Comment by coffeecantcode
2 months ago
No worries! I’ve only done a bit of thinking on this specifically but I struggle to understand why you are asking for an abstraction that could not be verified in the material world. From my understanding the only value that abstractions have is if they can be effectively verified and acted out in the material world. Otherwise why bother abstracting on them!
The abstraction itself exists outside of the material world, we’ve already beaten that horse, but for an example of ‘accumulating related truths to become greater than the material itself’ I would point to food.
Materially, food serves to nurture and satiate, to be found and eaten. But one level up, when abstracted upon, food becomes information. It becomes where to find the food, when the food appears, how much of the food is around. It provides an advantage to those that think in those terms instead of those that react to the appearance of food and eat it and move on to find some more. Animals over time evolve around food and food availability, they move seasonally to find it, they give birth near it, etc. That is not the same as abstracting information from food—this has spearheaded our evolutionary course from hunting and gathering, to agriculture, to squeezing the life out of our planet in pursuit of absolute control of our surroundings (food).
Yeah, this doesn’t work for me at all. I don’t agree that food has been abstracted away at any level, much less that it somehow turned into where to find food, etc. All of that is just information. Thanks for the discussion though.