it and continuing to better our ways of communication and thinking.
Schopenhauer's Aesthetics would be a great topic
because it would introduce people to his concept of "Will"
I do think that video would be more practical than the possible worlds video for now.
Schopenhauer please!
It's tempting to try and define abstracta in terms of 'information' or 'patterns', but I'm afraid there isn't a single position I'm happy to take which doesn't have obvious holes in it. I would say that there is nothing metaphysical about abstracta. All the abstracta you can mention only occur inside a conscious brain. So treating them merely as thoughts instead of a category of (meta)physical objects seems like the most parsimonious stance.
What about objects that exist only in a fictional sense like dragons, Harry Potter, or working homoeopathic medicine? These are "abstract" ideas about fictional concrete things. Which I think hints towards them existing not in a real sense but rather in people's minds where they are physically encoded in a real concrete way. And when we talk about them we talk about the set of all encoded versions of these abstract objects.
Also similarly if we talk about a webpage or a youtube channel or facebook post, we are talking about the set of encoded representations of those ethereal objects that only physically exist in brains and servers.
Red does exist as a concrete thing. It is a particular band of the light spectrum. And we call things "red" when they absorb other bands and reflect that band of the light spectrum.
I'm a big fan of counterfactual logic so that's my vote. I haven't done as many nerd studies on the issue as I'd like though, I'd be interested in finding out if there are any more famous philosophers who consider the many worlds model valid but only if the universe isn't 100% causally deterministic.
How about ideas? Do we consider it/them as abstract or concrete? If we say it is abstract, then why do we have laws that protect patents and copyrights? By the way, how about human rights? How do we classify them? We have laws that affect the real world although things like justice and ethics exist primarily in the mind and will as proposed by Kant and other philosophers.
Do they have consiousness?
In his 1898 book, Metaphysics, Borden Parker Bowne clears up the confusion admirably well, distinguishing between real and phenomenal existence. He denies, in effect, that abstract objects have an independent ontology of their own, saying, e.g., "The unity of the world-ground...is incompatible with any plurality of fundamental being. Hence it follows that truth and necessity themselves must in some way be founded in the world-ground. If we should assume a realm of truth to exist apart from being, it could have no effect in being unless we should further assume an interaction between it and being. But this would make truth a thing, and would compel the assumption of another being deeper than both truth and reality to mediate their interaction...A law of nature is never the antecedent, but the consequence of reality. The real is first and only, and being what it is, its laws result as a consequence, or, rather, are but expressions of what the things are...Natural laws are the consequences of reality, and never its grounds or anything apart from it."
@2:50 I would have said individual strawberries and apples are red, while "strawberries" or "apples" as sets are abstracta.
How about this: Concrete objects have boundaries. Abstracta start and stop. A cat has a beginning and continues to the end - the boundaries of the cat. One copy of Hamlet is here,another is there. It starts and stops. It's still a set,but the set itself is located where all the instantiations are, so the set extends over Earth just as copies of Hamlet do, but not into space.
For another example: a concrete beehive stops where the physical hive stops. The abstract hive stops where all the bees which belong to that hive stop. The functional hive is abstract not because it's not physical but because it has parts which are separated.
It's an interesting topic but the thing with metaphysics is it raises so many interesting questions, but how many does it answer in a satisfactory manner? So here are the questions / thoughts that I have...
First of all, without a method to distinguish abstracta from attracta then we will not be capable of knowing their difference; therefore we need to ask if we can construct such a method. Perhaps the method of 'conflation' as described in the video is one such criterion; although it does suffer from the problem of foundations. But then, there is no theory that doesn't suffer from that, so it's a moot criticism.
Observing how closely related their distinction is to language (in the broader sense) is enticing to say the least. I find that based on this observation we can dismiss the 'method of example' by noticing that it is a thinly disguised behaviourist theory of language acquisition.
However, by considering the question in these terms are we not already conceding too much to essentialism? Would that not make our argument circular?
It might be even interesting to consider abstracta alongside Cartesian dualism, and theories of mind in general. The existence of objects that are different from physical objects and do not (necessarily) interact causally with them (in any direct way) sounds quite similar to the description of mental objects, does it not?
Also, could we be inferring to much from the statement that "x exists"? It seems that this statement cannot be used on its own to infer anything about "x", so perhaps the question "do abstracta exist" attempts to derive more than what can be derived from statements of the type "there exists x"
Do the *possible worlds* videos, they sound boundlessly more interesting than Schopenhauer.
It occurs to me that although abstract objects might not technically exist in our world, and arguably in any other, they most certainly exist in our minds. They are merely a product of pattern recognition taking patterns from the real world and setting them on some sort of pedestal as being things all of their own, detached from the things that seem to follow them. Arguing the existence of abstract things as separated from material things is equivalent to talking of perceptions as separate from what is being perceived. It's all in your head, man! And that's all I have to say about that.
There are concrete things (like my fork), and then abstract things. I consider abstract things as, rather than "objects", they're actually ideas. The color color red is an idea, it just so happens we see this idea exhibited in the objects around us. Like seeing "2" bunnies in the lawn. You use the idea of the number "2" to quantify concrete things in the world around you.
Would the set of everything on Earth not be Earth itself? Maybe sets just appear as abstract from our perspective? It seems like if you 'zoom out' far enough on a set of physical things, they will appear to be one concrete thing. On the other hand, if we were to 'zoom in' on ourselves, all we will see is a set of individual molecules/cells and, from this perspective, our existence as a whole human would be abstract.
Is there really a difference between them if we consider the ship of Theseus? after you replace allt he ship parts is Theseus's ship the physical object or the abstract idea of it.....
Is time a concrete or an abstract object?
Could this link in to the idea of the distinction between the Noumenal and Phenomenal worlds?
i.e only concrete objects exist in the noumenal world but the phenomenal world has both abstract objects and images of concrete objects?
Is 'images' the right word?
Could these 'images' of concrete objects be considered as abstract objects?
If so, does that mean that concrete objects exist in the noumenal world and the brain creates the phenomenal world populated with abstract objects, some of which it creates using sensory data to reflect concrete objects in the noumenal world (what we'd previously have just called 'concrete objects' e.g. a piece of bacon) and some of which it creates its self to help organise and make sense of the sensory data its receiving (what we'd previously have just called 'abstract objects' e.g. 'china').
Doesn't it seem like class nominalism would be the best explanation, at least of those provided? It's far and away the simplest, and you can say that a set acts as a cause, as in the case of Hamlet making you sad, because of one or many members of that set. What's the counterargument?
I know that this video is several years old, and that it's meant to be an introduction to the ontological discussion about abstracta, but I thought I'd make a brief point, anyway.
It seems like the decision to use such things as Hamlet and Platonist numbers as examples makes Lewis's worries for realism about abstracta seem fairly unresponsive to the realist's position.
This is because they are vague cases.
For example, Hamlet is an artifact, and is therefore automatically a part of the "causal flux", so to speak. So, given the definition of an abstract thing as being non-local and causally intert, Hamlet is disqualified from the get-go.
Platonic numbers are similarly problematic. On the one hand, we might think of, say, the number two as being "THE" cardinal number of every set of pairs. On the other, we might think of it as being the abstract structural specification that every set of pairs satisfies. It's hard to see how this latter definition is vulnerable to Lewis's concerns.
Are there different categories of abstract concepts?
Wouldn't "nominalism" qualify as an "abstractus"? or am I wrong some how?
I think a problem with calling Hamlet a set that is it's members, is that when we're talking about Hamlet, we're only discussing certain properties of the members of that set. Back in the day when Hamlet only existed on paper -- it would still be kind of silly to say something like "Hamlet contains a lot of cellulose".
Also, Wikipedia does not say that abstract objects can have no causal effects, but rather that abstract objects have "no physical referents". Does this need correcting? If not, how would you deal with money? You might say that the money on my bank account exists physically as patterns on a hard drive -- but if that drive were to suddenly explode, the bank would have a backup, and I would still have my money.
Also, I vote for Schopenhauer's Aesthetics.
The fact that we can discuss only certain properties of a set, seems to be what makes abstract concepts useful. An instance of Hamlet written in English, but with the Theban alphabet (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theban_alphabet) wouldn't have a lot of physical similarities with any other member of the set -- but it would still be Hamlet.
Definitely do "are possible worlds real?" I would love that.
the first example i thought of is these higer dementional shapes in math
(triangle 2D, pyramid 3D, deeper 4D.. 5D etc.)
Wouldn't it would be better if you quantified it with "Conceptual" or do Abstract & Concept conflict?
Isn't both are mere concepts in our mind. Concrete - directly associated with a real world object. Abstract - a grammar construct sort of used for deeper thinking..
It is possible that Hamlet did always exist and was simply discovered, plucked out of the pool of all possible ideas by Shakespeare. There could be other beings in other worlds/universes who also discover it. If so, who really "has" it? There could even be a world that IS Hamlet, where it is real. When I create art it feels more like I'm discovering it, exploring for it, uncovering it or trying to bring it out of the abstract realm without breaking it too much with my shoddy skills, than it does me creating it from scratch.
Can you do a video on the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument?
It seems to me that abstracta exist only in our minds, in order to describe, or group, or otherwise help make sense of the outside world. "This apple is red" is true, but "red" is an idea created and defined by humans. In this way, abstracta do exist in the physical world, in that they are represented electrochemically in our brains, but really they are merely definitions, groups, characteristics, and generalizations of things that exist outside of our heads.
Are you sure red is defined by humans? Has anyone ever defined red?
I don't know if this is a technically correct term, but on on episode of TNG they reference emergent systems, where an object that is greater than the sum of its parts can be formed. Is that an actual thing or just some plot device star trek made up, and Could we think of the idea of Hamlet as a system (all the copies of it, every quote from it, its impact on society, and everything tangentially related to it) as a sort of emergent system where the combined whole is greater than any of its individual parts. after all if all you ever talked about with Hamlet was the kind of paper it was printed on or the font used for the letters, you really wouldn't be getting at the real importance of it would you?
What if all the copies of Hamlet were destroyed and everyone forgot about it. Then, 1000 years later someone came up with a "new" idea for a play called Hamlet and it is word for word of the original. Does that mean that mean it's a brand new concept or does it mean that the old one just just had a rebirth? Are they two separate ideas or just one?
(Of coarse the major flaw with this question is that the original would be written by Shakespeare and the new one would be written by a different person even if they shared the same name.)
What you could do is say that sets can include past and future members. So Hamlet doesn't just include all the current copies and memorised parts, but ones in other times too.
Technically the force of gravity is an abstractus because it is not a physical thing, a wave of anything like that. So Abstracta actually can affect things, like you said about Hamlet making one sad. I think that abstracta just non-physical objects, anything not made of matter/anti-matter. Actually I'll put energy in there too because E=MC2. So I guess like ideas, concepts and stuff are abstracta
Isn't there an academic circle that have found supporting evidence for Gravitons? So gravity may be comprised of a concrete thing.
I didn't hear about that, could you point me to the story? But from what I understand it would be impossible to ever observe a graviton because of it's low interaction with matter and background neutrino interference would be too much of a problem. And I imagine (and I don't know how accurate this is) that gravitons would interact in a graviton field, like the higgs field for example.
However, assuming your assertion is correct I'll replace gravity in my example with magnetism or any of the nuclear forces. (hopefully that will solve my dilemma)
You may not be able to observe the thing itself (I mean, I hate to be _that person_ who goes QUANTUMQUANTUMQUANTUM) but we _can_ empirically observe its effects (like all quantum particles now). The discovery was based around patterns found in the cosmic fingerprint - phys.org/news/2014-03-elusive-graviton.html .
But I see where you are coming from - forces and energy are non-physical. However, re-watching the video, Olly defines a _concrete object_ as "made of matter and energy and stuff". Energy is not causally inert: on the contrary, essential to causation! It also necessarily exists in specific spacetime scenarios.
yes yes! So my idea is that 'things' that aren't matter or energy, say phenomena like the mind, society or ideas are abstracta because they have no physical/energetic presence, they are only represented in the world by symbols, like the binary code in a computer. What do you think? Am I just repeating what Olly said, am I off?
I think I understand. You seem to be saying that things such as consciousness and morality and ideas are abstracta yet capable of causation, and ergo are not necessarily causally inert. I'm not sure what I think of that really - I'd be tempted to say that they are concrete rather than abstract purely because they can generally be anchored in spacetime. But I don't know!
I wrote a comment somewhere below about how I associated abstracta with adjectives - how they cannot be comprehended until they are qualified, akin to what you call "symbols" which represent programs, mathematics etc. As soon as an abstracta is qualified it becomes concrete. So I guess I would say that, although conceptual, acts which ascribe something symbolically can cause an abstracta to become concrete. To a degree, of course.
Abstract is usually something from us in the world created in order to overcome the seemingly insurmountable barrier between the outside world and ourselves
An example. Make 1cm for me from a material.
It is not possible, because no matter (the human body) can never make exactly 1cm. Especially if one perception of a human additionally doubts.
Question: What about sexual images of fictional characters? Does that violate their autonomy? What about that situation?
Seems like another example of philosophers reasoning themselves into a corner that doesn't have to exist. Look at our brains. Our cognitive abilities. We naturally find and refine patterns from input. We build categories around prototypes. We store schemas related to a phenomenon at _various_ levels of specificity (hence it's strange to ask if something is "really abstract"). Abstract structures affect us all the time. Whether they are "really objects" or whatever is just philosophers playing with words again.
One would not have a concept of a circle without first encountering an approximation of one at some point in life. The same goes for the color red, for example, someone blind from birth would have no notion of red. Furthermore, red is a sensory experience and may be different from one perceiver to another. I am willing to say, tentatively, that abstract objects are most likely the product of real-world experience and the internal processes of the mind and do not exist in some way independent of these two things.
I wish I could give you money Olly, you totally deserve it. Alas I am a poor college student but perhaps in the near future
Very nice video. Thanks!
Why didn’t You discuss the serious arguments favoring the existence of abstract objects?
Yes, my problem with the idea of a National Anthem being abstract and therefore having not causal effect on anything. Wars are fought and people die over these, the emotions they stir and the things they represent. :\ Most where commissioned specifically in order that they do just that.
Sounds to me like it's the _idea_ abstracted from the thing that idea represents. So, "the colour red" isn't a thing, but it is a commonly understood idea which we can all associate with, fast cars, warning signs, ripe berries, valentine roses, socialism, gift wrapping / presents, (particularly in east Asian cultures) hot coals / embers / metal / lava, dangerous insects and animals etc. etc. I suspect the fact that there are so many associations with these abstract "objects" is a key too. There are many ways of looking at any play, and Shakespeares' works have been re-interpreted far more than any others etc. but interpretations may, or may not alter a manuscript. They're still "Shakespeares' Hamlet".
What do "numbers" mean, as opposed to any particular number? What is a "numbers"? (the phrase has become meaningless through over generalisation) 32768 is an example of some numbers, or a number, depending on how you read it, and 8000 could well be the exact *same* number, if read as hexadecimal, and compared to the first set of numbers, read in decimal notation. That's pretty "abstract", and illustrates that the _physical_ thing, as a single example written on a page, or video screen, isn't in any way representative of the idea associated with it's abstraction. A number, or even all the numbers in the world _right now_ are not as useful, agile and informative as the simple idea of "numbers".
I think I'd prefer for the time Schopenhouer because learning something close to Eastern philosophy would be interesting. Otherwise my favorite philosophers were Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche... I'd love to see a video relating to one of those philosophers.
axayacatl14 I've already done two videos on Camus a while ago, a short one and an extended lecture I gave on him.
Short one: The Philosophy of Welcome to Night Vale - Philosophy Tube
Lecture: Philosophy in Welcome to Night Vale - Extended Lecture
Oh! I didn't see these videos, thanks I'll check them out.
Well its interesting that there is a dichotemy between abstract and concrete but ignoring the category of mental completely. (are you implying any stance on the mind-body problem here?
The way I understand abtracta is that its a place where all ideas rest and while its not physically able to enact any change, it can be referred to cognitively, thus us knowing about it. To me it seems that abstracta is a set of all possible things, orders, and propositions, and we cognitively point to specific ones when thinking about them. the same way you dont have an actual chair in your head when imagining a chair, but rather a cognitive referral to a chair you can have cognitive referrals to things that do not exist as matter such as numbers. another way to think about abstracta is thinking about propositions. If i have a proposition "its raining outside" this can that mean the same thing as
draußen regnet es, because the meaning isnt tied to the sound or writing of the word but rather the sound points to the meaning
do you have the written form of notes? :)
So consciousness would be an abstractus??
having trouble finding the aforementioned "stanhope" comic routine mentioned at the end of the video. any notes?
so i got into an argument with my mom, over whether people who break the law are "bad guys". Like, the way i view it, even though i dont justify their actions, you should not be ethically judged for things you are not responsible for, and it's usually outer conditions that result in making you do illegal stuff (unless you have a mental condition). So idk, what do you think?
What would a class nominalist say about the problem of the Ship of Theseus?
If I have a ship, and gradually replace all his parts with newer, equal ones as soon as they break, would I have a different ship by the end or would it be the same? Wouldn't this suggest that there is an abstracta or Form of ship?
I also vote for Schopenhauer's Aesthethics and ask why you will avoid Eastern philosophy and what is it especifically :)
Antonio Abello It's not that I'm avoiding Eastern philosophy by choice, no no; I try to make the episodes on topics that I have studied so I know what I'm talking about, and I haven't been taught any Eastern philosophy because it isn't often included in the analytic tradition. Schopenhauer is very tangentially related to it, so it's the closest I can take you.
Oh, I misunderstood you, then :)
can you discuss about epistemology and axiology? :)
Hammlet actually did exist before Shakespeare wrote it. As prooven by the fact that a monkey could have written it, going by the famous phrase, given enough time even a monkey would write a Shakespeare play. This just means an infinitly long input of random keys of a keyboard will eventually contain every piece of literature l, dialog and documentary ever concieved and ever to be concieved. Creative creation like writing or painting is inherantly more a matter of discovery and rearrangement of already existing parts of the universe. Because according to one of the laws of thermodynamics, at least I believe it's from them, matter can neither be created nor destroyed only transformed. Yes the creation of a play is not the same like creating matter, nevertheless, looking at the monkey on keyboard phrase there is a fitting parallel to be found.
I don't disagree that abstract objects exist, but I don't think I'd consider "red" an example. I think I'd consider red and green and blue and every other color a VERB, at least in the technical sense; it's not an object, it's a WAY objects can move. Red is what happens when photons move a certain way, and also we look at them with our red-perceiving eyes.
To make it short to grasp. Abstraction is to abstrahieren the Alltäglichkeit.
s. Heidegger: Sein und Zeit....
Nice videos! In the intro the greek and latin sayings are messed up, I don't know if that is on purpose.
οὐδείς ἑκών ἁμαρτάνει
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
mmichaelid They aren't meant to be transliterations of each other, if that's what you're getting at?