About a Chair

I recently re-read Arthur Eddington’s introduction to his book “The Nature of the Physical World,” in which he speaks of a table as I am writing and about my chair. ……

My chair is made up of atoms, and atoms are almost entirely empty space. That means my chair consists in very large part of emptiness. My chair is a blur of uncertainty, which I’m allowed to think of an unimaginably tiny particles whizzing around in a fuzzy manner. I know I mustn’t think of these particles as ‘things’ in exactly the sense I think of the chair as a ‘thing’ – something that can be pinned down in the accurate way we expect to pin ‘things’ down. I wonder whether a chair consisting of ‘non-things’ can itself fairly be called a ‘thing,’ and why I see it as such. Is my familiar chair more real than the same chair as Eddington describes it? Or must I consider the smallest level of the universe the most ‘real’? We shall get back to those questions later. My chair looks read enough to me. ~ Page 5

What do you and I really know about chairs or anything else? How do we know it? We humans have gone a long way beyond such modest observations of the world around us. We trust not only our five senses but a wealth of accumulated findings and a spectacularly complex system of mathematics and logic. From all of this we hope to find out the truth about far, far more than chairs and tables. What is the universe? How did it begin? What happened before that? How and when will it end? What is space and, even more puzzling, what is time? we hope to be able to answer Hawking’s questions “Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?” We hope, with him, to know the mind of God. ~ Page 6

……. We know that the human mind has become a superb device for compressing the wealth of information it receives from the five senses into useful, meaningful, abbreviated form. Thought and memory could not work as they do if we were not equipped to do this compressing. It doesn’t seems far-fetched to think that our brains, having been wired this way by evolution, might continue with this process out the habit, even to the extent of finding pattern where there is no inherent pattern to be found.

But could the human or pre-human brain have created the very concept of pattern if there had been no pattern at all to be found in the universe? Is that perhaps how we have come to interpret a quantum blur as a chair? Are there in reality in infinite number of dimensions, only four of which our senses and our consciousness allow us to know about? Does time perhaps not flow chronologically in the way which allows us to remember the past but not the future? can we prove anything about this at all? A good argument against an absence of all patterns is that evolution itself is a pattern. If that pattern exists only in our minds, could anything have done any evolving?

It’s difficult to see how all patterns could be merely our invention. But could it be that human beings have come to attribute more importrance to the pattern found in the nature than nature herself does? Consider the symmetry we find in nature. We have only to look around us to see that there is far more to the picture than simple symmetry. Symmetry seems to be an ideal which much of the universe fails to live up to, at least on the levels most obvious to us. ~ Page 17

Semantics and Syntactic Categories

What is a noun? We all learned in high school that a noun is the name of person, place, or thing, that is, a bounded physical entity. That's not a bad place to start. The names of persons, places, and things -- bounded physical entities -- are certainly the best examples of nouns. Of course, there, many more kinds of nouns than that.

Before we look at other kinds of nouns, let us consider what "name of" means in this case. The 'name-of' relation is the relation between something conceptual and something phonological, like the relationship between the concept of a chair and the phonological form of chair. A chair is a thing and 'chair' as a noun is the name of that thing. From a neural perspective, the 'name-of' relation is one of activation. When we hear and understand language, the phonological form activates the concept; in speaking, the concept activates the phonological form. Particular cases of naming are conceptual-phonological pairing. The word 'name' designates the phonological pole of such a pairing.

The Noun category, is therefore, at the phonological pole of the conceptual Thing category. The relation that links the Thing Category to the Noun category is called the Noun-relation. The Noun-relation is a category consisting of naming-relations between particular things and particular phonological forms. In short, Nouns symbolize Things. ~ Page 500/501 Excerpt: 'Philosophy in Flesh" Authors George Lakoff & Mark Johnson