To the head of the queue, from May 2011, on general principle. Since I've got progress on my mind these days, think of this as an example of how knowledge has progressed since Plato. [Shooting fish in a barrel.]Consider Plato, his brain, and his philosophy.
In his philosophy Plato wondered how some thing, such as a bed, could exist when it presented so many different appearances, appearing large and small or variously tilted, and so forth. Thus in the Theatetus (152d) Plato has Socrates teaching a secret doctrine of Protagoras:
It declares that nothing is one thing just by itself, no can you rightly call it by some definite name, nor even say it is of any definite sort. On the contrary, if you call it ‘large,’ it will be found to be also small, if ‘heavy,’ to be also light, and so an all through, because nothing is one thing or some thing or of any definite sort. All the things we are pleased to say ‘are,’ are really in process of becoming, as a result of movement and change and of blending one with another.
Plato inferred that there must be something behind those appearances holding them together. That something was the Ideal Form of bedness, which existed in realm of Ideals.
This problem is one quite familiar to researchers in the cognitive sciences, only we do not think of it as having anything to do with the nature of beds. Rather, we think of it as having to do with the nature of perception: How can the nervous system identify objects given the multiplicity of appearances they present to the eye? Many proposals have been made in answer to this question, some rather general, others quite specific. But none of them has recourse to Plato’s Ideals. Rather, they tend to propose something which might be called a canonical form along with a set of transformations which map perceptual appearances to the canonical form. This canonical form corresponds to Plato’s Ideal Form, but has its existence in some physical mechanism for processing information.
Given this last observation we might speculate that Plato’s philosophical efforts were thus, in effect, an attempt to understand the operations of his own nervous system. Just what Plato in fact knew of his nervous system isn’t quite clear. But he certainly didn’t have anything approaching a contemporary understanding. We know that he believed humans to be animated by three souls, one located in the head and concerned with reason, another in the breast (“midway between the midriff and the neck”) and concerned with the passions, while the third was located in and about the liver (“between the midriff and the boundary of the navel”) and concerned itself with physical appetite (Timeus 69d-71b). We now know that control of all of these functions is located in the brain, which is located in the head. So, if we are going to grant that Plato was constructing a representation of the operations of his own nervous system, we also have to grant that it was a rather poor representation — just as future generations may look back in amusement at our own theories on that score.
If we see that, in some respect, Plato’s meditations on ultimate reality were really meditations on his own nervous system, do we not have to admit that we may be doing something similar? Despite the fact that we’ve got very sophisticated concepts about perception, cognition, brains and nervous systems, nevertheless we may, in some respect of our thinking, be caught in a confusion similar to Plato’s: What we mistake for thoughts about ultimate reality are, in fact, the operations of our own minds of which we are, as yet, unaware. Dare we venture further into asserting that, not only is such a misprison a possibility, but that it is, in the logic of the situation, a necessity?
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