Sidestepping Materialism & Idealism is one of the things that makes Wittgenstein so austere. I appreciate the rigor but let's talk about abstraction. When we ab-stract the general picture of all leaves the resulting image is certainly "real" & has an ontological relationship to a particular leaf. It is the nature of that relationship that interests me. Blake wrote that "genius is in minute particulars" & by genius I think he meant something like life. Am I only making a commonsense distinction between the abstract image & the particular object? I've always had the sense that the chair I'm sitting on as I type would hold my weight more effectively that Plato's Ideal Chair. In a few minutes I'm going to go crawl into a bed constructed of birch logs & snuggle down with a little terrier. When you say "virtual reality" do you mean something Platonic?

Let's do a thought-experiment. We're on the holodeck of the Enterprise & we call up a country scene with grass & trees & a path beside a river. Let's say we're walking with a terrier & a lab. I take it that you're suggesting that functionally (?) there ain't no difference between that place & my patch of South Colton where I walk my dogs. What is the relationship between the hologdogs & my specific dogs? Sorry if these questions smack of sophomore bull-sessions, but I want to get clear here & try to understand where Wittgenstein comes down on these essentially ontological questions.