>>10891887>>10893049Other examples of abstraction like this are games, language, your center of gravity, and the eye of a storm.
With games, the real stuff is the behavior e.g. People moving little pieces of wood around on a board in the context of a chess game.
The somewhat weird / paradoxical seeming non-real thing that has even more importance to what they're doing than the real stuff though is the abstraction of the game of chess. The players engage in a fictional concept of the little pieces of wood serving as placeholders for these differently empowered members of fictional armies with rules of engagement and elaborate strategies of what the opponent might do in the future and how you plan to work with that.
The real things of language are mouth noises and scribbles or LED displays comparable to scribbles that people produce or react to other people's productions of. But the non-real stuff that's even more important than the real stuff in language is the "meaning" concept where we behave as though these sounds or drawings stand in for radically unrelated objects or events that don't have much if any resemblance to their representations e.g. the word "bee hive" written out on paper doesn't give you any hints as to what it means if you were looking at it as a non-English speaker.
Center of gravity is a useful fiction too along those lines. There is no literal center of gravity object like there is such an object as a rock or a puddle of water, but we can behave as though this fiction is an object and get benefits from doing so. Eye of a storm is the same deal. It's a fictional reference point for an absence of something in the context where storm activity is present otherwise and makes the absence of storm activity seem like a thing of its own.
