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card_zerotoday at 12:25 AM0 repliesview on HN

You could imagine beings who live on an abstract plane, creatively playing around with abstract thoughts and producing abstract goods. Except you couldn't imagine it in any detail, because it has no details, because its abstract. It's easier to imagine that they live in a virtual world, and play creatively with virtual objects in the course of producing virtual goods that owe a lot to real physical goods. But that's tantamount to learning physical skills. Besides, for the time being, the world we inhabit is an amalgam of the virtual with the physical (not to mention the abstract). I'm saying that if you lock yourself in a box and think abstract thoughts you won't innovate much. It worked for Descartes with his oven, but that's unusual. Usually we need to play with a somewhat physical environment that's friendly to our physical monkey-shaped bodies and senses, in order to be creative, so physical skills aren't going away in the foreseeable.