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There's no such thing as a truly immaterial concept. The most implausible, logically contradictory or essentially abstract thought exists only insofar as the
by ChainOfFools 3y ago
There's no such thing as a truly immaterial concept. The most implausible, logically contradictory or essentially abstract thought exists only insofar as there is a material configuration of state representation, and it is this physical representation with which other concepts, also configurations of physical matter, interact through the medium of energic exchange, all driven by the universal pull of entropic degradation.
Abstract concepts, even ones considered materially 'incomprehensible' like love, or ones considered materially inconsistent or impossible like taking the square root of a circle, are names - very long, patterned symbol sequences condensed from salient features of the far more complex structures they reflect, objects that would be otherwise inconvenient to discuss or contemplate on human time scales and within human constraints. Abstract information, any information, is the result of an energetic compromise necessary for our relatively insubstantial chunk of brain tissue to be able to play-manipulate objects far greater in scale, scope and remoteness then it physically could interact with. But it is still physically manipulating them, or rather the lightest of lightweight representations of them, at the mechnical, physical matrix of neurological energy exchange processes.
- silent_cal 3y agoImmaterial concepts are abstracted from the physical world, but they in themselves are immaterial. You can hide this plain fact in all the mumbo-jumbo you want, but it remains a fact. Even a simple concept, like the definition of a circle, is not material in itself.