abstractions & ontologies

[John Kineman <***>]

I had a bit of a breakthrough thinking through the adaptation/selection
arguments and re-reading AS. I won't repeat that all here, as it opens
too many questions that will naturally surface as our discussion
continues. But I will raise a key issue which helped me cut through my
muddle.

In AS Rosen refers to "acts of abstraction." In a colloquial sense of
the term "abstract" (as he points out most people intuitivly  consider
it) I often imagined abstract to mean something vague and even expansive
and in that way implicit of a broad ranging psyche. He points out that
it is the opposite. An abstraction is equivalent to an observation,
which is the basis of a model. It is thus a simplification of reality,
not an expansion of it. I wonder how many other on the list were clear
on this point. In that sense the observable world is also an
abstraction, i.e., what constitutes the simple mechanistic model of
reality. Other abstractions can be different from this one, and in that
sense "broader" than it, but all are simplifications from many
possibilities. Few would complain if I said our inner percepts of a
spirit world are "mere" abstractions from reality, but how many fully
grasp the extent to which sensory percepts are equally abstract, drawn
from a more complex whole?

This gets at the ontological aspects of the view.

JJK