Intangible Assets

At least some in the business world have realized that not all things a company can use to further its successes are physical.  No one can grasp or physically see employee morale, consumer brand recognition, and so on because they are objectively nonphysical.  The phrase intangible assets often specifically refers to such things like positive consumer attitudes, brand recognition, and intellectual property as opposed to something like a production facility or land.  This phrase is entrenched enough in business language for it to not be unfamiliar to people who have thoroughly scrutinized business terminology, but precise enough to not be a phrase or a concept that everyone interested in business would naturally think about.  All the same, there are a handful of ways that this phrase and the idea behind it connect with vital philosophical truths and issues.

To clarify, no one needs to think about examples of immateriality in business in order to think about, discover, and understand ideas pertaining to metaphysical immateriality and materiality and the epistemology of proving or disproving them.  However, the concept of intangible assets is also something that could be easily overlooked by businesspeople, some of them naturalists, who use the phrase without ever actually thinking about its actual veracity or ramifications.  Business transactions actually require some forms of intangible assets like consumer willingness to purchase or recognition of company brand, while a few intangible assets like software differ significantly from the ones I will focus on.  

Brand recognition, for instance, is just a reaction of familiarity, or a state of mind within a person's consciousness, and goodwill is just an attitude extended by one person to another, which also makes it a state of consciousness.  In other words, these particular intangible assets that have been identified by some in the business world are just situational aspects of consciousness.  Consciousness, as an immaterial thing that might or might not ultimately spring from a certain arrangement of matter [1]--and that might also be what matter is sustained by on a constant basis, not that any person with my limitations could prove either possibility--and specific mental states like familiarity with a company's work or logo are part of the the experiences specific people.

In other words, some intangible assets are qualities of an individual's consciousness, of something other than themselves, instead of separate things with their own immateriality.  They are neither physical things, for all physical things are tangible at least under certain circumstances, nor immaterial things with the same kind of metaphysical separateness as empty space, time, or the laws of logic, none of which are qualities of other things although there are logically necessary relationships between them and other things.  In the same way that emotions are immaterial despite potentially being accompanied by bodily reactions but could only possibly exist as part of a whole consciousness, the intangible assets like brand recognition or consumer appreciation are merely fragments of something more fundamental that is also immaterial.

In addition to the exact metaphysical nature of such intangible business assets, there is also the fact that there might be plenty of businesspeople who use the phrase intangible assets and knowingly accept the concept as true while simultaneously believing that everything is made of or causally reduces to physical matter.  Naturalists, like everyone except a perfectly consistent rationalist, are capable of not only making true or false assumptions, but of believing in contradictory, exclusive notions.  I do not mean these businesspeople necessarily embrace a strict metaphysical naturalism which would entail that nothing at all that is immaterial exists or could exist, which is already demonstrably false, but a more naturalistic approach to something like consciousness according to which an immaterial thing like a mind can is brought into existence by something material (the brain and/or extended nervous system).

Again, no one needs to specifically focus on the deeper metaphysics of intangible assets to understand immateriality, consciousness, or matter, but these other subjects do dictate the nature of this aspect of business although many in the business world might completely ignore it, as well as ignore the numerous other ways that business, which many pursue with practical intentions in mind, is inescapably intertwined with philosophy.  Not everything that a company can use to its benefit is physical because not everything is physical.  That some immaterial things exist is not purely speculative, but an objectively demonstrable fact, with consciousness being not only one of the immaterial things that can be proven to exist by logical necessity as long as there is any thought or perception, but also one of the only things that can be proven to exist in the first place.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/03/what-is-emergent-naturalism.html