**Links to**: [[Abstraction]], [[Whitehead]], [[William James]], [[Hegel]], [[Abstraction]], [[Concept]], [[Analogy]], [[Reification]], [[Map-territory]], [[Model]], [[Vicious abstraction]], [[Representation]], etc. # ₣₳ⱠⱠ₳₵Ɏ Ø₣ Mł₴₱Ⱡ₳₵ɆĐ ₵Ø₦₵ⱤɆ₮Ɇ₦ɆSS >“With our thoughts we make the world.” > >Buddha, cited in Mullinax 2021, p. 5. >“There is no doubt that up to now the procedure of metaphysics has been a mere groping, and what is the worst, a groping among mere concepts.” > >Kant, _CPR_, 1998, B xv, p. 110. >“Did not lice eat your father on the highways?” > >Hegel, “Who Thinks Abstractly?”, 1808, in Kaufmann 1969, pp. 113-118. We are talking about a complex cognitive phenomenon or condition of/for thought, and it is difficult to what extent we are actually possible of **not** falling prey to this fallacy, time after time after time, in all our daily estimations. The fallacy, by Whitehead owes and/or is comparable to Hegel’s warnings in “Who Thinks Abstractly?”, William James’ vicious abstractions, Korzybski’s map-territory, George Box’s _all models are wrong_, etc. However, as always, the Dao said it first. The fallacy’s critique of reification, is essentially that one should not allow a one-dimensional hypothetical construct to become a vision applied at large. In _Science and the Modern World_ (1925) Whitehead puts it as such: >The FMC “is not a vice necessary to the intellectual apprehension of nature ... It is merely the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete.” > >“Sensitiveness without impulse spells decadence, and impulse without sensitiveness spells brutality.” > >Whitehead, _Science and the Modern World_, 1925, 1953, pp. 50-51, cited in Thompson 1997 pp. 219, 221-2. In Thompson’s words: the FMC is “based on a bad philosophy” (p. 221). In Hegel’s “Who Thinks Abstractly?” abstraction is, to him, laziness in taking a concept for granted. It is nonphilosophical^[Not in the Laruellian sense, but in a Hegelian-dismissive sense.] thought, as, he doesn’t say so but we do: thought that cuts short the possibilities of concepts linking up to the network that sustains them. It isolates concepts from the rest. “This is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality.” (Hegel 1808 in Kaufmann 1969, pp. 113-118). Thought, according to Hegel, is the movement from the abstract to the concrete, in permanent dialect. In Whitehead, too, concepts are problematic when they appear to signal “concrete” realities. But to believe in the concrete is a high abstraction, too, we do not have _direct access_ to reality (see [[Prediction]] and [[Vantagepointillism]]), to believe we do is perhaps the most insidious of all fallacies.^[Sellars criticizes this as “the myth of the given.” This is treated in [[Principle of Sufficient Interest]].] Hegel suggests that banal reification is a common mistake of the “uneducated”, of _nonphilosophical_ thought, where complex abstract concepts are not fully grasped or properly contemplated, which reduces their complex dialectical logic to a mere quick judgment. To gesture towards caution against oversimplification is important, but where do we draw the lines, if at all?^[On this point see also: [[Complexity]], [[Simplicity]] and [[Negintelligibility]].] _Did not lice eat your father on the highways?_ What kind of **abstraction** is this? The poignancy of the sarcasm, cruel humor or irony here, shows us something else about abstract thought: it is not just the (de/re)scaffolding of possibilities for prediction, it is, within that: also the active *steering*; opening or shutting down of others’ stream of thought by force, by the violence of words, their effects on hormonal fluctuations. More on this in [[Phenomenology of Sick Spirit]]. %% Continue this in relation to the prediction of emotions (Lisa Feldman Barrett), collective intentionality (Ian Cross), etc. #todo %% ### Black box Then, Ilyenkov, in the late ‘60s writes: “In the search for the guaranteed limit to infinity, machines reach the condition of the absolute end of thought, which coincides with the permanent blankness of the Black Box.”^[See Evald Ilyenkov, ‘Cosmology of the Spirit’, tr. Giuliano Vivaldi, _Stasis Journal_ 5:2. (2017, pp. 164–90).] This is the conclusion Chukhrov ascribes to Ilyenkov’s “The Mystery of Black Box”, a story where a cybernetic scholar (Adam Adamich) invents an AI which augments cognitive processes, proving and/or assuming that, in a cognitivist vein: all “essentially human” attributes are but roughly painted mythologies which are functionally reproducible by means other than the flesh (which can then be made faster, etc.). Chukhrov explains that—against the conclusion that philosophy’s driving self-doubt is actually its demise—Adam Adamich, the protagonist of Ilyenkov’s short story, sustains that it is precisely the capacity to doubt and contradict that makes thought be what it is. The capacity to be and question its own black box, the capacity to commit fallacies time after time after time. This is not a “weakness”, nor a relativism nor an abandonment: it is _metalearning_ (see [[Metalearning]] and [[Metalogue]]). But, then, what is the concrete and what is the abstract? No line can be drawn between them, except when we try to make something explicit (concrete?) about matters of fact versus virtual, ehh, _abstractions_. The total countering of FMC means, possibly, no thought at all. %%Continue this argument as it relates to AI and the FEP. #todo %% ### Footnotes