Thread:Ghelæ/@comment-1073312-20141018015159

Given that we both have a busy weekend ahead, not sure if I'll get as much time to talk about your ideas, so I read through your messages and highlighted ones I could put my own comments on. http://pastie.org/private/pytwhol0nqs3rwjkz196ew

Funnily enough, I wanted to talk about abstractions well, but a slightly different question. Mainly, you once said that people using abstractions to understand abstractions might be viewed as circular reasoning by some, and deeply profound by others. Well, I thought one answer might be that that physical objects (especially of complexity), imperfectly model/map abstract objects (through knowledge), while abstract objects can do so for physical ones. But really, both are examples of approximation, and both are largely unobservable directly, so whether there is really a difference is perspective.

Thinking about both yours and my question together, perhaps a better way of saying things is that abstract and physical objects are really existing objectively, which is a better term to use. Philosophers after-all naturalism turned on naturalism, perhaps the same can be said for physicalism. Indeed abstractions contradict a reductionist-physicalist viewpoint (even though reductionists might want mathematics or logic as a bedrock of all things), qualia become viewed as un-physical so unreal or illusory (but not really solving the issue). Such criticism puts me off physicalism, despite following the non-physical = non-existing/or irrelevant argument. 