Is it humanity’s greatest invention? Is it a technology? I incline to the view that it is, as is speech. Is it (or is it not) inherent in all invention? In primary school we are often early taught fire or the wheel are among humanity’s greatest inventions. Would an individual be able to conceive abstraction without access to the teaching of it? Your views?
I'm not sure abstraction or speech (communication) can be classified as inventions, due to them being emergent processes of evolution, brain-complexity, consciousness and social conditioning. I think they should more be thought of as tools of which inventions can be envisioned and created.
Carl Alexander Frisk, thank you for your reply.
Suppose we turn your observation into a question. Can abstraction or speech (communication) be classified as inventions, given their being emergent processes of evolution, brain-complexity, consciousness and social conditioning? Phrasing the issue as a question in this way implicitly ascribes the process of invention to an individual mind. This point of view connects to the field of swarm intelligence.
Suppose we consider invention to be the product of networked neurons processing sensory information and knowledge to solve problems. An average human brain has about 100 billion neurons, or perhaps 86 billion neurons (Herculano-Houzel, PNAS 2012). An ant has about one million neurons. The average human brain therefore has the same number of neurons as a colony of 86,000 ants. The difference is that the neurons of the 86,000 ants are not localized to a single skull, but instead reside in 86,000 mobile platforms. Together the 86,000 ants may “invent” the architecture of their nest.
From the point of view of an individual human, the individual brain has perception and cognition. From the network point of view, only a society has the neuronal capacity and longevity to invent language. Might one argue that the collective mind invents collective products just as individual minds invent individual products?
I think your observations implicitly raise these issues. Thank you again.
Invention isn't the right word for abstraction, which is a cognitive capacity.
Zhuo Jing-Schmidt
Thank you for your reply.
I think you are right that abstraction is a cognitive capacity. I also think your answer has many dimensions.
How does that cognitive capacity come about? Is it innate? If it is innate, where is it in the brain? If it is innate, did it evolve into its current situation? If abstraction pertains to language, how is it possible for abstraction to evolve into a physiological feature of individual human beings, considering that language as we conceive it started about 150,000 or 200,000 years ago (if so). How did the evolution of brain physiology happen, a slower process, while language was still being invented? These questions also relate to the idea of a language instinct.
If an individual human creates abstraction through individual experience, does the capacity for abstraction vary according to experience?
Can a cognitive capacity for abstraction exist independently of language?
Feyerabend in Against Method, wrote: `... describing a familiar situation is, for the speaker, and event in which statement and phenomenon are firmly glued together.'
If he is right, that makes the question about whether abstraction is invented tougher.
If abstraction is created by society collectively, incidental to the collective creation of speech, language, and writing, is it learned by individuals, who then incorporate their cognitive capacity and adopt it as if it is incidental to their perceptions?
These questions seem to be, among many others, raised by your observation. And they are questions that go back to Herder's 1772 treatise, Treatise on the Origin of Language, and probably much further.
Thanks for your response.
A few points to note that are well researched if not already established in recent decades:
--Domain-general cognitive capacities such as pattern recognition, generalization/abstraction, and intention recognition etc. evolved through natural selection for the adaptive advantages they accrue and as such have neurophysiological underpinnings. These domain-general capacities precede and lay the cognitive foundation for language which is not an instinct, but develops through social and cultural learning (Tomasello 1995, 2003).
--The word "invention" refers to the creation of an artifact, process, or product as a tool that serves a particular function by deliberately studying and experimenting.
--Language is not an invention, but writing is.
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