Comment by practal

> Thinking purely conceptual notions are real is mysticism.

No, it is not. We just have to disagree here. What is 1? What is 2? Is it real? Of course it is. Is 3.5 + πi real? Yes, because what are you talking about if it is not? Something unreal?

> This is normal mathematics. It isn't unique to Platonism.

You can do mathematics without any philosophical grounding. In fact, most people do. It's just the way you study mathematics at university, it is pretty much platonic. Here is a vector space, deal with it. And it is pretty much the only philosophical grounding that makes sense to me. Of course a Turing machine is real. At the same time it is a purely mathematical object. So this mathematical object is real, and so are many others. You can make new concepts up as you go, and they are all real, if they are consistent. That's not mystic, it is a simple fact of life you should accept. It is not more mystic than life itself. Many concepts are real. That's why you can apply logic to them, and it works. And for some concepts, you can write them down, but they are inconsistent. And these are not real.

Writing down a concept in logic, I use a physical tool, the computer, but I really write it down in a mathematical object, represented on a computer. In my work, in Abstraction Logic. Abstraction Logic is real, even more real than the particular physical manifestation in form of software, for example. The software is just a shadow of the real Abstraction Logic. And only if I did not made a mistake implementing it. What is a mistake? Well, if my shadow doesn't match up to the real mathematical object that is Abstraction Logic.