Abstract
The hard problem of consciousness is explicating how moving matter becomes thinking matter. Harder yet is the problem of spelling out the mutual determinations of individual experiences and the experiencing self. Determining how the collective social consciousness influences and is influenced by the individual selves constituting the society is the hardest problem. Drawing parallels between individual cognition and the collective knowing of mathematical science, here we present a conceptualization of the cognitive dimension of the self. Our abstraction of the relations between the physical world, biological brain, mind, intuition, consciousness, cognitive self, and the society can facilitate the construction of the conceptual repertoire required for an explicit science of the self within human society.
Highlights
The nature of the experiential self is a highly debated topic in philosophy
Upon realizing that we have a definite understanding of the notion of ‘representation’ within the collective mathematical practices of representing reality (Lawvere, 1963; Lawvere, 1994a; Lawvere, 2004; Lawvere, 2013b), the author examined mathematical experience to discern the implications of the representational character of subjective experiences
With conscious experiences as subjective representations of objective things, we find that, going by the mathematical experience, there must be analogues of measured properties, abstract theories, backgrounds, and mathematical doctrines, which make subjective experiences representations of one or another thing
Summary
The nature of the experiential self is a highly debated topic in philosophy. Various schools of thought have been arguing that there is no self. Just as grammar determines what can be said and what must be said in describing any given state-of-affairs, and just as mathematics determines how to model any given situation, so does the self: one’s self determines how one experiences. Encouraged by these preliminary clarifications, we embarked on a thorough investigation of the parallels between mathematics and cognition. The mathematical analogues, in turn, suggest a formalization of the relations between the material world of things, their neural coding in the brain, mental concepts, conscious experiences, and the experiencing subject. Before we present our mathematical framework, we provide a brief account of the rationale behind our approach to the development of an explicit science of the self
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