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Return to Aristotle / 3. The biology of the soul back to Aristotle

I realize that the tone of the last contribution was rather theoretical, and then reading boring and inaccessible, even if it contained a number of elements necessary to support what I say. And I also realize that these are my thoughts quite personal, which end up leaving little room for criticism. But I would do the same great pleasure, if at least some of the friends who have so actively participated in the exchange of ideas on mythos and logos , could also come here to donate their valuable contributions, trying to turn the almost-monologue Shop in a more lively dialogue. (However, the small company that has followed me thus far has already given us insightful and appropriate interventions.)

One goal of this reflection, however messy and incomplete, is to propose a theory, not very innovative in hindsight according to which scientific activity is the necessary product of the human brain, specifically the mind.
The activity in question is connected with the use of mathematics, which is not a science, but it is one of the forms of their language in the human brain, that is a pure product of mind and non-existent outside of it, Like the verbal or musical (more suitable for other human activities that scientific development).
The scientific activity is the processing and organization of any feeling to cross the border of our indoor-outdoor living body. We have no choice in this. Whenever we get a visual or auditory stimulus, Every time I cross the road, whenever we compare between the two of them looking for a geometric sphere in an apple, every time we feel the urge to give a kiss to a loved face, they begin to move inside the vital chains of chemical reactions, governed by the brain's response to external stimuli that have crossed the border. Both the stimuli that the responses are processed by the mind according to a code that necessarily elaborante structure of the mind. Besides being process "uses throw-away", some of these stimulus-response chains (also including multiple levels of "round trip" between the interior and exterior) can be formalized the mind, to finish stored in memory. In the system of perceptual organization mental language of choice in which this happens is mathematics, while for other types of processes can be, for example, verbal language or music. In any case, these languages \u200b\u200b carved into the structure of the human brain. The music, speech, science, there are only in our minds.

I hope to clarify this block of concepts in more detail in the next action. In this post I will, however, insist on the contribution of Aristotelian thought provides inspiration to my thesis. In particular, the fact that the scientific ideas of Aristotle - that in the modern world, both inside and outside the academic environment, were considered a relic of a primitive or a "child" of doing science - should be regarded instead as the product of an investigation of extremely fine, and not so much not only about the objects of science itself, as the relationship between human beings and the world around . Showing that science is nothing more than this, or another form of poetic expression.
This sense of Aristotelian thought is that which stimulates many of my thoughts, or that we can not give the study an external reality independent of the activities (will?) The person who observes it. That this continuing game of projection ειδος in the outside world, internal mental images, crossing the boundaries of the body and drawing new boundaries in the geometry of the mind, and that these images, with a mathematical procedure, the mind abstracts organized forms, is the only form of access to the outside world that we are given. It starts from the Thomistic nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu for outcomes that surpass empiricism (avoiding the temptation of walking immateriality of Berkeley) and come with modern neuroscience. Our vision of reality is the result of perception and structural organization of the brain. In short, we must always see the world from behind our eyes. We can never go out of our body to an objective reality. We can never enter the brain behind the eyes of someone else, to have his own perception of his own reality. And this regardless of the value to be assigned to reality, material or ideal. Aristotle was born in

Stagira, northern Greece, the son of Nicomachus who was court physician to the royal family of Macedonia. For this reason his first studies were in medicine, until in 367, seventeen, was sent to Athens to study philosophy with Plato. He remained for twenty years in the Academy but, although it was probably the most brilliant student of all, had over time developed a specific objection to many of the teachings of Plato, so that he was appointed head of the Academy when Plato died. For this reason Aristotle left Athens and traveled for about ten years, mainly in Asia Minor. We can assume that his studies of biology Datin from this period. In 338 he returned to Macedonia, to become tutor to Alexander the Great. When his young disciple conquered Athens, Aristotle returned there and created his own school, known as the Lyceum. Aristotle remained in Athens until shortly after Alexander's death when, as a result of popular uprisings against the Macedonian invaders, his social position became increasingly critical to risk the death penalty. Was forced to retreat on the peninsula Evia island, far from Athens, where he died in 322.

It 'difficult to summarize briefly the contribution of Aristotle to the sciences of antiquity, but I think for some readers Bottega is amazing to discover how and with what skill and depth Aristotle was an empirical scientist, even before a philosopher. And 'one of the great ironies of history that the writings and ideas of Aristotle, based on large part on direct observation and manipulation, were used in the Middle Ages and beyond just to disrupt and prevent the development of formal sciences, after the School Aristotelian thought had amalgamated with Christian doctrine.
Aristotle, the first of empiricists, classified physical objects that he thought were the reality accessible only with experience. All objects, including bodies (it is he who invented the word, both the concept of body as aggregate set of elements to perform a function well-defined ) are composed of potency and act, matter or form. A block of marble has in itself the power to take any form the sculptor to give him, a seed or an embryo has the power to grow into the final shape of an animal or plant. In living creatures he identified the form with the 'soul : plants have a core of generally lower, the animals generally higher and can "feel", humans are the only ones to have a rational soul. I stress again that, in modern terms, the better identification of the soul is the Aristotelian definition of the materialist-functionalist mind that is given in neurophysiology ("can not be a change in mental status without a change in brain state") even if the plants are only partially included in this description, limited to the sensitive sphere. It should be noted that according to Aristotle the soul is a sensitive part (ψυκη) and part intellectual (νους). (An identification of the soul, for example, the genetic code or DNA would be conceptually possible, but the distance between the genotype and phenotype an individual is too large to make it almost plausible.)

The animals were classified by him according to their form of life (modern taxonomy), their actions (ethology) and, more fundamentally, in terms of their parts (anatomy ). Although Aristotle's work in zoology is not error-free compared with modern knowledge, his was the greatest synthesis of his time and was the authority in the field for centuries after his death. His observations on the anatomy of octopus, the cuttlefish, crustaceans and other marine invertebrates are remarkably accurate, and could have been made just downstream of the experiences of anatomical dissection. He described the embryonic development of chickens, distinguished whales and dolphins than fish, described the compartmentalized stomach of ruminants and the social organization of bees, he noticed that some sharks give birth to the children already live. His books on animals are filled with accurate observations, some of which were experimentally confirmed until many centuries later. It is classified in groups
kinds (a term that has a much broader sense than modern) animals with similar characters, and distinguishes between different species within the genus. Divides animals into two types, those with blood and those without blood (at least based on the presence of blood red), a distinction that corresponds closely to that between modern vertebrates and invertebrates. Animals with blood (vertebrates) were classified into five genera: viviparous quadrupeds (ie mammals), birds, oviparous quadrupeds (reptiles and amphibians), fish, whales (including that he not among mammals, including but while dolphins where he discovered the presence of the placenta: it is remarkable that on this point Aristotle was discredited by his successors, and dolphins were properly included among mammals only by modern science, more than two thousand years later). The bloodless animals were instead classified as cephalopods, crustaceans, insects (genus that included spiders, scorpions and earthworms), animals with shells (including molluscs and echinoderms), and zoophytes-plants or animals, cnidarians like that in the eyes of Aristotle resembled plants.
love for the classification and grouping similar kinds inevitably led him to formulate a hierarchy of linked progressive change in the shapes of animals, a kind of embryo of evolutionary theory in which he was joined by other thinkers of the time. Moreover, imagination and intuition led him into dead ends in some cases, such as being attributed to heart the seat of the vital functions whereas only the brain as an organ for cooling the blood. I suppose at least qualitatively to understand brain function, he should be able to perform the dissection experiments on live animals. As discussed
forward, talking about physics, Aristotle was not an investigator in the proper sense, but an acute observer of nature. In fact, he never set in place a real experimental setup is intended to prove or disprove a hypothesis, but pushed his remark as deep as he could.

The Aristotelian science of the earth is found in his treatise on Meteorology , a term in this case much wider than the modern meaning, including "all the phenomena common to air and water, and the kinds and parts of the earth , and the phenomena of its parts. " In this paper he discusses the nature of the land and oceans, and describes Among others, the hydrological cycle in exceptionally modern terms: "Why is the sun in its movement, sets in motion processes of change and becoming and decay, and for its action and pure fresh water every day is brought in dissolved air and steam, and thus increases in the higher regions where it condenses back to the cold, and thus returns to the earth. " In the same text he discusses wind and earthquakes (which he believed caused by winds underground), thunder, lightning, rainbows, meteors, comets and the Milky Way (which groups all under the category of weather phenomena).
Moreover, his vision of the history of the planet also has some very modern ideas: "The various parties Earth has not always been dry or dried, but they change, the changing of the rivers that run and dry. And likewise the relationship between land and sea changes, and where there was dry land comes the sea, and where it has the sea one day you will land. But we must assume that these changes follow a certain order and a certain cycle. The principle and the cause of these changes is that the interior of the earth grows and decays as the body of plants and animals [...] But the whole process of life on earth is happening gradually and in periods of time so huge in comparison the duration of our lives, that these changes may not be observed, and before their course can be documented from the beginning in the end, nations perish and are destroyed. "

Aristotle's observation that the circular nature of celestial motion is evidence of the limited space of the universe is much deeper than it may appear. It contains in fact the intuition a conservation principle (what we call in modern terms angular momentum of the universe) that sounds very modern physics. We must be careful in the discussion of Aristotelian thought, to keep separate his claims based on at least one element of observation, from those based on pure speculation. And even among the observations, his and his contemporaries, we must take into account the limited capabilities experimental era, such as the inability to sufficiently accurately measured intervals of time (not until the eighteenth century, and Christian Huygens for a quantum leap). For example, one of the arguments put forward by Aristotle to prove the eternity of the universe was the constancy of the speed of motion of the stars (in his formulation, the motion of the ether). Today we know that the universe as a whole is slowing , and this is one of the important evidence supporting the Big Bang theory, but this slowdown can not be measured with instruments that ecezionalmente refined.
Aristotle's belief in a universe without beginning or end of law would place him among the forerunners of theory of ' stationary universe, (re) formulated in the '30s by British cosmologists Roger Hoyle and Hermann Bondi, and repudiated the late 60s by the discovery of cosmic background radiation, estimated residual of the Big Bang. Or perhaps better, the theory of 'balance universe of Einstein, the solution of relativistic equations with nonzero cosmological constant, which was essentially put into crisis by the evidence of the universe (Einstein said here that this was the His most serious mistake). This view, though debatable, but certainly original and modern, however, led to an interpretation of Aristotle necessarily cyclical phenomena, to ensure the condition stationary as immutable reality. While this was necessary for Aristotle, on the one hand to avoid the logical paradoxes of the Eleatic school system and to strictly comply with its teleological view of nature, such a request to modern ears is not required to provide a possible solution to the stationary or equilibrium for a model of universe based on general relativity. For us today it is a plausible universe "open" time without end, though in constant evolution and change (for example, you could read the fine article by Freeman J. Dyson popular "Time without end: physics and biology in an open universe ", in Reviews of Modern Physics of 1979). Although the difference fundamental between Aristotle and modern theories of the universe, expanding and "inflationary", and the presence of a singularity, or Big Bang, which emerges from the fabric of space-time relativity, I think I have reason to suspect that If Aristotle were alive today he might have appreciated such a possibility, change in eternity, because the absence of a final time limit ensures that all possibilities are actually co-present between potency and act, and therefore immutable, even if we we perceive as apparent flux.

Personally, aspects of scientific thought of Aristotle that leave me colder it is precisely those who would falsely appear more modern in today's lean times of reductionism in favor of a diverse squad of holistic approaches. Yes, the theory of the organic universe, the dual identification of microcosm and macrocosm, which seem so close to the visions of a certain para-environmentalism that reaches Bateson & C. But sometimes paradoxical conclusions of Aristotelian physics, the non-role of mathematics in his thought (the importance of absences, sometimes), and its vision of the universe as purposeful living organism (here we go again with the 'Gaia Hypothesis of ecologists to Ray Lovelock?) will talk next time ...

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/ 2. The geometry of the mind back to Aristotle

This second episode of the talk on Aristotle tries, and I do not know what happened as possible, to develop further the concept of boundaries statute, starting with the Aristotelian theory of places and moving between mathematics, physics and neurophysiology, in the direction of establishing a basis for analysis of human perception (in general, animal ) of the outside world, properly defined, and then to discuss the activities of scientific investigation in terms of mental operations.

Aristotle did not invent the word place , τóπος, he found existing in the Greek language with its sense of place, physical place. If you look at the modern use of the word place, placed, you realize that they generally require the association to a resident who makes his residence. It 's rare that we use the word site with a genitive inanimate. Examples. The site of a rock? The site of a house? In the philosophical connotation, the word place brings an existential meaning, and to indicate the location of the geometric space is used rather than the word place or site constructs and their derivatives, such as location, inherent located.

Assuming, of course all be discussed, that the word implies a place to stay there, we call this being Lord of the place, be it human or animal. Each animal forge a place for its activities. Every living being is the center of a three-dimensional geometric domain, its τóπος, where he practices his reproductive activities, hunting, etc.. A domain is a volume that has a center of gravity, from which the Lord gives life and family ramifications. It is important to emphasize that such a geometric domain exists only in the mind of the Lord. The raids, or rather the external excursions are limited by boundaries, fixed objects that mark the end , the εσχατα Aristotle (τω δε τι κεξωρισμενον, which is separated ) that the individual for her own choices and cultural life will not exceed (boundaries that are clearly time-varying). In a simplified manner, we can say that Aristotle imagined that every living thing with this is his territory mental, inner projection of outer space in which to be lies. What I would like to discuss is how this is related to the mental territory physical territory in which the animal is submerged.

Initially, we attribute this to be a mobility within this domain (in the mathematics of topology, is called a connected open set) of the ordinary Euclidean space. The need for a place to have the εσχατα is a locally owned, which characterizes the ' be the ουσια. The site is defined by its external border. But what should be surprising is that this local property is actually set up as a double border. In terms of geometry, topology, and a convex hull replacing the place of extremes. This is the very nature of the concept of topological edge, border.

With Parmenides appears for the first time the concept of συνεκησις, usually translated as continuous (referring to the continuity of space). Translation partially misleading, according to René Thom (author of the famous essay on Aristotle as "the first topology of the history of mathematics" that inspired these reflections), which emphasizes that the sunékesis , which flows along , rather evokes the concept of domain continuously connected (without breaks) as tracing a perimeter of an object without lifting the pen from the paper. How would the sailors, who can test the connection geometry to complete the circumnavigation of an island. In fact, at the time of the late Plato and Aristotle, surveyors experienced a certain repugnance to the idea that two points were coincident, the notion that lacked even a proper term. Later, however, the time of Euclid, it will not hesitate before the operation concept of sliding two geometric figures in space, to bring them to match and verify the equivalence, for example by moving a team spirit on one line (the verb Euclid επιαρμωζειν indicates this). Thom noted that an immediate reading of the formula Εν ταυτωι γαρ τα εσχατα του περιεξοντος και του περιεξομενου (for the little 'I remember greek would translate as wholesale are together the edges of the perimeter of the perimeter and above underlying ) Aristotle seems to think of an identity boundaries, where the adverb is used instead in ταυτωι sense of proximity, what today we would call internal identity of two sets.

This discourse leads us to explore the idea of \u200b\u200bcoincidence of two points, as designated in the enigmatic Aristotle says: "The entelechy generates separation." Consider an infinite straight line at both ends. If we place a point source O on this line, the entelechy the cut made by the arbitrary choice of origin, creates two half-half for any segment AB that passes through the origin, and the line itself. The intersection of the two half-segments, X'-AX and B, are distinct, X and X ', although coincident. As in the case of the two geometric figures translated to make it match the perimeter, the boundaries are overlapping but distinct .

This Aristotelian theory of the site has historically suffered from a profound ambiguity, even defined the locus horribilis Aristotelianism, seen as an outdated monolith of more primitive conceptions of the teacher accused Stagira. Ambiguity is a theory of inspiration strictly geometric in the modern sense of the term or, conversely, a theory based sull'etologia, ie employment of space from the living? The second view seems more relevant to the tradition "biologistic" of Aristotle, and would make it the cornerstone of modern ethology of central questions: How does an animal to organize their living space within a certain area? For example, birds have the natural barrier of the nest, which is a key element in the education of children, the subject of many ethological studies. There is an activity in animals
projection on the inner eschata eschata outer boundaries reproduce the map of the territory that borders the soul, which is determined simultaneously, over the movements of the Lord's place within its territory. Build a continuum of mental spaces involved in moving the physical places that are a match while remaining distinct, which is also an external mapping 's own inner world. The structure ενταυτα, coincident, the εσχατα εσχατα on external affairs. A double edge, empty, which again according to Thom, an analogy in the mathematical formulation of topological edge for two sets overlap, d ⊗ d '= 0, a non-place-place, a no coincidence size.

E 'need for this identification of bidirectional coincidence without identity between external and internal borders, or just a new artificial language devoid of any substance? We
to a body that atraverso the border of the body contact the outside world (the representation that makes the brain) and the inner world projected in imagery, such as the eye. The vision of an external object is to construct a virtual image on the retina, a form enclosed by a boundary. This boundary is projected in the mind as a real board , not at all virtual, some receptors of the retina receive the full, others vacuum, and the brain identifies the transition region between solid and void with a sequence of signals on / off the receptors. This board is propagated backwards in sequence, until the visual cortex, where it is mapped topologically unchanged (with geometric distortion, no doubt, but keeping the connection properties and dimensional relationships) in the neurons of the nucleus visual perception. This seems a plausible modern interpretation of Aristotle's description of the perceptual process, with the union of form and feeling in the generation dell'ειδος, the image imprinted in the soul, which in modern terms is obviously to be identified with the definition of mind that occurs in neuroscience.
The perception is the result of a process of mental impression of forms drawn from outside through the interaction with the boundaries of the body and, conversely, the projection of mental borders on external objects by recognizing the elements of τóπος, scope vital place.

The rejection of the Aristotelian theory of Platonic forms, presented in the "Nicomachean Ethics" is explained in this sophisticated analysis of the perceptual process, so much next to the conceptions of modern neurophysiology. According to Aristotle, Plato's error was the assumption that, since the mind can separate an object and its abstract form, both have exist separately (and as we know, Plato arrives then to attribute reality only to the abstract forms). Aristotle says the other hand, with a very modern look, that the human mind is naturally capable of doing the abstract thought, and the fact that a person is able to abstract the mental image the shape object that generates it, does not necessarily mean that the form has a life of its own. The form, in conclusion, it is purely a mental image, their perception of the process of every being, human or animal, not intrinsic to the object.

This analysis, as only the beginning, still primitive and sketchy, incomplete and totally reprehensible, and all you want, make out, in my opinion, Aristotle's theory places its state of locus horribilis philosophiae the function of a statute boundaries.
That is, the definition of perceptual sensitivity by specifying the boundaries: first, the boundary between inside and outside of the body, what happens inside the life and what happens outside it, and secondly, the boundary that demarcates and sets out the substance of the external world, expressed geometrically as perimeter or area, and temporally as the interval between the beginning and end, and thirdly, the boundary that represents the mental images of external substances, ideally comparable to the real substance in the process of formal recognition, possibly coincident with those, but still distinct, the author of "double border" vanishing zero length that characterizes the methodology of representation.

One might argue that Aristotle in these my speculations longer seems to be used as an excuse methodology, not as a true subject of philosophical reflection. Maybe. But I said from the beginning. And nevertheless, the status of the borders will be used to correlate the activity of mental representation with the scientific activities ... but also linguistic or musical.

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/ 1. The status of borders

A little 'a surprise even to myself, I began to write more frequently in these pages. Surprise, because for a while 'I devote myself more to photography than to write an outlet for my creative ambitions misplaced (for those who want to take a look, this link gives you access to my pages on www.flickr.com).

A little 'a surprise even to myself, from my allotment last wrote a few days ago who spoke in the broad sense, the fear of science, to begin a reflection on my mind for a long time. And perhaps it is time to begin to pull out and put in black and white. The time has come around because they are also stimulating discussions , whose role ends up being not so much and not only the exchange of ideas, but rather the impulse to reflect, review and research the ideas themselves.

I know it will be a long job, because I'll summarize and give a completed form to the boiling for some time in the empty box that I have a head, and said the project is not me succeed and, if they can at least in part, the result of something coherent and complete. For this reason, and also to avoid the usual density of plutonic my writing, inspiring example of the discussions referred to above will try to develop a speech series. And I'm sorry about before you start, but I know that I'll be mythopoeic compelling as the author of the example that precedes me and inspires me. My speech will be much little logos and mythos . I do not think that poets and singers will stop leaving their contributions:)), because I like the background music ' Art of Fugue by Bach, and I doubt that the good young Sebastian could only return from the dead to comment on my blog. So I hope to be, if not compelling, at least convincing.

The target is the fear of science, and symbolizes that hides all the fears of men, ancient and modern (the latter with a number of aggravating and text to load). The excuse is the old Aristotle, to use as a metaphor for speech and at the same time, as practice for the argument against Platonism. Seeing in the latter a current, underground or surface depending on the cultural and historical moments, which periodically comes to suggesting solutions otherworldly, and extracorporeal iperuranee, read incorporeal, for trees and distresses the daily whims of being human.

I feel moved to this location for several reasons, professional, cultural, personal and even sentimental, the latter being, as always, if not the most important, at least the most stringent. But the fear of science in the sense of cognitive activity (which is that at that fraction of people in spite of little or poorly educated) is so biblically rooted, to force even the minds of philosophers established operations to counter denial and comparable from one side to the historical revisionism and political propaganda to the other. I am sure that many, at this point, evoking both came across as an example artificial opposition between Darwinism and creationism. But I think the more obvious cases, though less known, such as the controversy started by Koyré and supported by Feyerabend against Galileo's experiments. In brief summary, the choice antiempirista of these philosophers of science came to the forcing of wanting to make a Galilean platonic idealism strongly influenced (in the words of Koyré, a Platonism "deep and conscious that they had recognized those who had previously spoke of a Galilean platonic "). Because the Vulgate has it that the new science was incompatible with Aristotle, Galileo and would therefore opposed to the world of substances and accidents of Aristotle, the mathematical universe of Plato. This transformation of Galileo empirical idealist has come to deny that Galileo ever really done the experiments recounted in his works. PK Feyerabend has come to present Galileo as an unscrupulous scientist, who did not hesitate to use in the sense of observational data filocopernicano questionable, hiding with skillful maneuvers weak aspects of the theory. For pure

the record will serve to recall that after the criticism motivated by a clear project "political" scientists a bit 'all over the world have tried to reproduce the experiments and even to reconstruct the Galilean instruments, demonstrating the perfect plausibility historiography of the experiments and results. What question would then remain the intellectual attitude of Galileo, or if his work experience has really had the primary role, or whether there are overridden by the mathematical aspect than empirical, as the experiment conducted as verification of assumptions made with theoretical arguments. It 'a controversy of this long term and not a little time in the epistemological debate, but not essential for what I want to talk. Because the written word - that something finally will count - Galileo has never ceased to stress that his Aristotle, had he been alive, he would come to his aid to defend the new astronomical discoveries of the seventeenth century (see the edition of "Heaven" of Aristotle edited by Alberto Jori).

The controversy between the theory or del'esperienza priority goes to the very heart of science, and goes even deeper to the heart, or mind, the relationship between man and cosmos. To start this in my own speech from the limits of human perception, and for this I need first to establish the boundaries of the statute .

First, my view is anthropocentric , and could not be otherwise. Not in the classic sense and potentially negative that has come to give this term, but in a way that, in contrast, conveys all the limitations of animal nature of human beings. Let me explain.
We have experience in the world exclusively through the external border of our body, our border. The border of our body is in constant interaction with the universe, which, when assembled in its portion accessible to us for convenience define reality (bypassing for the moment, any discussion about the reality of reality). We homo sapiens perceive changes in temperature and pressure through the skin, light radiation through the cornea, we recognize various types of molecules through the nasal mucosa and lips, transform sound pressure air through the tympanic membrane, our life cycles are based on the alternation of day and night land rate from which the only intervals that we can understand and handle. This combination of sensitivity intervals (where a competent neuroanatomy easy to recognize the dynamic range of neurons in each nucleus of the central nervous system) is the domain of our interaction with reality, beyond this we can not go. Even the largest and most sophisticated instruments of measurement and observation of the modern era, to fathom interstellar distances, or subatomic distances, and penetrate at times dozens of orders of magnitude shorter or longer periods of our day, in the end require a translation that makes them readable and manipulable by the hands, eyes and human ears.

Thus, our perception of reality is anthropocentric. So what is the meaning of a question like "what is reality?" We, that is, no chance to get an idea of \u200b\u200bwhat may exist outside the border of our body? The response through the development of culture, namely through the logos, that is, through Aristotle Stagira.