Points and lines inside human brains

摘要

Throughout the centuries, different skeptical claims have been proposed, from doubts about the possibility of knowledge/certainty, to the doctrine that true knowledge is uncertain, to concerns about the limitations of human mind. Here we will focus on the skeptical tenet that “human beings cannot attain knowledge of the external world”. Throughout the centuries, such skeptical claim has been just tackled through logical weapons (for a survey, from Pyrrho to Erasmus, from Montaigne to Feyerabend and Fogelin, see: Popkin and Maia Neto 2007). However, logic does not describe the world, rather the human interpretation of the world. Indeed, our brain works with models. Demarcation among objects and things is somewhat arbitrary, because our mind tends to exclude the continuity among the world’s structures. We tend to draw a line of separation among things that we judge different, arbitrarily excluding or including issues in our description, to achieve positive demarcations that allow a pragmatic treatment of the world based on regularity and uniformity (Bonzon 2017; Kim and Lim 2017). In touch with set theory, our mind, equipped with logic weapons, tends to split the set of the entire world in different, arbitrary subsets that do not really stand, in terms of quantum dynamics, for different things (Mizraji and Lin 2017; Peters et al. 2017). The same scientific concept of “observable” is based on the choice of variables in an experimental setting: scientists, putting aside most of the variables, focus their efforts on a few features. For example, elementary particles are fully defined just in terms of three experimental observables, i.e., charge, spin and mass (Seiden 2005), putting aside, for practical purposes, less “useful” features.