Aphantasia and Platonism

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I'm wondering if there's any connection between aphantasia (inability to visualize) or low visualization, and platonism, the idea that at least some concepts (such as numbers and laws of nature, logic, or morality) exist as abstract objects that are neither mental or physical. Plato himself went as far as to claim that there is an ideal abstract version of everything, including categories of physical object. For example, we only recognize trees because we have an innate concept of ideal "treeness", which is more real than any individual tree. I'm not asking whether you believe there is an ideal object for everything, just if you believe in abstract objects in general.
I suspect that there may be a connection between low visualization and belief in abstract objects because low visualizers would be more dependent upon abstract concepts for modeling reality than more visual thinkers, who would have a more visual model of the world. Having a word-based model might make people more likely to believe that the structure of reality is parallel to the structure of language, which could lead to them thinking that concepts are as or more real than physical reality.
By modeling I don't just mean how you think but what you imagine reality to be. I think in both words and pictures but the model is primarily visual and my internal monologue is a commentary on the model. I hope this makes sense.

I have Aphantasia and I have a keen belief in conceptual theory including Plato's forms, and metaphysics.

Plato is in fact my favourite philosopher.

I also have synaesthesia which translates numbers and abstract ideas into sensory perception.

Great question.

Diogenes talking to Plato about his concepts:

As Plato was conversing about Ideas and using the nouns "tablehood" and "cuphood," he said, "Table and cup I see; but your tablehood and cuphood, Plato, I can nowise see." "That's readily accounted for," said Plato, "for you have neither tables nor cups in your hood, bro."

Let's take "nut-ness" rather than treehood.
We all have a concept of what a nut is.

It leads us to market cashews as a kind of nut, and strawberries as a kind of fruit. Yet, when it comes to botanical categories, that's wrong.
Botanical nut-ness depends of what part of the plant grows bigger and into the actual object we call nut, regardless of what tge botanists say.
But we merely call a strawberry a fruit because it shares aesthetic qualities with other fruit. Colour, taste, etc.
So, the categories are aesthetic in nature. That doesn't make them abstract at all.

I have very strong visual-spatial ability.

For as much as I can think visually I find that I still do more verbal processing than I realize and that it's probably the bulk, and I do believe that there are abstract objects I really don't know how we're using the term 'real' here. - I voted yes for real but as for strict Platonic emanation, it sounds like a nice story but for example - thinking of John Vervaeke and how he'd consider himself a Platonist and Deep Continuity guy, or Sir Roger Penrose would consider himself a mathematical Platonist, I don't think either one of them are of the Lon Milo Duquette kabbalistic type of thinking who'd take literally the notion that God or Unity thought 'rest', that the message dropped down from Atziluth to Briah, where the archangels started forming the idea of 'chair', which then dropped down into Yetzirah where all the possible myriad forms of 'chair', 'couch', 'bed', etc. diversified until you hit hour local bed and furniture superstore in Assiah.

I think there are other ways of approaching things like this.

For example you can look at questions of Markov mathematics and ask 'Are Pearl blankets real?' or 'Are Friston blankets real?'. I bring up Karl Friston's take on Markov blankets here because he had a really interesting discussion with Curt Jaimungal that went on for a good four hours where he was able to unpack some of this as well as his ideas of what the 'free energy' principal means.

There's another guy - Timothy Morton - who'd speak of things he dubbed 'hyperobjects' and apparently he was influenced by Bjork's Hyperballad in coining that but his idea seems to be - as far as I can tell - trying to describe stable situations, stable problems, or stable basins of attraction that exist across time and hold shape or mutate in a stable manner when compared against a Heraclitan background of perpetual change.

In some ways I'm also reminded of graphs and hypergraphs in math, and hypergraphs get really really epic, epic in the sense of Stephen Wolfram describing the universe as a hypergraph in his own theory of everything.


You can almost say this - if there are stable relationships there are objects. In that sense yes - abstract objects are real. You can be an idealist and believe that, you can simply be an Ontic Structural Realist and believe that (not certain for sure what James Ladyman would say on this topic - just that OSR seems to lean into relationships first over properties).

I believe in some abstract objects, e.g. numbers. However, I don't believe in things like "tree-ness" as objects distinct from a category of actual trees. "Tree-ness" is an abstraction based on descriptions of actual physical trees. On the other hand, numbers can be defined totally apart from any physical objects.

I think both visually and verbally.

I didn't expect the results to skew this much in favor of Platonism. Did I explain it poorly? Are people voting without reading the post? I'd be starting to think there was a connection between Platonism and autism if it wasn't for this other poll:
viewtopic.php?p=5537119

Abstract thought is essential to creativity.

I'm not a visual thinker----but I can "make things up" in my head.