Article
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Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed
Killing the Fathers: A Biology-Framed Skepticism
Version 1
: Received: 1 September 2018 / Approved: 3 September 2018 / Online: 3 September 2018 (11:34:18 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Tozzi, A.; Peters, J.F. Points and lines inside human brains. Cogn. Neurodyn. 2019 13, 417–428. doi:10.1007/s11571-019-09539-8 Tozzi, A.; Peters, J.F. Points and lines inside human brains. Cogn. Neurodyn. 2019 13, 417–428. doi:10.1007/s11571-019-09539-8
Abstract
Starting from the tenets of human imagination, i.e., the concepts of lines, points and infinity, we provide a biological demonstration that the skeptical claim “human beings cannot attain knowledge of the world” holds true. We show that the Euclidean account of the point as “that of which there is no part” is just a conceptual device, untenable in our physical/biological realm: terms like “lines, surfaces and volumes” label non-existent, arbitrary properties. We also elucidate the psychological and neuroscientific features hardwired in our brain that lead us humans to think to points and lines as truly occurring in our environment. Therefore, our current scientific descriptions of objects’ shapes, graphs and biological trajectories in phase spaces need to be revisited, leading to a proper portrayal of the real world’s events. In order to provide also a positive account, we view miniscule bounded physical surface regions as the basic objects in a biological context in a traversal of spacetime instead of the usual Euclidean points. Our account makes it possible to erase a painstaking problem that causes many theories to break down and/or being incapable of describing extreme events: the unwanted occurrence of infinite values in equations, such as singularity in the description of black holes. We propose a novel approach, based on point-free geometrical standpoints, that banishes infinitesimals and leads to a tenable physical/biological geometry. We conclude that points, lines, volumes and infinity do not describe the world, rather they are fictions introduced by ancient surveyors of land surfaces.
Keywords
points; lines; brain; continuum; physical equations; topology; curvature; infinity
Subject
Computer Science and Mathematics, Applied Mathematics
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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