Sensorimotor Origins of Universal Physics

July 27th, 2006 Fred McVittie

“Experiential models of the world are based on sensorimotor and visual experiences with environments, and form in individual minds as the associated bodies and senses experience their worlds. Formal models consist of axioms expressed in a formal language, together with mathematical rules to infer conclusions from them. ” (Mark, 1996)

Universal Physics describes an experiential model of the world based on sensorimoter experience, particularly the experiences provided by the visual and the proprioceptive senses. This model is partly ‘hard wired’ through evolutionary processes, and partly developed through the body’s experiencing of the world. This is in contrast with Rational Physics, which describes a formal model of the world, this model being axiomatic and produced through formal non-embodied languages, particularly mathematics. Although, as Nunez & Lakoff (2000), and Jones (1983) point out, the most formal and apparently abstract languages of science, including that of ‘pure maths’ are deeply embodied through metaphorical mapping of sensorimotor experience, so this contrast is somewhat illusory.

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Embodied Natural Language

August 9th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Natural language contains many terms for concepts which are inherently abstract; justice, love etc. It also contains terms for entities which are beyond the range of human sense; quarks, black holes etc. It also contains terms for entities which are purely theoretical and/or fictitious; ghosts, epicycles, souls, etc. Despite the discorporate nature of these entities, it is apparent that their appearance in language is not discorporate at all. All these concepts, when looked at in the context of their use in sentences and in their definitions expressed in natural language, is made readily embodiable through the application of concrete metaphor. In fact, it might be said that natural language, in its entirety, is a fully embodied system. This contrasts with, for example, the language of mathematics, which is not obviously embodied, (although is it clearly based ultimately on embodied ideas, after Lakoff and Nunez).

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Physics, Maths, and Metaphor

September 8th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The language of both rational and naive physics make extensive use of metaphor in its conceptualisation of abstract entities such as energy, particle etc. A significant difference in the discourse of these two physics (over and above any difference in their application) is that rational physics is underpinned and consequently legitimised by the digital logos of an apparently non-metaphorical transcendent mathematics. However, as Nunez et al (1999, 2004) and Lakoff and Nunez (2000) point out, the apparent transcendent status of mathematics is something of an illusion, and maths is itself ‘grounded’ in embodied metaphor. This does not disturb the significance of rational physics, or undermine the robustness of its findings, but it does indicate that the validity of rational physics is due not to inherent relationship to a transcendent disembodied knowledge. Rather, the coherence and efficacy of rational physics is a result of its referring to and resting on a single limited set of metaphors; those which we use to conceptualise mathematics.

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