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I'll probably disagree here. Symbolic meaning is attached to the abstraction only on the second stage, when you have to express it. You can totally understand t
by divan 7y ago
I'll probably disagree here. Symbolic meaning is attached to the abstraction only on the second stage, when you have to express it. You can totally understand things and their relationships without attaching words to them – actually, people who learn foreign languages should be familiar with this feeling, when you understand thing, but can't attach words to them.
Here is a quote of Albert Einstein (his actual quote, this time, from "Ideas and Opinions" :)):
> (A) The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined.
> There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought — before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.
> (B) The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.
- goto11 7y agoA programming language (visual or textual or whatever) is an expression. How thoughts and ideas are represented inside the mind is a different question.
- argd678 7y agoQuite right, for the sake of a visual mental support of a 3d imagine you’re limited to three dimensions, where as the mind doesn’t have these limitations and is n dimensional.
- divan 7y agoCan you provide any support to the claim that mind is "n dimensional"? My understanding is that findings in grid cells research suggest that brain's mechanism to deal with spatial information is exactly "3-dimensional", i.e. optimized to handle our real world space. Which kinda makes sense from the evolutionary perspective. That's why even a simple attempt to "understand" 4-dimensional object wreaks havoc in your mind, and we have to reduce it to some sorts of 3D projections or explain it with math formulas.
- argd678 7y agoIt’s because concepts are just dimensions of information, they don’t always have a physical representation, you can associate and create different levels of abstractions, have different views, sort of like an OLAP cube. You’re doing this all the time, consciously or not, you’re deciding on abstractions that cross cut problem domains. The author touches a bit on it, where he talked about zooming in and out for example to the right level, those are dimensions of the data beyond 3D, or wanting good code to visually look a certain way is another dimension. So those are possible in his model, but you can imagine needing say a function to be in two places at the same time since it’s related to two pieces of code, but you don’t want to duplicate it or draw lines cutting across the diagram to show this. The mind has no problem with say a function being in two places at the same time but not duplicated, but obviously this is impossible in the physical model.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoI can’t think very well beyond three dimension. Maybe those who study higher arity spaces learn how to do that?
- argd678 7y agoIt’s because you’re caught on thinking dimensions are physical, if you realize it’s all really just data it’s pretty simple since you’re doing it already.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoI can do that symbolically, easy, but I can't "visualize" that. Yes, it is data, but to see something even in my mind I have to make it physical.
- argd678 7y agoYeah that requires practice in getting out of thinking physically. There’s a well known and very old exercise back from the 9th century where you visualize a man sitting in a conch shell, and the man has not shrunk and the shell has not changed size. If it’s a struggle, what you’re seeing is just habit and nothing to do with the mind amusingly.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoI can already think symbolically just fine. If it isn't physical, and it isn't symbolic, then what it is it?
- argd678 7y agoSo that direct sense of understanding something, without any helping intermediates like symbols or visual aids, is just the mind directly. It is its own thing. Another way to look at it, is if everything you thought needed a symbolic or physical/visual aid, you wouldn’t be able to represent everything, you wouldn’t be able to think.