Imagination and abstraction Saturday, 27 February, 2010
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This post is meant as a completion of the “virtus dormitiva” post. In fact there are two ways to look at explanation, and the previous post only discussed one of them, what will be described below as the “bottom up” view. In this post I point out that there is also a “top down” view. However, the basic conclusion remains the same.
Let us start from the beginning: explanation is a form of communication between intelligent beings and therefore makes use of mental tools available to them. What are these tools?
In an article available on this site (but well hidden, because it requires cleanup…) I suggest, in the context of a discussion of memetics, that intelligence basically consists of building internal, mental models of the external world. First, mental objects are created (instinctively and automatically) in correspondence with certain perception dataset features, or patterns. Non-intelligent beings are capable of this as well. Then, secondary mental objects are created (consciously), by either composing or decomposing objects from the first (primary, or instinctive) group. This is something specific to intelligent beings.
When an object is decomposed, what is needed is a capacity for abstraction, while when objects are combined to create composite objects, what is needed is a capacity for imagination. From this perspective one may say that intelligence is the mental equivalent of opposable thumbs: allowing their owner to easily take apart and put together objects in arbitrary new ways.
Let me give some examples to make it clear what I mean.
A blue sweater is a textile object, which is blue, and which is used to keep warm. From the real, physical object one obtains a mental object, the idea of a blue sweater, which can be broken down into a series of other mental objects among which are the ideas of “textile material”, “blueness” and “warmth”. All three of these ideas are clearly abstract ideas, derived from the real, physical object, the sweater on my shelf (actually, and strictly speaking, derived from the sensory dataset pattern corresponding to the sweater).
An example of imagination is putting together the ideas of pigs and of wings to create the mental object “flying pigs”. The resulting object does not correspond to something in the real world, but other objects which were imagined at one time, later became realities. Very roughly bus+wings=airplane, internal combustion engine+wheels=car, etc. Clearly much (but not all) imaginative activity goes on independently of the real world.
These two basic intellectual processes are in close correspondence with the two types of explanation mentioned above. When an intelligent being communicates an act of abstraction to another intelligent being, that is a top down explanation, because the agent explains how to take apart a composite object. When it communicates an act of imagination, that is a bottom up explanation, because the agent explains how a given object fits into a larger composite object. The argument of the Virtus Dormitiva post relies on the latter conception of explanation. The conclusion, however, remains the same: : explanation is a relational enterprise, and only makes logical sense in a process centered mental universe (as opposed to a substance centered mental universe). A substance centered ontology only makes sense to the extent that time, or the inevitability of change, is ignored. In physics language, it is an approximation valid on sufficiently short time scales.
Note: interestingly, the etymology of the word “explanation” belongs to the abstract tradition: it refers to unfolding something, laying flat a convoluted object. Thanks to Catherine Nicolas for pointing this out to me, and motivating this post.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Alexandru Ioan Căbuz 2010.
Virtus Dormitiva Wednesday, 10 February, 2010
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“Virtus dormitiva” is a notion which appears in the play “The imaginary invalid” by Molière.
In the play, a character is asked to explain why opium causes sleep. He answers that opium contains a “dormitive principle” which is at the origin of its ability to cause sleep. In the original text the phrase is in latin: “virtus dormitiva”.
It is evident that the explanation does not explain anything, but only replaces one poorly understood phenomenon with another. The interlocutor is in no way wiser after the explanation than before it.
In fact, I would like to go further, and put forward the idea that all explanation suffers from the “virtus dormitiva” syndrome. There is no real distinction between real and fake explanations. All explanations are fake, in the sense of “virtus dormitiva”. The value of an explanation never resides in the fact of replacing a poorly understood idea with a better understood one, because the second is never better understood than the first. It always needs, in its turn, to be explained in terms of a third, a fourth, and so forth. The only things which we believe not to require explanation are the ones that we have agreed, that we have accepted, collectively, and at least for the time being, to not understand.
Where, then, is the value of an explanation?
It certainly is not in replacing one idea with another (an “explanatory” one, presumably), but in establishing a relation between the two (or perhaps more) ideas. The value of an explanation is not to help us “understand” an idea or phenomenon as an object in itself, but to draw our attention to a relation or interaction of the given idea or phenomenon to some others. The notion of understanding is therefore, a fundamentally relational notion: we can never understand things, but only relationships between them. When we say we have completely understood a phenomenon or idea, that is equivalent to providing a complete set of relationships in which the said phenomenon or idea participates. The difference may seem cosmetic at first: “so explanation is relational, so what?” Well, the relational conception differs from the object centered conception in that it is a process-centered view: it incorporates time/change from the start.
This is also why the notion of “definition” is fundamentally misleading. A definition claims to be an explanation which is definitive, total and exhaustive, and which fixes once and for all the description and meaning of an object. It is misleading in its finality; it creates an illusory impression of immutability, of something being impervious to change. When a definition requires an update, or modification, that does not mean the old version was “wrong”; instead what is wrong is our expectation that a final, “correct” version exists at all. There are no “correct” definitions, only definitions that may be more or less useful, in a given context. The attraction of western thought for this approach (of “defining” things) is clearly very closely related to its ontological, substance oriented approach since Parmenides (see also the Ontology, truth and politics post and the Philosophy page).
Among other things, this supports a view of science (and abstract thought in general) as a set of useful fictions.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Alexandru Ioan Căbuz 2010.
