I don't think, given that we don't even have a particularly full understanding of how human conceptual logic functions, that we can claim that even AIs are using it as well. It's only "abstracting" in the sense that it has labeled one million objects in its training set with the word "tree," and fuses many of those images together to form a general picture dependent on specific parameters made to limit its set (oak tree, winter tree, etc.)
But that is different from me or you using the word tree, which is just a signifier among signifiers, it stands for nothing but a negation of the very thing it points to in a certain set of symbolic relations. Humans communicate in the order of symbolic structures, our minds function much more like LLMs, creating multitudinous pattern relations. What you call "abstract concepts" are of a secondary order imposed to create rigorous exactitude overtop the riddled mess that we call the human psyche.
I don't think, given that we don't even have a particularly full understanding of how human conceptual logic functions, that we can claim that even AIs are using it as well. It's only "abstracting" in the sense that it has labeled one million objects in its training set with the word "tree," and fuses many of those images together to form a general picture dependent on specific parameters made to limit its set (oak tree, winter tree, etc.)
But that is different from me or you using the word tree, which is just a signifier among signifiers, it stands for nothing but a negation of the very thing it points to in a certain set of symbolic relations. Humans communicate in the order of symbolic structures, our minds function much more like LLMs, creating multitudinous pattern relations. What you call "abstract concepts" are of a secondary order imposed to create rigorous exactitude overtop the riddled mess that we call the human psyche.