Intangibility of Intangibility

What causes a concept or idea to be intangible?

By ‘intangible”, I basically mean; something that is vague and difficult to understand or value in concrete terms. The function of the mind’s interpretation is an important aspect in questioning what causes something to be intangible. If something is difficult to understand for someone in concrete terms, it should be relative to that person's interpretation. In my last post; Interpretation of Interpretation, I analysed the process of interpretation, regarding how someone's mind interprets anything it receives through sensory perception. At a basic level, the mind seems to subconsciously interpret that which is perceived through the senses, by recognizing patterns, and reinforcing memory of patterns. This information is likely to be fairly tangible, since it has been directly perceived. 

But when it comes to conscious interpretation, it involves not only those basic patterns (which represent factors), but combinations of more than 1 pattern of a factor, as well as how those factors interacted (more details in a post from 2yrs ago; Conscious Comprehension). These concepts, of the cause and effect of the interaction of factors, can often still be tangible for the mind to grasp, as long as the interaction has been directly perceived by the individual. For eg; the interaction of an animal running fast causing the effect of that animal's lungs to lack oxygen, after a time period, is a fairly tangible concept for anyone who has experienced it themselves. Another example is giving an example, which perhaps makes a concept more tangible, since you can access memories of the factors and interaction which is described.

But once a concept involves an interaction or factors which have not been directly perceived by an individual, it becomes more intangible. If sensory perception has not recorded and saved the interaction or factors, in memory, the idea of a concept becomes much more difficult to grasp, since some component of the interaction can not be accessed in memory. To some degree, people can still understand concepts which they haven't witnessed, but this involves a step of accessing memory of a new combination of factors and interaction. Each component still must be saved in memory from sensory perception, but new combinations can be accessed in a process of a hypothetical thought experiment. This is similar to an aspect of the concept of imagination, as I further imagined in a post from 22 months ago Imaginate. 

In the scenario of someone trying to conceptualize something they have not directly witnessed, they access memory of factors which they have perceived before, then access memory of the interaction (involving other factors) which they have perceived, and try to combine memory access of the separate components. The more accurate that the person has each component saved in memory, the more tangible it should be. For eg, if you try to conceptualize (or imagine) an orange monkey flying in a hurricane, you access memory of each component which you have perceived before, and which is saved as separate memories; the color orange, the picture of a monkey, a hurricane, and the interaction of flying. If you have witnessed each of those components, you can combine memory access to make it somewhat tangible, but likely less tangible than something you have witnessed the entire combination of (perhaps a monkey climbing a tree in a jungle). 

When more components of a concept have not been saved in memory, it becomes more intangible. The concept of; “electrons do not orbit the nucleus in the manner of a planet orbiting the sun, but instead exist as standing waves”, is at such a microscoping scale, that it is more intangible from a lack of direct sensory perception. Or the concept of; outer space going for infinity, should be more intangible, due to a lack of witnessing something having no end.

The degree of accuracy of memory, which someone has from direct sensory perception of the combination of components of a concept, seems to be quite relative to how tangible it is. If each component has been witnessed, someone can still make a new memory combination to conceptualize something new, making it somewhat tangible, but if factors or the interaction have not been perceived before, it becomes more intangible. The factors and interaction of this entire concept itself, may explain the; Intangibility of Intangibility.