On abstract objects

[Magical Realist]

"An abstract object is a non-physical, non-mental object that exists outside of space and time and is wholly unextended. For example, one might think that numbers are abstract objects; e.g., it is plausible to think that if the number 3 exists, then it is not a physical or mental object, and it does not exist in space and time. Likewise, one might think that properties and relations are abstract objects; e.g., it is plausible to think that if redness exists, over and above the various red balls and red houses and so on, then it is an abstract object—i.e., it is non-physical, non-mental, non-spatiotemporal, and so on. Other kinds of objects that are often taken by philosophers to be abstract objects are propositions, sentence types, possible worlds, logical objects, and fictional objects. The view that there are abstract objects—known as platonism—is of course extremely controversial. Many philosophers think there are just no such things as abstract objects. Philosophers who endorse this antiplatonist view have to endorse some other view of objects of the above kinds—i.e., numbers, properties, propositions, etc.; in particular, in connection with each of these kinds of objects, they have to say either that these objects are physical or mental objects or that there are just no such things. There is a vast literature on the existence and nature of abstract objects..."---
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/dis...7-0384.xml

"Rather than simply ask "Do abstract entities like numbers and properties exist," a metaphysicist prefers to ask in what way they might exist that is different from the way in which "concrete" objects exist.

Concrete objects can be seen and touched by our senses. They are material, with causal relations that obey the physical laws of nature.

Abstract entities are immaterial, but some of them can still play a causal role, for example when agents use them to decide on their actions, or when chance events (particularly at the quantum level) go this way instead of that.

Just as the mind is like software in the brain hardware, the abstract information in a material object is the same kind of immaterial stuff as the information in an abstract entity, a concept or a "non-existent object." Some philosophers say that such immaterial things "subsist," rather than exist.

Broadly speaking, the distinction between concrete and abstract objects corresponds to the distinction between the material and the ideal. Ideas in minds are immaterial. They need the matter of the brain to be embodied and some kind of energy to be communicated to other minds. But they are not themselves matter or energy. Those "eliminativists" who believe the natural world contains only material things deny the existence of ideas and immaterial information.

Some ideas may be wholly fictitious and nonsensical, whether mere possibles or even impossibles, but most ideas correspond to actual objects or processes going on in the world. In either case, we can usually specify the informational content of the idea.

Metaphysicists identify abstract entities with the information contained in them. They may be concepts that did not exist in the world until they were invented. Or the information may have existed in material structures and so we say they were discovered. For example, the idea of the moon includes the concepts of a distinct shape, color, and even the appearance of a face.

Many such ideas are mind-independent. Consider properties of the moon. Most observers agree the shape is round and the color is white. (Actually, the moon is blacker than most any terrestrial black object. It only appears white compared to the blackness of space.) Some metaphysicians deny the existence of a universal property such as roundness or whiteness. But metaphysicists see the information needed to specify circularity and the wavelengths of radiation that correspond to whiteness. And that information is embodied in the moon, just as a software program is embodied in computer hardware, and a mental idea is embodied in a brain.

Many ideas or concepts are created by human minds by "picking out" some of the information in physical objects. Whether such concepts "carve nature at the joints" (Plato, Phaedrus, 265e) depends on their usefulness in understanding the world.

Plato's Theory of the Forms held that Ideas like the circle pre-exist material beings, where Aristotle argued that the Ideas are abstractions from the most general properties in all the actual circles.

Information philosophy restores so-called "non-existent objects" to our ontology. They consist of the same kind of information that provides the structure and process information of a concrete object. What we call a "concept" about an object is some subset of the information in the object, accurate to the extent that the concept is isomorphic to that subset. By "picking out" different subsets, we can sort objects.

Information philosophy settles deep philosophical issues about absolute and relative identity. All material objects are self-identical, despite concerns about vague boundaries. All objects have relations with other objects that can be interpreted as relative identities. All objects are identical to other objects in some respects and different qua other respects.

In modern times, many philosophers distinguish a third realm beyond the ancient idealism/material dualism. Beginning with early analytic language philosophy, the apparently mind-independent ideas were described as "objective" or "intersubjective" by contrast with the purely "subjective." See the "triads" of Gottlob Frege, Charles Sanders Peirce, Karl Popper, and others.

For Popper, this third realm includes all human knowledge and culture, including human artifacts. We call this the sum of human knowledge.The ideas in our books are not the ink and paper they are printed on.

We could also widen the definition to include the biological realm. It would include the genetic content of all living things, the product of four billon years of evolution. The genetic information is not the nucleotides of DNA that carry it. Both kinds of knowledge, human and biological, are abstract entities.

Human knowledge (information) and biological knowledge are created, stored, and communicated by similar means. New information requires chance events. Storage requires embodiment of abstract symbols or patterns in material information structures.

Communication of those symbols requires transmission through a medium, via sound and sight at a distance, or touch, smell, and taste by contact. These all are evolutionary refinements of the chemical interactions inside living things. Assembled from arbitrary symbols, the syntax and semantics of messages from a cell nucleus to the ribosomes, or messages between cells, even hormonal signaling from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex, are the progenitors of human prose and poetry.

Many centuries ago, the neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry asked what some called his "fateful question, "what is the existential status of the Platonic ideas?" Metaphysicists see ideas as the information they contain. They have no existence as material, although they might be embodied in material, as its organization. The information can be communicated in the form of energy to other material things.

Information as a Physical Cause
Information philosophy demonstrates that abstract information (ideas) can initiate new causal chains starting in the minds of agents. Although the ideas are embodied in the material brains of the agents, their content is not material.
Many philosophers of mind are "physicalists" or "eliminative materialists." The mind and mental events are described as redundant causes that can be excluded, since them material brain already provides physical events as the cause."---- https://metaphysicist.com/problems/abstract_entities/

[C C]

People are hung-up on the commonsense belief of the universe only existing as a sequence of ephemeral changes, which thereby require a prior-in-rank process outputting each state of the world and replacing it with the next. That's where a need for immutable, generative principles or laws (abstractions) comes in as necessary for governing that process or maintaining its consistency from moment to moment. 

Of course, in modern times they could alternatively conceive that process as a simulation carried out by another ontological level -- a computational substrate for this cosmos, whereby the regulating principles are instead stored, material information patterns rather than immaterial objects.

Better yet, they could eliminate the need for such nomological entities altogether by just accepting perdurantism-like conceptions, and regarding the "flow of time" as an illusory side-effect of cognition. A "flow" doesn't make sense in presentism anyway, since there is no future moment for the current "now" to flow to (nor a past one). As aforementioned, a current moment or state of the world is simply annihilated by the next one produced by the process to replace it.

The cinematic film of a movie or a digital recording of it likewise does not need extraneous abstract principles governing what happens in it. The lawfulness of it is built into the co-existing frames or different states constituting the length of the movie.

[Magical Realist]

Yeah just another rational attempt to instill some kind of permanence in the fleeting procession of experience. Substance, identity, selfhood, properties, laws, equations, and ultimately Being itself, anchoring down the world into a domain of lasting entities that despite all appearances are NOT passing by us in a stream of events. Even physics posits the eternalist scenario of everything happening all at once and at the same time, much like the film is to the individual frames passing thru the projector. Becoming or change is nevertheless ingrained in the fabric of the real. New things arise and old things pass away, eluding our instinctive grasp for something we can hold onto and say "This is real". Events! Events! Nothing but transient happening events and the interesting patterns they create.

[Zinjanthropos]

I think an abstract object goes part and parcel with not having all the evidence and the likelihood that we never will. It’s gone forever which leaves only one alternative, the one probability that makes the most sense. Good luck with that.