Invention and Discovery

Continuing my thought from last week, a thought instigated by Ciceronianus: 

Do humans actively shape the world?  Do we invent reality? Or do we merely discover it?

Surely we build skyscrapers and bridges, in much the same way that birds make nests. We seek to shape our environment for the sake of our own survival.

Is there some sense that doesn’t immediately involve motor activity in which humans invent the world? Something more constructivist?

A “yes” answer seems to make more sense to me than it does to Ciceronianus. In part this is because of reflection on the history of mathematics A very short statement is this: mathematics is a series of outrageous re-definitions of what it means to be a number. We learn to count when very young, and I suppose it has always been thus. The first conception of number derives from the act of counting.

But through our lives, if we receive any sort of education, we learn about ever more outlandish sorts of number. The strangeness of zero, for example.  Or irrational numbers, those wild things like pi that never repeat and never end.  How uncanny!

We may also wrestle with negative numbers. Then the idea of an "infinitesimal." I remember an old Sesame Street episode with the question whether a circle is “all one side” or whether a circle has “a whole lot of very little sides.” Ernie was raising the question of infinitesimals.  Circles (or other curves) can be thought of as an infinite number of tangent straight lines, each line always receding in size, with the Euclidean point as a limit.

Beyond even that, there is the notion of imaginary numbers. In the real number system, the basic rules of multiplication and division make it impossible that there should be such a thing as the square root of a negative number. But forget about that and invent the square root of -1 anyway! Call it i.

These increasingly absurd seeming steps of human reason are also steps of human imagination.  They seem as sheerly inventive as anything else we as a species can do. The paradox, then, is that the inventions of these outlandish notions by clever humans working at a very high level of abstraction, and often unconcerned with practical consequences, always turns out to have enormous practical consequences.

The Mereological Fallacy

Philosopher Anderson Brown contends that much of our confusion about the mind-body problem is a "mereological fallacy," a confusion about parts and wholes.

The stomach doesn't "have lunch." The stomach digests, which is part of the process, but we don't accordingly say that the stomach has lunch, and we don't think of the activity of having lunch as internal. It is a fact about our behavior.

Likewise, the brain doesn't think. Brown doesn't give a name to exactly what the brain does -- what is the equivalent of digestion here? "impulse processing"? -- but it isn't "thinking," anyway. A person thinks and, as with lunch, there is nothing internal about it.

I'll reproduce here in italics the comment I made on his site, except that I'll clean it up a bit for this blog.  I was a more-than-usually sloppy typist in the comment section of his.

I'm reminded of one aspect of Julian Jaynes' theories, in his book on the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

I don't have the book with me so I'll work from memory, and more than usually subject to correction. But Jaynes said that the "bicameral mind" was not "conscious" in the way in which we are, NOT just for reasons of neurology, but because certain metaphors hadn't come into use yet. The idea of a sort of theatre "inside" the human body -- chest or head, depending on who is writing -- started as a highly literary metaphor, and gradually became an essential part of how people saw themselves. THAT was the "breakdown" of Jaynes' title, when the metaphor became generally accepted as a literal fact. Thus, "consciousness" pulled itself into existence by imagining itself, if you will.

This seems akin to your point, except for chronology.

Yet implicit in Jaynes' account is the point that we don't really have a choice. Going back to the bicameral mind is not an option. Or, in your terminology, thinking of thought as a fact about behavior, like lunch, isn't really an option either. The notion of an inner space where we deliberate is something more than a useful fiction, it is a constitutive fiction.

Perhaps rather like the fiction that the elite group of white men that gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 had any business speaking for "We, the people" of the United States.

Looking Inside

Anderson Brown has a fascinating post on the "mereological fallacy" and its significance for the philosophy of mind.

I'll just link to it and allow you to find my further comment on it there.