That's fairly convincing proof you are a medic of some sort. I can't find it anywhere on the web - so possibly not just plagiarised. I apologise and withdraw my comment. You do realise you're going against the majority of medical opinion, and the government advice? Why are you doing that?

Red herring is all I can say. — TheMadFool

No thanks, I had cereal!

Right, but the configuration doesn't exist of itself; it exists as a configuration of three balls, a pen drive, a brain. What's at issue here, ultimately, is this:

"Elementary particles, time, genes and the brain are manifest to us only through our measurements, models and manipulations. Their presence is always based on scientific investigations, which occur only in the field of our experience."

If that's the case - how do we know we're not just brains in jars, being fed sensory data we mistake for reality? How do we know we're not in the Matrix? If we assume we are not in the Matrix, we have to assume the primacy of the objective, if only on the basis of the chronology of the question. Consciousness evolved from inanimate matter. If consciousness is subjective - where did it come from? The spirit realm?

The scientific method doesn't include subjectivity into its theories, even though that's how we all experience the world. Whatever consciousness is and however it fits in with the world science describes, that fact can't be wished away by blaming Descartes. — Marchesk

But science does account for subjectivity - admittedly, as an obstacle to understanding to be accounted for and subtracted from the objective, but there's observer bias, the Hawthorne effect, the placebo effect - all sorts of ways in which subjectivity is accounted for in science.

A configuration isn't physical. Imagine 3 balls, one red, one green and the other blue. A configuration would be some kind of permutation/combination of these balls but there's no net energy, mass, volume difference between these configurations. — TheMadFool

Right, but what you're asking me to do, is imagine three balls - and then take them away, and suppose there's some substance of configuration still there.

Your argument implies the opposite. Your argument suggest that consciousness is a consequence of the configuration of the brain. Can you download your movie without a pen drive? Can you put it in a bucket? No, it has to be configurable hardware.

I don't know where you are, but my country is in lockdown, businesses are failing, the bills are piling up, and people are going stir crazy. There's 100,000 people in hospital with Covid, and delayed treatments are upward of one million. Public spending and borrowing are through the roof while revenues are on the floor. And you ask - what do I mean by patriotic? You don't think this is a time when we all need to be pulling in the same direction?

For what it's worth, I have some of the same reservations with regard to the vaccine. I'd like to know more about the efficacy of the vaccine - particularly with regard to mutant strains. I'd like to know how long protection lasts. There's a lot I'd like to know, but the vaccine was created and approved in 10 months, because of the sheer scale and immediacy of the crisis. It isn't a sales pitch. It's a cry for help.

Something about your earlier post bothers me; particularly if now you're claiming:

I am supposed to sell the public health pitch to my patients so it is more than slightly helpful if I believe it at all. — Book273

A medic would certainly be aware that masks stop virus getting out, as much as they stop it getting in. They stop you spraying your germs everywhere with every exhalation of breath, every word and laugh, to say nothing of coughs and sneezes. Your earlier post is clearly, utterly unconcerned with masks stopping you infecting others. Stop lying and just accept the advice of actual medical professionals.

The ancient Greeks, Chinese and Indians recognized that subjectivity or the mental was something substantial that needed to be dealt with. — Marchesk

Granted, but in contrast to what? Galileo developed scientific method to contrast with revelation as a means to truth, and Descartes immediately rubbished it, by using a radically unscientific method to assert the primacy of the subject. And Descartes got the gold and the glory while Galileo got threatened with torture, death and everlasting damnation.

Right! That helps a lot. I noticed your impassioned response against my purported ‘subjectivism’ in one of our recent exchanges. But I stand by it. Michel Bitbol’s observation about ‘the blind spot’ is both physiologically and analogically accurate. Physiologically, because there really is a blind spot, where the optic nerve joins the eye, which you never notice until it’s pointed out by way of the blind spot test. — Wayfarer

Physiologically, sure! Physically, there is a blind-spot. It's where the term blind spot comes from! Analogically too, there is a blind-spot, but the essay is completely wrong about its nature and cause.

The reason it’s analogically accurate is not nearly so simple to explain, but equally true. First, let me observe that Galileo’s treatment by the Catholic Church had nothing to do what what is discussed in that essay by Bitbol. Yet, it’s the first thing you mention. Why is that? What is the connection? — Wayfarer

"Many of us like to think that science can give us a complete, objective description of cosmic history, distinct from us and our perception of it. But this image of science is deeply flawed. In our urge for knowledge and control, we’ve created a vision of science as a series of discoveries about how reality is in itself, a God’s-eye view of nature. Such an approach not only distorts the truth, but creates a false sense of distance between ourselves and the world. That divide arises from what we call the Blind Spot, which science itself cannot see. In the Blind Spot sits experience: the sheer presence and immediacy of lived perception."

I mention the trial of Galileo because it's where the divergence between science as a tool, and science as a description of reality begins - and because this is the true nature of the blind-spot. The essay claims: "Many of us like to think that science can give us a complete, objective description of cosmic history, distinct from us and our perception of it." But the Church asserted the exact opposite by arresting Galileo. Descartes jumped on board with both feet. He withdrew a work on physics from publication, and instead made an argument in Mediations on First Philosophy that methodologically, is presented in terms of sceptical doubt (such that falls at the first cut of Occam's Razor) to arrive at views consistent with religious orthodoxy; and he was showered with gold while Galileo remained imprisoned. The rest of Western philosophy piled in behind Descartes - and justified science used as a tool in the Industrial Revolution, and for military power, without any regard to a scientific understanding of reality.

So who are these "many of us [who] like to think that science can give us a complete, objective description of cosmic history, distinct from us and our perception of it." They're certainly not making decisions in government or industry, because it was only this time last week they even acknowledged the reality of climate change?

What is at issue is not that ‘subjectivism has absolute primacy’ at all. Rather, it’s the belief that science is ‘the umpire of reality’, that science alone can tell us what is real, what is worth paying attention to. That is so ingrained in our culture that it, like the blind spot, can’t even be discerned, unless you know how to look for it. — Wayfarer

No, no - here's another quote from the essay:

"Behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism."

It's very clear what he's saying, and it's also quite clear that the absolute opposite is true - and has been since science as a tool, was divorced from science as an understanding of reality by the trial of Galileo. If you think otherwise, please explain why, 150 years after Galileo's trial - Darwin was attacked and ridiculed, and remains under attack to this day!? Explain why, in 2008 - Craig Venter was attacked for "playing God" for creating artificial life in the lab? Explain why, technology is still applied for power and profit - and not as a scientific understanding would suggest it should be applied, assuming we want to continue to exist?

I've been looking at the essay on your profile page. That's what I'm talking about. The blind-spot is not a consequence of objectivism and physicalism, but rather - of an assertion that subjectivism has absolute primacy; such that humans believe they can use science as a tool while ignoring the picture of reality science paints, dot by tiny factual dot.

It begins with Galileo - who formulated scientific method in order to prove the earth orbits the sun, and was threatened with torture and forced to recant, was found grievously suspect of heresy and held under house arrest for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, his contemporary, Descartes - using an argument that can only be described as sophistry, asserted the primacy of the subject - in a manner consistent with emphasising the spiritual and reviling the profane, and he was appointed to the Royal Court of Queen Christina of Sweden.

Nagel is a subjectivist - and now recipient of:

The 2021 Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy — Wayfarer

Hence:

They may have stopped threatening Galileians with torture, but they continue appointing Cartesians to the Royal Court! — counterpunch

If I understood that comment, I’d probably criticize it. — Wayfarer

Why let mere incomprehension stop you? Others here are unconcerned by such trivial impediments.

They may have stopped threatening Galileians with torture, but they continue appointing Cartesians to the Royal Court!

We are not mere robots, with pre-programmed characters resulting in unexamined behaviours. Doing anything requires thought, and an effort of will. We are imbued with a moral sense - informed by inter-subjectivity and empathy, that must be aware, in some degree - of the rightness or wrongness of the actions that we think about, decide upon and commit. Or don't - because that would be wrong. We have a choice, and that's what makes us responsible.

Not quite. There is an extremely small probability the die will end up balanced on an edge. Or that as you toss the die a meteor will crash into your home and blow everything to smithereens. — jgill

If the question were, in a universe with a lot of floating rocks - you throw a six sided dice, what are the odds of getting hit by an asteroid in the moment before it falls, the odds are very small, but if they're not zero, where does it end? A confused Llama escaped from the zoo could run in and swallow the dice! A time traveller from the future could materialise in a ball of light that vaporises the dice. A world war two explosive buried in the foundation of the building could explode - and destroy the dice. And so on and on, and adding a presumably infinite number of infinitesimally small chances together, once one starts down that road, one must eventually conclude that there's almost zero probability of a result between 1 and 6!

So, no reply, huh? Fair enough, but at least ask yourself - if it's because you disagree with me, or that you fear the retribution of the mob you helped create??

The first questions epistemology asks are: What can we know? and How can we know it? Those questions are, in my view, fundamental to any and every other philosophical argument. Knowing what is and is not available to knowledge, and being able to justify knowledge claims - is the essence of philosophy and the origin of wisdom.

Oh shit, now you're alienating me :lol:. I don't know man.. What are you saying? — schopenhauer1

Three Cubans were just rescued by the US coastguard - having fled Cuba on a tiny raft that sank, and cast them ashore on some desolate island.

That's what I mean by equality is not a virtue. Communism has failed every country that ever adopted it, and frequently, it runs to genocide.

Then there's political correctness; in my view, an utterly disingenuous dogma that uses identity politics in reverse, in pursuit of the very same authoritarian power a command economy affords.

Alienating everyone is also second nature here — schopenhauer1

I don't buy into the whole political correctness thing, or equality as a virtue. And there's a very strong left wing contingent here - who only seem interested in confirming their beliefs.

You are afraid of insulting someone on this forum? Insult is basically second nature here. — schopenhauer1

I've pretty much managed to alienate everyone already, so in practice I would have to say, no! But I would rather it were not so. Me, I value a diversity of opinion - even stupid opinions are useful for contrast!!

Well shit, no one can give a compliment anymore! — schopenhauer1

No-one can take a compliment anymore either!

Agreed full-heartedly. You would have to ask Banno. People get a kick out of feeling superior I guess. The "well-adjusted" just "have" to let the complainers know their place. If they know what's good for them! — schopenhauer1

I don't know him all that well, and I'm not particularly diplomatic at the best of times. I don't know how I'd ask if a need to express a lack of sympathy overrode an ability to parse the passage - or if he's actually intellectually incapable, without it coming across as an insult.

Interesting observations. — schopenhauer1

Thanks, but it looks like you made much the same argument before I did - so it's like you're saying your own observations are interesting. A little self serving, n'est pas?!

What I find interesting are the comments of those who almost certainly haven't experienced depression, and have less than no sympathy for it.

Is Banno incapable of the literary analysis necessary to an appreciation that the writer is writing from the perspective of someone with depression? I don't know. But depression angers people. They don't understand that it becomes the suffers' truth - more, the suffers' very identity. Variations upon the 'snap out of it' theme are ubiquitous - and not at all helpful.

I made a sandwich that was too big to eat! That's gotta count for something!

I like the passage. It communicates very well how depression feels - while posing an interesting philosophical question about the nature of reality and experience. It's a conceit, of course - for the first thought of the reader must surely be that depression is just a different cocktail of brain chemicals, that give a different quality of experience of reality. But written as if depression reveals truth lends a sense of reality to the description, and that is how depression feels; that happiness is a lie.

Read some philosophy you twit! — Constance

Don't do that. Don't pretend this on on me. I could see you had a lot going on, and I offered to butt out. You responded anyway, and you fucked up. You're not following the argument because you're having three arguments all at the same time. Your response was poor quality. I'm owed an apology not an insult.

Do I detect a hint of sexism in this? Or perhaps this is an irrational feminine suspicion. — Constance

There's no assumption on my part that you're a raving nutter because you're a woman. To my mind, you're a raving nutter first, and incidentally, a woman. Did you play an 'ism' card to shore up your weak argument? Wish I had 'ism' cards to play. Sadly, they don't give them to straight white males. Everyone else, but none for straight white males.

Evolution and politics? This has not entered philosophical thinking. What I am doing looking into the existential basis of religion, on this point. It is simply a matter misplaced analysis: talk about teleology and watches and caveman curiosity is outside discussion about what the enduring nature of religion is. Curiosity and invention are always there, but here it is a question of what is there that inspires this. — Constance

I can just about scrape some vague sense of a meaning from this. Purple prose has its place - Constance, but here, I'd rather you said what you meant directly. Like I did when you asked:

Take the notion of God: Why would people invent such a thing? What role does it play in describing the world? — Constance

I gave you direct answers to these questions, and you give me some garbled, meaningless one paragraph response. Then accuse me of sexism. WTAF!

Well, that's a far cry from not knowing anything at all as you said earlier. — Constance

No, it's not. I don't know if God exists. But I know the concept of God exists. You asked "why would someone invent such a thing?" I answered - and then you say:

"that's a far cry from not knowing anything at all as you said earlier."

We're done here. Either, you're not intellectually capable of understanding what I'm saying, or you are making absolutely zero effort to understand, or are deliberately misunderstanding. I don't care which. The consequence is the same. There's no point continuing the discussion.

The science is clear on masks preventing an aerosol of water droplets sprayed into the air by you, and breathed in by other people. You don't know if you have the virus for quite a while after you have it. That's how viruses get around. Besides which; it's not your job to decide how to fight this virus. This is a situation where the patriotic thing to do, the sensible and capitalist thing to do, is wear the mask, wash your hands, keep your distance from people, and get vaccinated asap.

Try telling him that! Communism is dead. The correct political ideal to take its place is Truth; relative to Freedom, and the consequence of the democratic compromise between them being capitalism regulated to achieve sustainability.

The virus may be 1.25 microns, but it travels in much larger water droplets that you exhale into the air, if not wearing a mask. Wearing a mask prevents you infecting others.

I hate wearing a mask! Mostly because I think it's useless. — Book273

Why do you think it's useless?

idiots tend to deal in extremes, in either/or. — Kenosha Kid

It was either/or for those Cubans when they put to sea on a raft made from coconuts stuck together with bird shit. Either they get to a country that doesn't have a political system based on equality, or they die. Same with the Berlin Wall. Pretty much everyone braving the machine guns and barbed wire, was trying to escape from equality. How do you not get that? Equality does not work as a political ideal.

I’ve also experienced being passed over in silence..... — Wayfarer

Sorry Wayfarer. I'll butt out. I'm not making any progress with Constance anyhow. The more rational and specific I get, the more emotionally esoteric she becomes. I'd best quit before she starts speaking Aramaic and sending me innards in the post!

Yes but the creator God is not just an incidental conjuring of an idle mind. Religion and all of its unquestioned domination throughout history cannot be conceived by such a trivial accounting. Religion is the metaphysics of human suffering and joy. Alas, metaphysics is not something one can discuss since it is more about absence where presence is needed: we are quite literally thrown into suffering, death, horror, and love, music, and the many blisses we can discover. You have to look to the need for this world to have its suffering redeemed and its blisses consummated. This is religion in a nutshell at the level of basic questions. — Constance

I'm speaking in scientific terms of religion as an evolutionary, political and sociological phenomenon. God knows what you're doing!

Then you haven't encountered God philosophically, and it is clear you have little regard for the idea. — Constance

I just suggested that the concept of a Creator God may be responsible for the "creative explosion" that is, the development of a truly human mode of thought; abstract conceptualisation, and forward facing strategies for survival. That's in addition to God's role as objective authority for multitribal social law. To show the concept any more regard I'd have a join a negro spiritual choir!

But imagine yourself in medieval Europe during the plague, and there you are with children whose extremities have turned black with gangrene, vomiting blood and bile, and you the same, and there is only wretchedness, and just when you think the worst is behind you, someone knocks over a oil lamp, the place catches fire and you are burned alive.
Now, this is not to talk as Nietzsche did about the mentality of the weak slave rising in numbers against the naturally gifted ubermensches of the world, though there is something to this. Nor does it look to explanations in mundane things like etymological story telling. It is something more primordial: the world as it is given to us is not stand alone ethically. There is something intrinsically wrong with woman above's situation that has no remedy in this world. Put aside silly ideas about anthropomorphic deities and look to the moral absence of the world. — Constance

You realise I suppose that you're asking a modern man; stood on the shoulders of giants who invented modern medicine, anti-biotics, indoor plumbing and electric lights - by thinking in scientific terms, to imagine the suffering of someone who lacked those things, in order to show your need for God in suffering and moral absence? Just in case you don't see it, it's wildly ironic.

Sure, but your confidence that "we will find it out" : How does one imagine what the answer would be? — Constance

My purpose is to employ the gifts bequeathed to me by the struggles of previous generations, to secure the future for subsequent generations - by knowing what's true, and acting morally on the basis of what's true. When humankind gets there, we'll get there - wherever there is. I don't pretend to know things I don't know, but I do think there's a clear path to follow!

Religion, at its core, is an ethical matter, and ethical deficiency. Science, talk about DNA and the rest, has no recourse at all to discover ethical resolutions because science is factual, — Constance

Morality is fundamentally a sense, fostered in the human animal by evolution in the context of the hunter-gatherer tribe. Chimpanzees have morality of sorts; they groom each other and share food, and remember who reciprocates, and withhold such favours accordingly. Moral behaviour was an advantage to the individual within the tribe, and to the tribe composed of moral individuals. It's only when hunter-gatherer tribes joined together - they needed God as an objective authority for moral law. The idea that man in a state of nature was an amoral, self serving individualist; Nietzsche's ubermensch - fooled by the weak, is false. Man could not have survived were that so. He already had a very well honed evolutionary moral sense when the need arose to make that innate moral sense explicit. That's religion. It has politics at its core.

Three people believed to have been stranded on an uninhabited island in the Bahamas for 33 days have been rescued, the US Coast Guard says.

"Unfortunately we didn't have any fluent Spanish speakers but in my broken Spanish I was able to discern that they were from Cuba and....

...only fled the workers paradise because equality is such a good basis for an economic system, they had become overwhelmed with happiness!

Ya think?

Yes, but read more closely. It is not this that is at issue. It is what underlies popular religious ideas that we are looking into. The past is full of foolishness about everything, but the proper analytic inquiry into what a thing is what we want. Take the notion of God: Why would people invent such a thing? What role does it play in describing the world? — Constance

In the archaeological record there's an event, called 'the creative explosion.' Beforehand, about 1.5 million years of stone hand axes, and almost nothing else. Afterward, cave painting, burial of the dead, jewellery, improved tools, and so on. Quite suddenly, people began making things - and either before or after this point in time, I imagine, some smarter than average caveman got to wondering about who made the world, and the animals, and himself?

In William Paley's 'Natural Theology' 1803 - there's an argument called the 'Watchmaker Argument.' It was taken as the title of a book by Richard Dawkins too. In fact, it goes back to Cicero in Ancient Rome, that we know of, and I suggest much further. Basically, the argument imagines someone walking along and finding a watch. It then goes on to suggest that if that person knows nothing else - they know that somewhere in existence, there's a Watchmaker - because the watch is a designed object.

So back to our caveman, he's observing the grass grow, the animals eat the grass, the lions eat the animals, and it all fits together rather well. He plucks fruit from the trees that seems placed there just for him and so on. It's not at all inconceivable that he would ask - who made all this? And naturally, he would arrive at the idea of a Creator God, and that is the origin of the concept. It may even be that realisation of this concept drove the creative explosion.

But you do talk like one, argue like one, reducing religion to anthropomorphic terms. Conspicuously missing from your remarks are those that would NOT make you an atheist. So tell me a-atheist, what is it that constrains your thinking from being an atheist? — Constance

It's because I don't know, and I admit what I am and am not able to know. I don't believe God exists anymore than I believe God doesn't exist. I don't know. I'm okay with it, and apparently, so is God!

Extinct? But this is a practical concern, and being objective about practical matters certainly ranks high on my list of priorities. But the question here is one that is more simply descriptive. What IS there in the world that underlies all the fuss of all the ages about our Being here, in this reality? The fact that it IS a fuss, that there is some monumental unfinished business in the enterprise to explain the world that remains after science exhaustively does its thing. — Constance

Organisms evolve in relation to reality, and must be correct to reality at every level - the physiological level, that is the structure of their DNA, their cells, their bodies. The behavioural level - move away from danger, toward food, ingest energy, excrete waste, breed, etc. And for human beings - we also need to be correct on the intellectual level, and therein lies the purpose that follows from our nature - that we exist to know reality, and in knowing reality, secure our continued existence. I don't pretend to know what our existence is all about, but if there is a reason, we will find it - and do so by moving toward truth and away from ignorance and falsehood.

It's a good question. In theory, we are all the same species, all evolved, and living on the same planet; so why should we not have global government? There's a concept called 'political legitimacy' that plays out in all sorts of political systems. It undermines the idea of global governance, because - people would inevitably find global government too distant from their interests in much the same way US states resist federal government, and the UK resisted EU governance. I think this is a related question.

Much as I might like to pretend otherwise, I cannot get as worked up about the death toll in Yemen as I am by the death toll from Covid in my own country. I value the existence of humankind - and humankind is made up of human individuals. Politically, it's expedient to uphold human rights, not least, the right to life. But I value the individuals I know, and those over the horizon are somewhat abstract. My life, that of my loved one's, friends, neighbours, colleagues are more important - to me, than those of strangers in strange lands. And I expect, they feel much the same way. All of which suggests that they are best placed to govern themselves, and we to take care of ourselves.

There are things, fascinating things entirely unregarded in this dismissive pov. — Constance

What? Like... how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? I wasn't addressing that question. I was addressing the question I addressed - and it's you who are being dismissive. Religion is a poor reflection of reality; created by our ancestors for political purposes. Science is a much clearer reflection of reality. In face of the climate and ecological crisis, it's time to move on.

To me, most atheistic reasoning is straw person arguing: The man in a cloud thinking is demonstrably absurd; therefore, religion is bunk. — Constance

I'm not atheistic. I've said repeatedly, I don't know if God exists or not. Science does not know if God exists or not. Raising atheism is a straw man argument.

The trouble with what you say is that it reveals none of the "Copernican Revolution" of Kant. — Constance

I don't put the subject at the centre. I'm an objectivist. Human beings need to learn their place, as subject to forces much greater than they; not least the relationship between truth and causality. If we are not intellectually correct to reality we will be rendered extinct as a matter of cause and effect.

Religion is the politics of our ancestors - made necessary when hunter gatherer tribes joined together to form multi-tribal social groups. Hunter gatherer tribes were hierarchies dominated by an alpha male - and it's very difficult for two such hierarchies to coexist. Any dispute over food or sex inevitably splits the social group into its tribal structures of authority. So they needed an objective authority for laws that applied equally to everyone, to maintain a stable cohesive social structure. God is the supreme alpha male; and objective authority for law and order. Now, like I said, I don't know if God exists, but I do know religion is the politics of primitive peoples.

The point of explaining this to you is to suggest that the actual areas that are not open to me, philosophising on the basis of a scientific understanding of reality, are much less than you might imagine. You would like to construe science as some myopically focused experimental discipline - but science seeks to establish laws that are universally true of reality. Your imagination, by comparison is dwarfed - by the sheer size and complexity of the universe. You worship the book and despise the creation. You have the milky way laid out before you - and instead you put up fairy lights!

Why would it be a problem for empiricists? If you see two apples and I see two apples - there are, empirically speaking, two apples.

Assuming two exists only as the relation of one apple to the other, it becomes an adjective, and it makes as much sense to say 'two' exists, as it would to say high, or long, or lazy - exist as some abstract ideal.

If you were able to somehow go back in time, and map every mathematical thought in chronological order, surely it would begin with the relationship of one apple to one more apple, and get increasingly abstract.

Also, it's said that phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny - and you don't start kids out learning math with abstract objects. You begin with one apple and one more apple - and build toward abstract objects. So, all in all - maybe this is a wrong end of the telescope problem.

Maybe numbers do exist, primarily in the relations between objects. Then, expert mathematicians forget their infant education, and talk about numbers existing as abstract objects, and cite highly derived ideas, like geometric line segments and set theory, as proof of an abstract realm created through logical manipulation of those basic, real numerical relations.

"Thinking about geometric objects is perhaps the clearest way to think about abstract objects. A line segment (a true, geometric line segment) is a perfectly straight, one-dimensional object with a determinate length. There are no such objects in space-time. Every object you could possibly interact with is three-dimensional — no matter how thin a piece of, say, plastic you create, it always has a height and a thickness, giving it three dimensions. Nothing, therefore, in the concrete world, is a real geometric line segment. We have things that approximate line segments — very straight, very thin objects. But none of those things will ever be perfectly straight and with zero thickness. So if there does, somehow, exist a true line segment, it certainly isn’t in the concrete world, and therefore it must be in some sort of abstract realm."

Neither does a unicorn, or a griffin exist in the concrete world - yet we can imagine them, and draw them - because we know what a horse looks like, or what a lion and a eagle look like, and can conflate them. So, perhaps a true geometric line segment is like that - an abstraction from the relations between real objects; then the idea of numbers as existing in the relations between objects holds up.