Interior Dialogue

Imagination and abstraction Saturday, 27 February, 2010

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.