One of our regulars has posited that “The human mind as you well know prefers to work with the concrete.” The implication seems to be that our limited intellects cannot conceive of bigger things than what we can see and feel. But anyone who has studied semantics, cybernetics, higher math, or any system in which symbols are explicitly manipulated independent of their referents, knows that this is silly.

Our minds only manipulate abstract symbols. We first learn to simply identify objects and to manipulate thoughts about them. Anyone with children remembers how they discovered their toes, and learned that the toes were a part of themselves that they could feel from within and without. And then later to control. These are abstract concepts that are so familiar by the time one learns the word “abstract” that people are generally unaware of the process they went through to learn them. Most people never learn that the image in their minds is not the object itself, that a map is not the territory. One might believe that an image witnessed is solid proof that an object existed. Ask a UFOlogist.

But with training, we can abstract things by many degrees with conscious awareness of the process. A word (as in this post) is not an idea in itself, but a cluster of marks representing a series of sounds representing a class of ideas. Each member of said class itself representing a different set of objects. Quite abstract.