I’m not familiar with background literature on the topic, but I suppose the most natural way to think about the problem is not take the distinction between a concept and an object so seriously. The fact that concepts are used as objects in ordinary language underlines the fact that they have physical manifestations in the things human beings think, do and say. We can even measure their effects on a macroscopic scale by methods such as polling.
This is actually related to the question of whether there is really a distinction between virtual and physical reality. You could do a micromagnetic scan of hard disk to show that programs had were physically real, but it wouldn’t be necessary. It’s obvious that they’re physically real since we observe the effects of their processes. It’s takes a bit of a conceptual step though to see that yout own ideas reflect similar physical processes.
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