Idea and Mind
By Nathan Anecone
Ideas are spoken of, but are never touched, smelled, or seen. We point to a book, and say “study the ideas contained in this book.” When we open up the pages, what we see is not ideas, in the sense of some glistening paranormal substance, but words, flake after flake of words. Ideas aren’t objects to be found in the world, they are abstractions that exist only cognitively. They may be pinned and correlated to certain physical things, such as the symbols of a sentence, but ideas are not objects in the simple sense that fridge-magnet letters are objects. That much is obvious.
Even in the domain of our minds through introspection we do not find “ideas” lying around our imaginary premises as though they were little stone idols in a temple. We may able to supply proof that we know the geometrical idea of a line by producing in on paper, “—“and providing a definition, “a line is the shortest distance between two points.” Is this the idea? If so, an idea is nothing but a drawing and a verbal definition. Of course, an idea must be something more than this, something richer. An idea must be an abstraction, a thing held in knowledge, a beam of thought, a unit of imagination.
The question as to what an idea is can be simplified if we eliminate the tradition in Western philosophy that supposes a “metaphysical subject” that invents and evaluates ideas according to transcendental logic or reason. This may seem a doting issue, but it has vast repercussions for the way we think about our minds. Whatever an idea is, it is situated in the map of the body and must follow the logic of the body. Ideas come not from pure disembodied reason, but from the visual-spatial intelligence of our species.
According to the cognitive scientist George Lakoff, the principle concepts of human thought are metaphorical in nature. The basic relations of human thought, Lakoff argues, arise because in childhood certain stimuli appear consistently together, and their proximity is then “conflated” into a unified pattern of conception as the brain matures. For example, the relation “Importance is Big” as when we say “Daphne has a big presentation to give tonight” arises by conflating the sensorimotor domain of size with the childhood experience of finding that important things, such as parents and adults, “are important and can exert major forces on you and dominate your visual experience.” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Human thought also makes the relation “Similarity is Closeness” as in, “baseball is closer to softball than either are to soccer” by having the primary experience of viewing similar objects close together, such as a bundle of blueberries, a flock of birds, and a sink full of dishes (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). In addition, categories are thought of as containers such as “Socrates is in the set of all Greek philosophers.” This equation is performed by making the correlation that “common location [between objects]” implies, “common properties, functions or origins.” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999.)
What can be surmised from all these examples is that the principles of thought are not derived from a realm of disembodied logic but from raw bodily experience, both the personal and ancestral experience of knocking up against the world with limbs, a visual system, and a vertically oriented bodily posture.
The psyche which forms ideas, therefore, does so according to a logic structured by bodily experience and the equipment of the sensory organs. We think not just with our brains but with our skeletons, too. Lakoff’s theory of the embodied mind shows that there is an anatomical basis for thought patterns that is richer than what is normally associated with mental content. As a literal matter of fact, the body instructs the mind. Because we perceive through our faces, for example, and move in the direction in which we perceive, we are able to produce such sentences as “I look forward to tomorrow” in which time and the direction of our perception (“look forward”) is conflated. What the fact of the embodied mind entails is that our abstractions originate from the body’s orientation in reference to the world and not from a fabulous sphere of pure thought or from pure perception of reality.
Because most members of Homo sapiens have a closely similar body plan, the lowest grade of our thought processes is anatomically universalized. Human cognition is not a pure window into the ground of all being, because our anatomy is not structured for pure reason and pure perception into the ground of all being. Our insights into the universe, though they may resound with meaning, are thus in a decisive sense provincial and indirect. Just as how our visual organs cannot naturally detect gamma radiation, but must be bound to the spectrum of visible light, our conceptualizations are limited by the spectrum of the conceivable. What forms the spectrum of the conceivable, according to Lakoff, is primarily metaphor.
Complex metaphor, states Lakoff, is “molecular” in nature, consisting of “atomic” spatial, temporal, body-orientation, and compositional metaphors. Thus when we produce the statement: “popular culture consists of rock music, celebrity adulation, video games, and certain ways of dressing and speaking” we are producing the metaphor (innate to the human mind) that abstractions such as cultures are structures consisting of parts, which can be understood according to a part-whole logic in which components are relatable to a whole.[1] Lakoff believes that a great fraction of thought can be rigorously comprehended according to these “primary metaphors.”
Cognitive science is beginning to show that human thought is not infinitely variable. Though it is true that each human is an individual which has traits entirely his or her own and not belonging to the species as a whole, we are bestowed with almost identical musculoskeletal and sensorimotor organ structure. Though human thought displays breathtaking variability, the bounties of our imaginations are not evidence of arbitrary variation but combinations allowed for by the anatomical formulation of our species’ intelligence.
Such a thesis portends an extraordinary new stage in intellectual history. Thinkers since antiquity have worked using this cognitive structure but were unable to decipher its mysterious codex through intuition alone. They were it. Plato, Saint Augustine, Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant all used this mental embodiment, and were this mental embodiment, and so were only able to glance at its glacial magnitude in the corner of their sight. They used this cognitive structure to generate ideas, carried to us through the medium of language, but they could not chart the map of the mind. Now we are beginning to understand the very matter of thought. If we know the formula of cognition, might we be able to predict the existence of a unified thread underweaving all intellectual activity? In other words, might we be able to have such systematic knowledge of the human mind that we could somehow make inferences of its development into the future?
This question has been taken up by philosophers many times before. In the modern age, it was taken up by David Hume, and later by Immanuel Kant. Hume is considered to be the most rigorous and ableminded of the British Empiricists, a group of philosophers including John Locke and Thomas Hobbes who thought all knowledge was derived from sensory experience. Hume pursued a skeptical agenda of thought that placed all previous philosophical and religious doctrines and dogmas in doubt and asserted experience to be the only vehicle of knowledge. The mind, Hume proposed, was the internalization of sense-experience. Each mind was like a hive of experiences, woven and bandied into an organized gallery of perceptions. To know, according to Hume’s propositions, is to have experienced through the senses.
As meticulous and shrewd as Hume’s program was, it presupposed very little inborn structure to the mind and to took as its leading premise the dubious suggestion that “there is nothing in the mind that wasn’t first in the senses.” Hume was aware of instincts, and in his political and social writings spoke of “natural affections” such as the desire of mothers to care for their children. But he was incorrect about his central hypothesis regarding how the mind intercombines and integrates with sensory data.
Hume would have thought, for example, that our ability to shut our eyes and imagine the color purple is caused by us having previously obtained though sight the essence of purple in the world and then fixing this essence in the observatory of the mind. This is wrong, since color is not a property of the external world in total, but rather is the effect of an interplay of several physical and organic phenomena: the projection of radiation of the visible spectrum, the absorbance and reflectance of the reflective object, the operational schemas of the rod and cone cells of the retinal field in the eye, and the visual processing categories of the brain (Lakoff and Johnson 1990). Hume cannot have been completely right that the mind is a reiteration of experience, because he ignored the interactive embeddedness of the mental categories, the sensory organs, and the physical world.
The thinker who explicated the true predecessor of the modern idea of cognitive structure was the great Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant reasoned that there were transcendental categories of the mind, such as Universal and Particular, Space and Time, Shape and Quantity. These categories were the primordial entities of all reflection. Kant believed that these categories were transcendental, that is, thinking itself would be impossible without them. We may imagine a garden spangled with flowers, or a Cartesian coordinate system with two values (x,y) describing its form, or the odd surface of a distant planet—but to do so presupposes that we can imagine primary elements such as space, number, distance, and topology (surface).
The curious thing about Kant’s argument is that we can never know for certain if reality actually has these properties that structure reasoning. We can’t know if Space, Time, Unity or Multiplicity have any reality beyond our cognition. These categories are the fundaments that form the groundwork of our modalities of thought. They are objectified by the data transmitted to the mind through the sense organs. Ultimate reality, what Kant called Der Ding an Sich (The Thing in-Itself) cannot be known to perfection, since it can never be verified that pure reality coincides with the internal categories the mind presupposes it to have. Kant reasoned that we cannot judge space exists just because we have the sensory intuition of space, that time exists because we have the illusion of temporal flow, and that multiplicity exists just because we detect a variety of objects. Although we have every reason to believe our common intuitions since they are so customary to life, Kant simply stated the simple logical truth that there is no way to logically infer the mind is the clear mirror of the Thing in-Itself.
Although Kant’s ambivalence towards the mind’s relationship to reality is one of the profoundest realizations in the history of philosophy, his supposing metaphysical categories as the source of mental structure is ridiculous and unnecessary. Our domains of perception are the processing schematics of the brain, derived from heredity and learning-interactions with the physical world. Kant was right to think that the mind has native categories, but he made the mistake of thinking these categories could be inferred through technical introspection alone (which was, as in all philosophy, the method he used for the Critique of Pure Reason). That’s because 95% of cognition has been discovered to be unconscious (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Kant’s mission to decipher the mind brought him far, but his task was doomed from the start since most of what he sought could not be accessed by introspection. (It is after all fitting that Kant would call the categories of thought transcendental, because if they were products of the unconscious they would truly seem distant and beyond the reach of comprehension.)
If we want to investigate the question of ideas and their properties, we must better understand the metaphorical and imagistic traits of cognition. We must also understand the synthesis between the world of ideas, the world of bodily relationships, and the system formed by these two in combination with the remainder of the physical environment.
The literal meaning of “metaphor” is something that stands for something else. It is therefore an algebraic notion. The mathematical definition of a variable, such as is a way of showing how a symbol can carry the identity of something else. A dollar bill has this same metaphorical-algebraic property. A dollar is a signifier of exchange value, it is therefore analogous to the of the variable definition. Ideas in general have a representational quality. This is true on a linguistic level since each word has a logical relationship within the language-system, and it is true for the imagistic mental schemas which coordinate with the signs.
What do we mean when we say a sign represents an object? In the literal sense, it cannot be that a sign represents and object, in the same way that a researcher could show a child an apple, put the apple behind a curtain, and then re-present the apple to the child’s vision a moment later. What we mean by representation is the notion that products of thought can serve as models of the world. This idea, called correspondence theory is the concept that ideas are compressed holograms of the world or possible worlds.
Correspondence theory claims that a logical sentence can be used as a ruler to measure things. If I state “The earth is flat” that proposition has pictorial properties which project in our minds the model that the ground we are standing on does not eventually curve but continues as a plane. Truth, according to correspondence theory is when a logical sentence corresponds to the way things really are: i.e., “The earth is round.” In an exactingly logical sense, there is a (vast) set of sentences which could be written out that would give the “absolute truth of everything” insofar as each sentence in this list corresponds to every entity ever configured within existence. Yes, there is a plurality of different conceptual systems in the world, but that only means that there is a variety of configurations of logical sentences lying out in books. Not every one of these conceptual systems and their logical sentences will be the “right” because many conceptual systems do not correspond to objects. The totality of language depicts the totality of possible state of affairs, but only a minute sliver of these sentences would depict actual state of affairs the happen in the universe.
Correspondence theory has a likable ring to it considering it reduces the concept of truth to a simple interaction between symbols, mental objects, and worldly objects. The kernel of this conception is that an orchestra of symbols can be written that conducts abstract mental objects into certain patterns in the mind, which in turn hitch into alignment with the way things really are in the world. Such a conception totalizes logic, makes logic out to be the ground of all being. As harmonious as this conception is, there is no indication just what a correspondence really consists of. It is just asserted as one of the hidden premises of the theory. In traditional formulations of the correspondence theory, mathematical truth-functions are supposed to determine the truth or falsity of atomic propositions, elements of a proposition that unite with other elements to make a true or false proposition, e.g., “ I was born in the year or 1990 (true, false). Therefore, I am no younger than 20 years (true, false). The way the proposition unites is the way the facts of the world unite, so the correspondence theory would have it.
As Lakoff points out, the correspondence theory is problematic since it fails to stipulate just what these metaphysical correspondences between symbols, mental pictures, and the world are. The theory of the embodied mind posits a more homely version of ideation. We view concepts to “structures” not because ideas are geometrical widgets that have distinctive parts, joints, nodes, and so forth, but because through learning, neurobiological conditioning, and linguistic familiarization we make the direct observation that physical objects consist of movable articulated parts, and we have no other means to describe the strangeness going on in our minds so we connect these systems through metaphor. One definition of metaphor is “Converting some phenomenon that is not understandable to human thought into a form that is understandable to human thought.” Metaphors are putting the terms of the world into terms that we can understand through something analogous to translation. The essential point is that these metaphoric constructions do no fluidly map onto the Thing in-Itself, once our brains learn them during the early fraction of the human lifecycle they are irreversibly converted into distinctive cognitive schemas that have since lost their elementary connections to become entirely synthetic.
Whether the mind can use these schemas to facilitate genuine understanding is a problem of great depth. Lakoff argues that our metaphoric schemas arise because there are authentic relations happening in the world, and we pick up on them through the process of development and maturation. Once they grow into the twine of the cortex, these concepts are kept—not just as accidental baggage, but also because they convey indirectly the order of the world encompassing consciousness.
[1] In fact there was an entire movement in cultural studies called “structuralism” founded by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the anthropologist Claude-Levi Strauss. This entire program of thought works from the part-whole metaphor that cultures and languages consist of discrete chunks that emerge according to historical continuities.
Works Cited
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic, 1999
