The "Real" and the "Abstract"

[Magical Realist]

"Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems. Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."---Neils Bohr

This is something I am beginning to realize myself--that our concept of things being real and in-themselves and irreducible discrete objects is absurdly flawed. That as quantum physics has shown us, everything comes down to relationships and laws and ideas. IOW, abstractions of our own minds. But does such apply to the macro level as well?

Take a house for instance. Something we immediately and conveniently regard as a thing in itself and not an abstraction. But upon examining the house, we only turn up spaces and forces and materials that impart to the whole house its entire character and identity. The house it appears becomes less a thing in itself and more of a template or a matrix or even an interlocking blueprint of geometrical relationships. Nothing in its composition is necessary for the house to exist. Every house can have a totally different structure and materials and still be defined as a member of the set "house". House it seems is a mere generalization or category--a mental abstraction allowing us to conveniently regard all houses as being one thing or one object when in fact it is simply a concept and not real in itself.

Isn't it strange then how our entire physical world of so-called real things can themselves only be known and experienced as real to the degree that they are also abstractions of thought? That identity or being only gets imposed over phenomenally present properties by our own thoughts, real only to the extent that they are made up of mere abstractions? Is there in the end any difference between real and abstract? Between physical objective things and the ideational forms they take? More specifically, might they be but two sides of the same coin?

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"In Kantian philosophy, "things in themselves" (noumena) are often understood as abstractions—or more specifically, the result of a process of abstraction. They represent objects considered independently of our sensibility, space, time, and conceptual categories. Kant suggests that to know the "thing in itself," one must abstract from all sensory conditions.

Key Aspects of Things in Themselves as Abstractions:

Methodological Abstraction: Kant uses the concept to mean looking at objects while abstracting away (removing) the conditions of human sensibility and understanding.

Independent Reality: They represent what is thought to exist independent of our perception, distinguishing them from appearances (phenomena).

Negative Definition: In many contexts, a thing-in-itself is simply the concept of an object that is not a phenomenon, meaning it is defined by what it lacks (sensory experience).

Necessary Postulate: While unknowable, the concept is necessary to ground our experience, acting as the presumed reality behind what we perceive.

This abstraction analysis implies that the "thing in itself" is not a second, separate world, but rather a way of considering the same world, separated from our human modes of observation."
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"The map is not the territory reminds us that our mental models of the world are not the same as the world itself. It cautions against confusing our abstractions and representations with the complex, ever-­shifting reality they aim to describe."--- https://fs.blog/map-and-territory/

[Ostronomos]

I google the following:

The thought-generating mind and the universe are not fundamentally unlike in terms of their information structures. The thought-generating mind operates on a biological level, utilizing the vast network of neurons to process and generate thoughts. In contrast, the universe, as a physical entity, is not limited by a two-dimensional information structure. The universe's expansion and the continuous interaction of its components suggest a more complex and dynamic information structure than what could be described as a two-dimensional information structure. This suggests that the thought-generating mind, while intricate and capable of complex processing, does not operate within a two-dimensional information structure, which would be more accurately described as a three-dimensional or higher-dimensional information structure.

[C C]

[...] "In Kantian philosophy, "things in themselves" (noumena) are often understood as abstractions—or more specifically, the result of a process of abstraction. They represent objects considered independently of our sensibility, space, time, and conceptual categories. Kant suggests that to know the "thing in itself," one must abstract from all sensory conditions. [...] This abstraction analysis implies that the "thing in itself" is not a second, separate world, but rather a way of considering the same world, separated from our human modes of observation."

Kant's contention was that we don't have the capacity for metaphysical experiences due to the perceiving part of mind adhering to the sensory forms of space and time (that yield the everyday manifestations or representations of the world). Therefore, it is only through reasoning or inference that we can grope at the attributes of ultimate reality, which produces multiple abstract theories that we usually cannot cull down in number.

To reduce those rival concepts to only one would require an "intellectual intuition" that outputs a single fact. Akin to uncovering a cloaked cage and empirically discovering that there is a goat inside rather than the set of options that included chicken, dog, cat, hog, etc. But we don't have such an intellectual intuition, just the conventional space/time intuitions that deliver a specific empirical environment rather than a specific meta-phenomenal domain.

Of course, some mystics and drug-consuming psychonauts might object that they do have experiences about a noumenal realm. But since those vary in all sorts of modes and scrambled-up complexities, they don't actually generate anything definitive... just multiple competing speculations and claims, as usual, about what those meditations and "trips" mean.

[Magical Realist]

To reduce those rival concepts to only one would require an "intellectual intuition" that outputs a single fact. Akin to uncovering a cloaked cage and empirically discovering that there is a goat inside rather than the set of options that included chicken, dog, cat, hog, etc. But we don't have such an intellectual intuition, just the conventional space/time intuitions that deliver a specific empirical environment rather than a specific meta-phenomenal domain.

Kant elaborated on his idea of the noumenal or thing-in-itself as a negative or limit to our experience. That to me is the only way it even approximates any kind of phenomenal manifestedness or unmediated presence to our consciousness. Not as a metaphysical substance or being but as a nothingness or otherness to our own being. It is in this sense not really outside us as like the sensory-revealed physical world is but is inside us and at the core of our subjectivity. "Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being--like a worm."--Sartre

"The noumenon (or "thing-in-itself") acts as a critical boundary or limit concept in Kantian philosophy, defining the boundary of human knowledge by separating what we can experience (phenomena) from what is independent of our senses. It serves as a negative limit, restricting the understanding from claiming knowledge of reality as it is outside of space, time, and causality.

Key Aspects of the Noumenal Limit:

Limiting Sensitivity: The noumenon acts as a "boundary concept" that prevents the human understanding from extending its claims beyond the limits of sensible intuition, or what we can perceive.

Negative Definition: It is a "negative nounemona," meaning it represents the limit of what we can know (i.e., not that), rather than a positive, definable substance.

"Nothingness" Boundary: Kant classifies the noumenon in his "schema of nothingness" as a necessary, yet empty, conceptual remainder—a gap between our perception and reality.

Inaccessible Realism: While the phenomenal world is what we experience, the noumenal represents the unknowable, non-material, and non-temporal "true essence" of reality that lies beyond human comprehension.

Methodological Necessity: Despite being unknowable, the concept is essential to Kant's philosophy to prevent dogmatic claims about the nature of reality outside of experience.

It is not a "thing" we can discover but a necessary intellectual limit we must acknowledge."

[C C]

Kant elaborated on his idea of the noumenal or thing-in-itself as a negative or limit to our experience. That to me is the only way it even approximates any kind of phenomenal manifestedness or unmediated presence to our consciousness. Not as a metaphysical substance or being but as a nothingness or otherness to our own being. It is in this sense not really outside us as like the sensory-revealed physical world is but is inside us and at the core of our subjectivity. "Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being--like a worm."--Sartre

The noumenon has both a positive and a negative context, that is dependent upon whether we have an intellectual intuition or not. The positive view goes back to ancient philosophy (Plato) and Kant introduced the negative view (via eliminating people having an intellectual intuition). The background of that is covered in the second half below.

With respect to "thing in itself"... If we flip that, we get a "thing outside itself", which is what empirical objects or corporeal bodies or the phenomena of perception are. They're representations depicted as existing outside themselves, dependent upon external relationships to other things (like an observer).

How non-biological things without brains would exist internally to themselves is either unknown or would indeed seem to be "nothing" or the absence of everything (since rocks are non-consciousness or presumably lack any internal manifestations of themselves).

Kant: We conclude that ‘all bodies, together with the space in which they are, must be considered nothing but mere representations in us, and exist nowhere but in our thoughts.’ You will say: Is not this manifest idealism?

Idealism consists in the assertion, that there are none but thinking beings, all other things, which we think are perceived in intuition, being nothing but representations in the thinking beings, to which no object external to them corresponds in fact. Whereas I say, that things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i.e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses.

Consequently, I grant by all means that there are bodies without us, that is, things which, though quite unknown to us as to what they are in themselves, we yet know by the representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us, and which we call bodies, a term signifying merely the appearance of the thing which is unknown to us, but not therefore less actual. Can this be termed idealism? It is the very contrary. --Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics

Physicist Lee Smolin encroached upon those rival extrinsic and intrinsic ways of existing when he championed the Russellian monism explanation of phenomenal consciousness: 

Lee Smolin: The problem of consciousness is an aspect of the question of what the world really is. We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties. Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence; it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains.

Michael Lockwood went there, too, back in 1998:

Michael Lockwood: Do we therefore have no genuine knowledge of the intrinsic character of the physical world? So it might seem. But, according to the line of thought I am now pursuing, we do, in a very limited way, have access to content in the material world as opposed merely to abstract casual structure, since there is a corner of the physical world that we know, not merely by inference from the deliverances of our five senses, but because we are that corner. It is the bit within our skulls, which we know by introspection. In being aware, for example, of the qualia that seemed so troublesome for the materialist, we glimpse the intrinsic nature of what, concretely, realizes the formal structure that a correct physics would attribute to the matter of our brains. In awareness, we are, so to speak, getting an insider's look at our own brain activity.

"The noumenon (or "thing-in-itself") acts as a critical boundary or limit concept in Kantian philosophy, defining the boundary of human knowledge by separating what we can experience (phenomena) from what is independent of our senses. It serves as a negative limit, restricting the understanding from claiming knowledge of reality as it is outside of space, time, and causality. [...] It is not a "thing" we can discover but a necessary intellectual limit we must acknowledge."

Ancient tradition had a positive context for noumenon. In contrast to Kant, Plato believed that we had an [intellectual] intuition and could therefore apprehend the "intelligible realm" (noumenal world of that era) and its Forms.

#Ancient philosophy: Early mentions and definitions of intuition can be traced back to Plato. In his Republic he tries to define intuition as a fundamental capacity of human reason to comprehend the true nature of reality...
Plato - Education and the Value of Justice: Moving upward into the intelligible realm, we first become acquainted with the relatively simple Forms of numbers, shapes, and other mathematical entities; we can achieve systematic knowledge of these objects through a disciplined application of the understanding.

Finally, at the highest level of all, are the more significant Forms—true Equality, Beauty, Truth, and of course the Good itself. These permanent objects of knowledge are directly apprehended by intuition, the fundamental capacity of human reason to comprehend the true nature of reality.

But Kant eliminated the idea of humans having the intellectual intuition, and contended that we only had the faculty of sensible intuition (utilizing space and time) to provide empirical objects for the faculty of Understanding (that held the categories that interpreted them). Thus, he introduced and championed a negative context for noumenon.

Critique of Pure Reason (Kant): If by a noumenon we understand a thing insofar as it is not an object of our sensible intuition, because we abstract from the manner of our intuition of it, then this is a noumenon in the negative sense. But if we understand by that an object of a non-sensible intuition, then we assume a special kind of intuition, namely intellectual intuition, which, however, is not our own, and the possibility of which we cannot understand, and this would be the noumenon in a positive sense.

[...] If, therefore, we wanted to apply the categories to objects that are not considered as appearances, then we would have to ground them on an intuition other than the sensible one, and then the object would be a noumenon in a positive sense.

Now since such an intuition, namely intellectual intuition, lies absolutely outside our faculty of cognition, the use of the categories can by no means reach beyond the boundaries of the objects of experience. And although beings of understanding certainly correspond to the beings of sense, and there may even be beings of understanding to which our sensible faculty of intuition has no relation at all, our concepts of understanding, as mere forms of thought for our sensible intuition, do not reach these in the least. Thus, that which we call noumenon must be understood to be such only in a negative sense.

Without the intellectual intuition of Plato, the faculty of Understanding lacked super-sensible content to identify and comprehend. It was empty when it came to ultimate reality affairs, only having the empirical ones provided by the faculty of Sensibility. Kant was the first to explain cognition, though today we would make identification and understanding dependent on concepts (categories) and other information stored in memory.

Critique of Pure Reason (Kant): It comes along with our nature that intuition can never be other than sensible. I.e., that it contains only the way in which we are affected by objects.

The faculty for thinking about objects of the sensible intuition, on the contrary, is the Understanding.

Neither of these properties is to be preferred to the other. Without Sensibility no object would be given to us, and without the Understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

It is thus just as necessary to make the mind's concepts sensible (i.e., to add an object to them in intuition) as it is to make its intuitions understandable (i.e., to bring them under concepts). Further, these two faculties or capacities cannot exchange their functions. The understanding is not capable of intuiting anything, and the senses are not capable of thinking anything. Only from their unification can cognition arise.