this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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States aren't an abstraction, any more than the earth's gravity and atmospheric pressure are an abstraction. Both exist and are very stable, despite nominally existing in what's otherwise empty space, if you ignore the whole world.
They are abstractions in the sense that they are collections of rules that people made up.
They are real in the sense that those rules are reliably and effectively enacted and carried out.
You can say just the same for a single person with a moral code, or a group of people, some kind of organization with its own rules, codified or implicit.
A person can decide to shoot you or stab you, or give you a donut or sing a song in praise of you, depending on their rules... just in the same way as a group, or a state.
The difference is just scale, and the number of layers it takes to get from something you can drop from above the ground and reliably know it will fall, and things that have massive effects via much more complex processes.
The state 'exists' to roughly the same extent that 'I' exist.
I might change my rules, my behavior, so might a state.
A person's personality, the way a state functions and acts... both are emergent patterns or concepts or ideas that ultimately derive from something physically real, yet themselves are not directly, tangibly 'real'...
They're also not static, the way gravity is a static rule of reality. Their 'nature', their own internal rules are mutable. The speed of light, ohm's law, set theory... things that we discover, not invent... those are static, universal rules, spatially and temporally invariant.
Emergent patterns of course also often have particular ways that they tend to behave, rules that they tend to follow... but the more abstract, the more indirectly 'real' the thing is, the more complex and nuanced those rules tend to be.
Odd things begin to happen when you treat certain emergent patterns, certain rules, as more primarily, fundamentally 'real' than they actually are.