What are platonic concepts?
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Let’s consider squares.
* Is there even such as thing a square? We can easily imagine a square, but are they *real*?
* Can you point to even a single square in the physical unvierse?
* Certainly we can make nearly-square shaped things, but if you zoom in enough you’ll find they don’t truly have 4 *perfectly* straight sides, so they aren’t true squares.
* Indeed, squares are 2d, so any object you create, even if you somehow make it perfectly straight, will be 3d, so it can’t be a square.
* Even a drawing of a square is 3 dimensional, because the ink on the page has some tiny thickness.
* Even a square made of lines just 1 atom thick/deep has some thickness, and isn’t truly a square (and those atoms probably can’t *really* make *straight* lines anyway).
* So do squares not exist?
Well, even if there is no true square any in the physical universe, we might still choose to believe that there is still a very real concept of a square in a conceptual/mathematical/idealistic sense.
We might call a square a ‘Platonic Ideal’, because Plato argued that they were real, and I think he even argued that they were *more* real than the physical world. After all, if the unvierse never existed, or it crumbled to nothing in the future, then perhaps, in a sense, the *concept* or *ideal* of a ‘square’ would still exist despite there being no physical universe. If these Platonic Ideals are ‘real’ then they transcend the universe.
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