Socrates On Philosophy and Death

[Mudhammam]

Well, neither would the concept of inches as a unit of measure but things still have extension in space, do they not? Are you suggesting that spacial relationships do not exist apart from people knowing about them? Are gravity and mass just concept too? Matter? I guess what I am asking is what kinds of things do you consider part of objective reality that can exist without someone forming a concept of it. Were sharks still sharks before humans evolved to find (and perhaps be eaten by) them?

It's complicated, because I can't describe something without including my perception of it.  What is gravity from the point of view of a rock.  A rock doesn't have a point of view, of course.  Without something to perceive these things, concepts can't exist.  It's just what is, which I think falls under the category of matter.  Just as I think concepts also fall under the category of matter.  As you could, likely, literally cut out a concept from someone's brain. 

What is a shark without perception?  Just a subset of matter in a big pile of matter.  Of course any subsets of the matter we create are again concepts.  We think of these things as seperate, but it's all one thing. It's just existence.  Again, tough to imagine, because of our inability to imagine how it would be, I think.

My two cents, for what they're worth:  Concepts don't emerge out of a vacuum.  They're produced through vaguely understood (at least on my end) mental and physical events that involve highly sophisticated interactions between qualitatively "subjective" features that exist among -- and perhaps simply consist in -- a wider set of quantifiable "objective" features, those objects and their properties that the ancient materialists concluded must represent one of the two fundamental characteristics of reality, the other being void or empty space.  Therefore, a shark or a sunset or an apple didn't exist in the form of a concept or even as a lush experience of colors and tastes and sounds until creatures with the capacity to have these experiences or formulate a conceptual understanding of them came along; yet the properties of those objects which impose themselves on creatures, through the bodily organs that have evolved as translators of these properties, i.e., into the rich spectrum of experiences such as we all know them to be (I'm speaking only in our case, obviously) did exist prior to ourselves as the properties of those objects.  Of course, the brain itself has evolved with properties that allowed it to discover properties, which renders true to some extent the statement that you are some insignificant subset of the universe that has found a way (accidentally, if this is one instance in which we are right to trust appearances) to contemplate itself -- a fact that in-of-itself does seem significant, to me, as it both is and should seem to me.  Prior to the evolution of the human mind, there were no concepts, but that doesn't mean that the concepts which have evolved subsequent to our brains don't reflect deep truths about "non-perceptual reality"... which one can take in a Platonic sense or in terms of physical reality as it actually is outside of our "rose colored glasses."