They exist as an artificial abstraction. But what is concrete reality? How do you define it and what are the symbols and methods you used to arrive at that definition. The problem is this: Yes, we know the telescope is an artifact we made, but we’re uncertain how much it, and thus we, invent the things we see through the telescope. Our crisis isn’t mistaking the map for the territory. It’s being able to only perceive the map. It’s true this is in part a problem of epistemology. But the thing to understand is that in mathematics we know the map is a map and we can draw other maps that are self-consistent but contradict the first, and we don’t know which if any of the maps most closely describes the territory or even what the territory is or means.
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