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Abstract v concrete. I've been trying to understand abstraction for quite a while, and I'm finally making progress, I think. There is a concrete reality in which the physical is both endlessly decomposing and being always in creation. This reality is far too complex to be comprehensible to any individual consciousness. We can talk about it, tell true and false stories about it, but we can't be concise or complete. We approximate, at best. We can see patterns and categorize elements of reality into enumerate "buckets," and map these abstractions onto reality. We can test these maps against reality to develop expectations for the next phenomenal experience of reality. So long as our experience matches each instantaneous concrete reality our personal abstract reality remains "true enough," but when it diverges we can either ignore it (to our eventual peril) or notice it.

None of us exist in concrete reality. Every single one of us has a flawed comprehension of reality. My map is not only inaccurate, but also different from nearly 8 billion other currently extant maps that are also inaccurate. Weirdly, I'm pretty sure my map shares a "most recent common ancestor" with many other persons, but I'm not sure that's true of EVERY other person's. Culture is an abstraction from the observation that one people interact with/in concrete reality differently from another. Civilization is an abstraction from the observation that differing cultural practices are in ascent and decline simultaneously among, within, and between multitudes of populations that are constantly being sorted by various forces both misunderstood and mal-understood. My map's most recent common ancestor with any other person might be a thousand years ago with some people, but I suspect it's far more recent, really.

Individualism is an abstraction from some sort of communal comprehension that collective guilt is just too godamm horrifying to be allowed in a globalizing multi-culturally interactive age. I wonder if if might have derived in the late middle ages from the many disparate peoples who must have heard a version of the same quote: "Your people must have sinned mightily for God to have given you Me."

govols 8 Aug 15
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Sanity is defined as having a good grasp on reality and being relatively free of anxieties.

What is it when you're utterly free of anxiety and possess no confidence that reality can be subjectively shared?

I think sanity has more to do with being constructive moreso than destructive. A nuclear war, for instance, would be insane because of its destructiveness.

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There are a plethora of theories pointing to physical reality being an illusion or more accurately a delusion.  A delusion because we impose ourselves on reality through the concept of the subjective.  Some of those theories that propose that our normal perceptions of reality are inaccurate would include relativity, the simulation theory, the mathematical universe, quantum mechanics, so on and so forth.

The only significant push back from the scientific community I'm aware of is one quote from Einstein "God does not play dice".  It's important because the key feature of scientific understanding is objectivity.  The key feature of objectivity is that the object of perception is independent from the observer.  More specifically that any observer or subject will have the same perception under identical circumstances.  It doesn't matter if, as some suggest, that the consciousness of the observer influences the object in quantum mechanics.  If you abandon this principle then nothing is predictable.  

Predictable is the basis of life.  No matter how primitive or simple an organism is, it has a complex mechanism for prediction.  An Ameba can predict in which direction is food and which lies death.  It's a rudimentary form of intelligence.  The Ameba however has a limited ability to perceive its environment and limited response options.  What is important here is that the Ameba does not "objectivity" avoid danger and seek food it avoids pain and seeks pleasure.  More complex organisms are elaborations on the same principle.  In social animals culture adds even more complexity.

What I'm trying to illustrate is that the Ameba's perception of reality is abstract.  The first mistake people make is thinking that abstractness is linked somehow inexorably to sophistication.  Abstractions are inherently simplifications.  The Ameba for example may not detect a predator lying in the direction of food just as we may not predict the dangers of some forms of medication.  Medications by their nature are produced through some series of abstractions that simplify the range of possible consequences.  The sophistication comes in when using the simplifications.  Just being able to use the abstract language of math does not mean you are able to make better predictions.  The math has to be tied to a sophisticated set of perceptions.  A more complex discussion would include the role of imagination, extended perception, etc. but I do not see the necessity for our purposes.  The important thing is that abstract reality is real in the sense that it has physical consequences.
Another mistake people make is assuming that things differ in kind not degree.  Once you understand the nature of abstract reality the idea that something is more than the sum of its parts is almost silly.  The idea that human intelligence is a new kind of intelligence because complexity has created something unpredictable is flawed.  Humans simply have a greater range of abstractions to call on than Amebas.  Intelligence is intrinsically tied to the ability to predict and the ability to predict is tied to the quality of perception and range of abstractions that can be drawn on.  Humans are more intelligent by degree not kind.
What is unique about human intelligence is tied to physics through culture.  Culture transcends time and space.  No other animal has the ability to transmit culture across time and space.  It comes down to tools and tools are the physical expression of the abstract.  Even our evolution is tied to abstractions.  Some ape simplified the process from something fairly random like picking up a stone into the use and production of tools.  That ape had a brain no larger than a Chimpanzee's but the use of tools enabled humans to transfer energy that was going into the gut into a larger brain through dietary changes.  If it had been a one off event then humans would not have evolved but culture transmitted tool use from generation to generation.  Over time tools have become more sophisticated along with the culture that transmits them.  One of those tools is the totally abstract language of math on which the supposedly "realistic" practice of science depends.  If you use the word concrete for physical reality what is concrete is the predictability of observable causes and effects but only imprecisely the perception of the thing itself.

The flexibility that the abstract nature of culture offers has a dark side.  Not only does it largely lack the reproductive fidelity that is inherent in DNA but it also lacks in many cases the selection pressure to eliminate deleterious mutations.  Without keen perceptions it can go wildly amiss.  Culture often comes into conflict with physical reality.  That is why it is important to understand that abstract reality has to be tied to productivity.  Since there is no productivity in nature, only consumption, with the possible exception of a few eusocial species and animals that build physical structures, productivity constraints abstract reality.  It is the selective environment that would otherwise be lacking.
I'm not so naive as to suggest that productivity is easily defined.  I would not argue for example that art and imagination are not productive.  That seemly pointless rituals do not add to human progress.  If you take a completely scientific perspective, complexity is your enemy.  Science has proven very poor at dealing with complex chaotics systems.  Some of that can be demonstrated to be a lack of mathematical sophistication and limits on perception but no matter the sophistication abstract reality will never capture the thing itself.
The individual is an abstraction just as the number one is an abstraction.  Nothing exists in isolation.  The individual is real in the same sense that money is real.  Money or the lack thereof has real consequences.  Money is a product of culture and like culture it transcends time and space.  It stores social contracts and lubricates trade and social development.  The concept of the individual is equally critical in a species that is civilized that has adopted a form of artificial eusociality.  It's as useful as money even if it is as abstract.  The collective does not think, it can not.  While swarm intelligence is real it has more to do with extended perception than something analogous to adding transitors to computer chips.  The collective does transcend some aspects of time and space just as books do.  Numbers do matter just as the number of transistors or the size of memory in a computer system does but the mutations that allow for evolution of a culture happen at the cellular or individual level.  Totally collective societies tend to be stagnant and unadaptive.  Geniuses are even from a physical perspective mutants.  A collective society suppresses genius.  But genius is often associated with autistic traits that collective societies find repugnant.  Genius requires a certain level of anti-social predispositions.
Had we evolved from a eusocial species perhaps swarm intelligence would have been sufficient for cultural advancement.  But we evolved from monkeys for a world without productivity.  A world of individual consumption and a non meritocratic distribution.  A world which could never have produced civilization without the introduction of  individual abstractions and cultural inheritance.  The collectivist and those who push collective guilt are essentially opposed to civilization and are predisposed to live the monkey's life.  That they may be highly intelligent and sociable is irrelevant.  Sociable and intelligent does not mean prosocial or productive.  Too many people today achieve social status without a selection mechanism for productivity.  There is nothing productive about those who spread collective guilt.  It is totally irrational and counter productive.  They propose without a test or selection mechanism that their abstract reality is superior to the evolutionary history of culture.  The probability that that is true is nearly zero because complex chaotic systems do not work that way.  Complex chaotic systems remain marginally predictable. 

What we are talking about here is the sin of pride or hubris.  It is inherited through a successful culture even if it feels individual.  The story of the Tower of Babel illustrates not only the folly of pride but the folly of collectivism.  While social progress is a collective enterprise it can also become focused on a singular and irrational objective such as a tower to heaven or in our case global warming.  The inherent irrationality makes communication impossible.  Irrational objectives atomize social structures and they become incoherent.  They produce idiocy such as collective guilt.     

That'll take a day or two. Very useful.

@govols

I want to add that collective pride is as idiotic as collective guilt. But the definitions are fussy. The distinction between pride and respect is important. We should respect our fathers but not be prideful that we our descendants. Honoring our mothers and fathers does not require that we ignore their flaws. Their sins are not our sins but we suffer the consequences for multiple generations. The opposite is true as well in that parents should not be proud of their children but respect them as individuals and honor their accomplishments however small or large.

I have come to believe that pride is the deadliest of sins. Many people on this site are proud to be conservative. Conservatism however can be an obstacle to progress. For conservatism to be rational it must first be determined what should be conserved and what should be liberated or let go. Traditional liberalism was very conservative but at the same time open to experimentation. Because we live in complex chaotic social systems it is very hard to know what to conserve.

Liberalism has come to be associated with doing away with tradition and using "science" as our guide. Unfortunately science rejects abstract reality. Key elements of culture get lost in the process. The most important one at the moment is freewill. Because science is fundamentally and necessarily deterministic freewill is an oxymoron scientifically. What is interesting is that scientists seem perfectly ready to accept that an economic science is possible if improbable. They may even exclude money from the realm of rational social structure. Recognizing that money is totally abstract. They seem to prefer centrally controlled systems of value where exchange rates are determined by some quasi scientific theory of reality. Their dependence on abstract tools such mathematics is the irony. Properly analysed money is a tool like mathematics but it is concerned with social organization not physically reality. Freewill is of the same nature. Only hubris prevents this observation.

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There is a concrete reality in which the physical is both endlessly decomposing and being always in creation. This reality is far too complex to be comprehensible to any individual consciousness.

I have concluded that the speed of light is actually the refresh rate of the physical universe.
All of it is gone and the next step instantly created from what we expect as humans experiencing it. Reality seems to be on automatic. Any deviation or ethereal input is a "miracle".

I tried to stay away from metaphysics in my response but that does not mean that I don't believe in the contributions of the right hemisphere of the brain. Your proposal is in my opinion to be taken in the same way poetry is.

@wolfhnd @govols

In my scenario of a refresh rate. there is no possibility of time travel. I reason that if there is such a thing that the future would have provided us with many time travelers by now. Plus, the universe would have to continuously exist. The past and the future would be realities time travelers could experience. In which case the whole of time would have to exist and it would be finite, having a beginning and an end. Only in my scenario could the universe be infinite.

There could be teleportation in a constantly refreshed Universe but no time travel.

The past and future can only exist in the metaphysical abstract world of our minds. From the past we can create a future. Reality comes out of the past and creates the future.
There could be an end to time but likely we will keep things going. Once something "is" it is almost impossible to consider it isn't.

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