What are ideas?

I can’t build a device to detect an idea

Sure you can. It’s called an fMRI.

Ideas are dynamic electrical impulses coursing through networks of cells in your brain. They’re a physical process with an entirely material explanation.

Let’s ask Ali G.

I think you’re trying to dig deeper than what exists.

I thought they were lightbulbs appearing above ones head.

Construct – you have a hand with some appendages on it. You hold it up and suddenly realize that ‘one’ of them can be used to describe ‘one’ object in your environment. You choose to call that “uno”. Hence, you have had an idea and constructed something from it.

@Sarcasm I think the rabbit hole in infinite; that there’s no end to how much we can know and understand.

Most ideas are reflected residue of immediate experience. The function of the mind is to sort, identify and associate aspects of experience. Ideas are the reflection of that action. I see an apple tree (experience). I associate the word “apple”, the flavor of an apple, I like apples, I think I will go over there and get me an apple (reflections).

Do ideas exist apart from the minds that conceive them? Kant gave a great answer: Epistemology used to be about how subjects know independently existing objects; there used to be a gap between subjects and objects. Kant’s genius is to say that to be a subject means to be a judging subject, and that to be an object is to be an object judged – the meaning of subject and object determine each other. Nothing can be an object except what accords to our categories of understanding (exists spatially, in time, etc.). The relationship is always already internal; there is no trick to finding the connection between subject and object in the question “How do we really know?”, because the subject/object distinction has been broken down.

Do ideas exist apart from the minds that conceive them? Nope, “gravity” didn’t exist before Newton gave it a name. Of course the force of gravity still applied, but it wasn’t part of our knowledge of the world until then.

Science is at least about things that are real. This one’s easy to refute; science is based on its own predicates. It’s no more “about what’s real” than any other category of human knowledge – or, that is to say, it’s all ‘real’.

I could go on but my break’s ending, time for more Hegel.

@doggywuv Yes, but why bother?

Nothing exists apart from mind…including rocks and apples
We create problems that don’t exist and then “find” the solutions. We ignore the fact that the solution and the question are both brought about by our desire. Our desire creates the problem and then finds the solution which give birth to endless problems which continually necessitate further solutions. The seed of any problem has its solution inherent within itself and they are in fact a mutually co arising phenomenon. There really are no problems but simply desire manifesting ignorance which gives birth to ideas.

@wildpotato it’s all real
So unicorns are real?

An idea is a symbolic equivalent for an object or a relationship in the perceived world. Ideas are typically expressed in language (math is just another language). Language is the use of symbols to refer to objects, actions, relationships or anything else in the perception of the person.

Ideas can not exist without symbols. It seems to me that the best definition of both humanity and consciousness is the ability to manipulate symbols. The main purpose of symbols is to communicate with other symbol manipulators. Symbols are used to express ideas so that it is possible to share the ideas.

Without people to conceive of ideas, there would be no ideas. Without another conscious entity to communicate to, there would be no ideas. Ideas are only necessary when you want to communicate. It is possible to communicate to yourself, I suppose. But would you need to develop a symbolic system if you were the only consciousness around?

Well, I don’t think you could think without symbols, but would you even need to think if you were the only one of your kind? It’s kind of irrelevant because there is no life where there is only one of a kind, unless it is the last of a species coming to extinction.

Although this does raise the issue of what a “kind” is. For my purposes a kind is a grouping that is perceived to share similar attributes. With respect to consciousness, something of the same kind exhibits the traits that we associate with consciousness. It’s all relative, I guess.

In any case, ideas are only of use in communication. Ideas can’t be communicated without an agreed-upon set of symbols we use to communicate our ideas. We have no certainty that we all mean the same thing when we use the same symbols. Communication, therefore, is a rather uncertain endeavor. There is never any certainty of understanding. By anyone.

Since we have no idea if we are talking about the same thing, or even if we are talking, ideas might be a delusion, and the idea that there are others out there to communicate to may also be a delusion. In the end, there is only faith that your perceptions are reliable and that you can make predictions about the behavior of your perceptions if you understand the relationships between the things you perceive. It works. Or it doesn’t.

In technical writing it is possible to be very precise about what is being said. Suppose person A writes a book about how to construct a bomb. Person B reads the book, acquires the idea and builds a bomb resulting in loss of lives. Does the idea exist in the book? In what sense? This is more than symbolic manipulation. There are real lives that have been lost.

@LostInParadise As much as gravity is real – unicorns and gravity are both dependent on the human mind for their ‘reality’ – their meaning, their pertinence, their relation to other concepts, etc. That one has physical implications in the world that we perceive and one doesn’t, is a different matter. I guess you could say we’re talking about what the qualifications for categorizing something as ‘real’ are.

@wildpotato Consider the idea of flying. There are at least three different paths of evolution toward flying – in insects, birds and bats. Evolution occurs at the level of protein changes. Flight and just about any other complex behavior have to be seen as emergent properties. What is it that guides evolution? Mutation and natural selection are the engine for change, but what causes evolution to go in one direction and not another? Couldn’t flight be seen as some sort of chaotic attractor? If we find complex life on some other planet, it would not be surprising to find life forms on that planet with the ability to fly. We can speak of the idea of flight as existing separately from its various instantiations, and this occurs regardless of whether humans are around to think of it.

Ideas are linguistic artifacts. That is to say, they are not the product of individual minds but the product of social interaction. Objects acquire meaning through the way people interact with them. The meaning of an object, such as a chair arises out of people’s interactions with it as an artifacts that they can sit upon; likewise, the meaning of the word “chair” arises through a similar process of interaction with this linguistic object and it’s association with it’s physical referent. More complex ideas are built up in a similar way using linguistic objects as their referents.

The deep structure of the universe appears to related to the ratios of whole integers. And this structure appears to exist independently of our minds. However, the idea of an integer is still a linguistic object. And the idea of a ratio, is also an object conveying a relationship between two integers. Ideas do not necessarily refer to anything “real.” The idea of a ratio exists independently of any real-world application of that idea, so it properly belongs to the realm of the ideal, even though it has vast explanatory power when applied to the real world.

Yes, scientific theories and math are human constructs. We do not experience the world directly, we experience a mental construct of the world. Even the idea of an individual self is a social construct, or the idea of an unpredictable future. These are all cultural artifacts.

The word chair is certainly related to social convention. Bean bag chairs, benches and armchairs are all considered chairs because of the way we use them. Integers are different. Because they are so useful in describing the world, they must have some independent existence. We are not at liberty to make up the rules that they follow.

@LostInParadise I’m not sure what you mean. The idea of an integer is no different than the idea of a chair; both have referents in the real world. Same with ideas like “contracts” or complex constructs “Romanticism,” which don’t exist in physical reality but exist in social or cultural reality.

I think we are at liberty to make up ideas based on real world referents (e.g., “horse”) and those that don’t (“unicorns”).

What is the real world referent of integers? Do they exist in space and time? Can I modify the twoness of a pair of apples the way I might change their color or crispness?Addding another apple is not an option because it does not change the twoness of the others.

In short, is there a way of distinguishing between the idea of integers and the supposed real world referent? If not, then Occam’s Razor says that they are one and the same.

@LostInParadise So you’re saying the idea is the thing? It matters not whether there is any evidence that the thing has existence in any other way than as an idea? Can an idea exist without someone or something to think it? Can things exist without some conscious entity to think it?

I could ask a bunch more questions, but that’s already an overload.

@LostInParadise “Can I modify the twoness of a pair of apples the way I might change their color or crispness?”

You could use Occam’s Razor to shave your balls. Or you could cut the apples in half.

@daloon , Yes, I am saying that ideas are things. Unicorns exist as ideas so there is no need for correspondence to reality. And I am claiming that ideas can exist without being thought of. It is the ony way I can imagine mathematical entities. In this regard, the physicist Eugene Wigner coined the phrase, “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.”

@MontyZuma, No need to get nasty. And an apple cut in half is still one apple.

@LostInParadise I am not being nasty. I’m just pointing out that there is more than one way to modify “two-ness.” You could peel your two apples, if you prefer. That would be like changing their color or their crispness. I’m not talking about cutting one apple in half, I’m talking about cutting both the apples you mentioned; 2×2 gives, you two pairs of twos, an abundance of two-ness.

Wigner’s “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics,” if you think about it, actually disproves your claim that ideas can exist without being thought of. The fact that nature is organized according to deeply mathematical patterns, doesn’t mean that these patterns exist independently as ideas any more than the idea of a chair exists independently of the class of artifacts we call chairs.

In order for you to have a mathematics, you have to have a system of notation, a set of axioms, things like number theory, set theory, symmetry, probability theory, a consensus among mathematicians of what constitutes a “proof,” and a language to communicate all this in. All of these are cultural artifacts, stipulated into existence as social facts. But even more than that, mathematics as a professional discipline is a social world, which people are recruited into, become socialized, innovate, and are governed by the norms and mores of the discipline. Thus, mathematics is a profoundly social and cultural enterprise, however much it’s subject matter seems to belong to the world of the Ideal.

So now we can ask, unreasonable effectiveness at what? At explaining the deep patterns of the universe. This too is a deeply social process, where nothing springs full grown from an independently existing world of Ideas. Rather, our theories about physical reality have been built up over centuries. And, it still remains to be seen whether our minds can develop a mathematics that is unreasonably effective in explaining the ultimate nature of reality.

Let’s make this simple and confine mathematics to the arithmetic of real numbers. Someone develops a formula for computing some quantity in nature based on some other measured quatntities. Experiements show that the measurement of the derived quantity matches up with a precision of 5 or 6 decimal places to its computed value. Why should the aritmetic of real numbers be so effective in not just one formula but hundreds and maybe thousands of them? The discipline and socialization of scientists and mathematicians is a fertile ground for creativity but, what is more relevant to this discussion, is that it provides a check that the reported experimental results are accurate.

Although creativity may used to design experiments, the results are not the products of our imaginations. Some scientist once said that anyone claiming to understand quantum mechanics really does not understand it, meaning that although things can be computed, the laws involved are completely non-intuitive and beyond human invention.

@LostInParadise I’ve kind of lost the thrust of your argument.

“Why should the arithmetic of real numbers be so effective in not just one formula but hundreds and maybe thousands of them?”

I don’t know. Why would 10×10=100 not be “effective” in every case? What do you mean by “effective”?

What has the discipline and socialization mathematicians to do with the accuracy of scientific experiments? (Since we are confining ourselves to arithmetic instead of probability and statistics?)

My last comments on this. What do you mean by “effective”? By effective, I mean the existence of equations that model the behavior of the natural world. There is simply no reason why this had to be so. Scientists do not make up their theories, but are led to them by the results of their experiments, and these results consistently show the ability to make predictions using arithmetic operations on real numbers.

I am not really leaving out other areas of mathematics other than real arithmetic so much as ignoring them as the source of the equations.

The discipline in science is what assures the accuracy of reported experimental results. For example, the cold fusion fiasco was an embarrassment to the scientists who made incorrect claims, but it showed the strength of the scientific community in its ability to catch the error.

@MontyZuma
<em>The deep structure of the universe appears to related to the ratios of whole integers. And this structure appears to exist independently of our minds</em>

Of course by the minds who imagined its independence. There of course does appear to be an ordered and numbered universe from the segments of an orange to the rotation of the planets but like you mentioned “in order for you to have a mathematics, you have to have a system of notation, a set of axioms”...

Ideas do appear to have an independence from us at times. Yet I think it’s simply that- an imagination. Perhaps the complexity of our interactions has created a subconscious repository of which we are unaware yet is passed on. Much as primitive responses are part of our physiology.

@SeventhSense “Perhaps the complexity of our interactions has created a subconscious repository of which we are unaware yet is passed on.”

We each inherit a received view of the world which has been coded according to a received stock of linguistic symbols. These theories of this and that, no doubt have internal contradictions and unexplored implications, that when explicated and unraveled can lead us to new ideas that express a and deeper understanding. You could say that these are latent ideas remain hidden and within the unacknowledged structures of our knowledge. Is it meaningful to say these ideas exist independently? No, I don’t think so. Their existence depends on the knowledge structures that imply them. They do not become ideas proper until they are made explicit in such a way that they can be passed from mind to mind.

@LostInParadise “Scientists do not make up their theories, but are led to them by the results of their experiments, and these results consistently show the ability to make predictions using arithmetic operations on real numbers.”

No, I don’t think so. Theory, particularly hypothesis testing, tends to run ahead of empirical validation. E=mc^2, for example, was proposed far ahead of any empirical proof. What kind of equations are you talking about? Structural? Dynamic? Predictive? None of these seems to have much to do with arithmetical operations.

The concept of ideas independent of us seems to be a Platonic Ideal which has its roots in ideas of gods that toy with men and ideals of perfection. These concepts no doubt drove progress at one point but we forgot that they were illusions. I think apart from mind there can be no idea. Even projected intent in writing, film or art has no true independence. The viewer always has a role in the process. Engaging an idea or focusing on an aspect of a work of art it is more likely that there is never anything but subjective response. It seems that the idea of an “idea itself” seems to be highly improbable. More likely we have loose affiliations with certain concepts and more concerted agreements with others.

For example we may naturally have certain predilections with some thought and form groups that form consensus. Artists, scientists, politicians all have their particular affinities. The rest of society will cede to these persons expertise in these areas and allow their opinions to supersede others. This probably gives rise to the concept of ideals and objective truth whereas it was more likely strong passions that people held and society’s expedience to lend to some authority. Those ideas not our own but accepted as society’s knowledge perhaps feel the most alien.

Having failed to find anyone who agrees with the Platonic notion of the independence of ideas, all that I can say is that the issue, at least in mathematical philosophy, is still very much undecided. There are proponents on both sides.

@LostInParadise Well now, hold on there, don’t feel dejected.

Let me explore the other side of the coin for a while: Consciousness, what we take to be our individual consciousness, may actually be a physical process, like photosynthesis (which scientists now believe is a quantum-level phenomenon). It may well be that consciousness creates a kind of mathematical space (a subset of Hilbert space), somewhat the same way that a calculator creates a computational space for all the possible arithmetic operations allowable in the space of it’s display window.

Everywhere we look in the universe, we see fractal geometry. In fact, that may be the underlying mathematics of the cosmos, complete in it’s entirety. If so, perception and memory may be holographic and proceed by a kind of Barnsley compression, so that we all literally carry the rudiments of a complete model of the universe in our heads. But not just us, all of life. Evolution may also exist in a mathematical space which biologists call fitness space .

Ultimately, the sensation of ourselves as individual, particular, unitary selves may be an illusion. We may, in fact, be deeply immersed in a fractal-structured existence, where the distinction between the knower and the known breaks down at the quantum level. Did you know that they’ve even found fractal structures in the fluctuating price of cotton and other commodities. I have a whole book on Fractal Market Analysis.

It may well be that our ideas are complex mathematical constructs. Work in fuzzy logic shows how easily it is to build multi-dimensional servo-control mechanisms. All they would need to do is restrain the chaotic equilibrium of our thought processes long enough that we could hold it in our “mind’s eye” as an “idea.” Indeed, how else are we able to understand each other? When you think of how delicately balanced a chaotic equilibrium is, and how sensitive it is to initial conditions, it is remarkable that our minds don’t go spinning off in all directions. On the contrary, there is a remarkable degree of coherence, coordination, and consistency that holds us individually and collectively in agreement right up to and including the places where people have not made up their minds and society is at a decision-point or fork in it’s evolutionary road.

When large numbers of people make up their minds on any given issue, their behavior changes. They start voting differently and policy changes, setting off a cascade of cause and effect which structures the next problematic issue. For example, the central ideological divide in this country is over whether we should try to reserve the benefits of American society for a shrinking majority of white, christian, male, backward-looking traditionalists, or whether we should share the society’s bounty with traditionally excluded members of society; i.e., blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, newcomers, and future-oriented secularists.

There are all kinds of tacit ideas embedded in this struggle for people’s hearts and minds that are not entirely conscious in the minds of the people who are being persuaded; nonetheless, these implicit ideas structure the conflict just as surely as if they were explicit. People who can not admit to racism, misogyny or homophobia, can more easily admit to an antipathy toward “big government” when said government is seen as the agent and agency of wealth redistribution and social inclusion. It is almost as if these ideas implicit and unacknowledged in the debate comprise a kind of political subconscious, which shapes people’s conscious decisions and opinions without them being fully aware of the extent of it.

There are other ideas that we take even more completely for granted, such as the idea of a future which is unknown, and that the actions we take in the present matter because they shape that future. In the ancient pagan world, the world was seen as cyclical; everything except minor annoyances had already happened, and there was literally nothing new under the sun—until a band of people who were to become the Jews took off from comfortable, predictable, civilized Sumner, and changed the way everyone now looks at the world. So, if our consciousness can be shaped by decisions made in the dim recesses of our history and prehistory, why would it be a stretch to think that it might not be shaped in even more fundamental ways by the deep mathematics or geometry of Ideas?

Certainly, these require a human (or other society composed of other sentient beings) in order to play out, but who is to say that the locus of this activity is the species that is host to them, and not the mathematical structure of the cosmos playing itself out across all of consciousness?

I can’t quite follow all that you said, but I do believe there is something important missing in the current picture of the universe, which is not going to be fixed even if the much sought for Theory of Everything is discovered. Wigner’s unexpected effectivenss of mathematics requires an explanation.

The connection between intelligence and quantum dynamics strikes me as a bit odd, but I am open to it and I know tthat the respected physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose pushes the idea . And if collective consciousness and maybe even spirtuality fall into the mix, well I am a bit more skeptical but still open to the possiblility. It could be that the reductionist approach has about run its course and that the great discoveries will be in how things come together.

@LostInParadise What I am trying to say is that when you strip away the complexity, thinking, and perhaps all of consciousness is a fundamentally mathematical affair—and that the ideas we think are so unique to ourselves and our culture, are actually the only ones possible under the circumstances. If what I am saying is true, it might explain the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics (which would be included in an expanded Theory of Everything).

@Facade Because we’re curious, that’s why!

If you are interested in the sociology of knowledge (what are ideas, how are they formed, who determined what knowledge/ideas are “valid”) the best person to read is Sandra Harding. She is awesome! Way too complicated for me to sum up here…but her ideas basically focus on epistemology and power. Very interesting reads (especially “Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?).

Sounds interesting. I will look into it. I hope that she is not one of those who thinks that science is a social construct.