Thank you for your positive feedback, Erik. I have a reply to your specific comment. You asked,

"where does the abstract idea of dog exist? It has a real-life analogue, the actual dog (which exists directly biologically), my personal idea of dog (which is some shadowbox of brain-states and electro-chemical activity), and then there is the non-corporeal space onto which I can intentionally and consciously project a simulated composite of my idea of generic dog (which is, I guess again a phantom extrapolation of brain states), and then there is this supra-organism-like holographic projection of the Ur-Dog, which is stabilized, independent and carried forward by the entirety of the human species ..."

My answer is that, while we may each have an abstract idea of a "generic" dog, some people may not, and even those of us who do will not agree entirely on how it is defined and what it covers. Dingoes? Jackals? Wolves? It may differ from culture to culture, and I think we are fooled into thinking we share a generic concept of dog by the fact that we who know English share a word for "dog". That is, it's the word, not the exact concept, that is shared, and that word activates in each of us the nerve network that represents our own abstract concept of dog, which is rougly the set intersection of all of the more specific nerve networks we have for specific kinds of dogs and individual dogs that we know.