Einstein is famous more for a blackboard than for a lab table, but what he did on the former was demonstrated on the latter. Well, by “latter,” I mean complex lab tables like cyclotrons, accelerators, atomic clocks, lasers, and telescopes, that is, everything physicists use to study the nature and composition of the Cosmos. His Gedankenexperiment (“thought experiment”) has been tested by many, and so far, what he “thought about” agrees with what physicists see in Nature. But the many proofs for Relativity that rely on experiment—and therefore, on experience—seem to put the cart before the horse. Did Einstein “think” about relativity in the absence of “experiencing it”? That is, was there something in his encoded experiences that enabled him to derive his insights? Or, did he think in the absence of experience?
Einstein was not the first to examine the world by thought. Aristotle ran a primitive version of thought experiment in making his assumption about why things move. Galileo transferred the thinking into action by actually running experiments, and Newton added the exact math by which we still send cars down roads and rockets into space. In Newton we find a merger of thought and action, a tie between the why and how of motion that furthered Galileo’s scientific methodology and that overturned Aristotle’s thinking. Observation led to conclusion that led to prediction.
Although he was aware of experiments, Einstein did science by thinking, specifically by analogies, placing himself mentally on a train, or in an elevator, or in a fall. He turned analogy into predictive math. And his predictions work to this day. They enable us to have GPS because we know that clocks run differently when they are exposed to greater or lower gravity or faster or slower speeds. They enable us to understand the strange arcs of ostensibly bent galaxies that are rather the product of light’s bending into Einstein rings as it passes a closer “gravity well” of an intervening galaxy.
Although we might say that Einstein’s insights were derived purely from thinking, we might also acknowledge that in drawing analogies, he was relying on experience. He knew about elevators, ladders, bicycles, trains, falling apples, Galileo’s relativity, Newton’s forces, and he had experienced acceleration personally. In other words, his insights derived from experience, from his experiments similar to those we all run in the physical world, experiments that keep us from repeating a fall down the stairs. Gedankenexperiment isn’t a thought in a vacuum. It is thinking in the context of what we know because we have experience.
I make that statement in the context of a recently published article and a nine-year-old’s observation. Looking at emojis, Leonora told her parents that the text-bedecking symbols are very much like the hieroglyphs Egyptians carved in stone. That might seem to be a simple observation, but it has a profound context. It begs questions about both what we know and how we know. And then it begs the question about how we communicate.
Does Leonora have some innate understanding of the relationship between language as a symbolic representation of reality? Was her insight like Aristotle’s “motion,” already contained in her brain the way some “motive force” is “contained in the moving object”? Or did she deduce some universal principle of language after nine years of careful observation in the laboratory of her life? That is, was her knowledge a priori or experiential? Was she born with an innate understanding of language as represented in symbols that cross the physical gap between two people before she heard the first soothing sounds of care from her mother or before she cooed her first coo?
You send me a smiley face in a text. I understand. Well, I think I understand. I reciprocate. You understand. At least, you think you understand. We are connected very much as the Egyptians were able to connect with their hieroglyphs. In fact, I see you just sent me a cartouche of emojis, a happy face, a face so happy it sheds tears, a “thumbs up,” and another symbol, maybe fireworks, all logograms, pictograms, and ideograms. We have just communicated to a more complex degree as you add emojis to further refine your thoughts just as an Egyptian cartouche encapsulates several images to make a single thought, like the name Ramesses. One smiley face: “I’m happy.” Two smiley faces: “I’m super happy.” In those cartouches, the modifiers keep building until in one, we get “Protector of Egypt, who has subdued foreign lands, Ra whom the gods have borne, the founder of the Two Lands,” or his nickname “Ka nakht mery Ra,” (The strong bull, beloved of Ra), symbolized by a bird, a bull, and couple of other hieroglyphs.
And your thoughts encapsulated in the emojis you texted? What were they about? Why were you happy? Something in the “real world” that you observed? Maybe something that happened to a mutual friend? Certainly, what lies at the center of our symbolic connection is experiential, some happy circumstance that you or I observed and that we communicated by an emoji, or, as Leonora might say, a “modern hieroglyph carved not in diorite but in cyber-stone, in digits, in pixels? And we drew an analogy: Whatever symbol you sent = Happiness (or Fun, or Joy).
So, Leonora opens us up to a complexity of thoughts about knowing, thinking, and sharing. And her insight came because she had seen hieroglyphs somewhere, had learned about them, or, should I say, had experience with them. They were part of a pattern stored in her neurons.
In February, 2022, Leonardo Fernandino, Jia-Qing Tong, Lisa Conant, and Jeffrey, R. Binder published in PNAS online “Decoding the information structure underlying the neural representation of concepts,” a work on how the brain classifies. * That we can recognize a blond Golden Retriever and a red Irish Setter as “dogs” or a Chevy or a Ford as “cars” lies in our stored conceptual knowledge as patterns of dogs and cars. In short, as the authors write, our neurons through experience “encode sensory-motor and affective information about each concept, contrary to the long-held idea that concept representations are independent of sensory-motor experience.” Leonora had seen pictograms in texts and hieroglyphs on Egyptian monuments. She tied them together in a mutual pattern, and, walla! She had an insight: When we send an emoji, we are not different from Egyptians who put hieroglyphs on stone monuments. The “stuff” of language, the essence of communication hasn’t changed. We went from runes and hieroglyphs to letters that relate to images (an A, for example, related to a drawing of an ox’s—alep’s—horned head rotated), and now we’re back to pictograms. Really, think of texts you have received. Some of your friends have sent not words, but simple emojis, the new hieroglyphs.
And think of what that means for communication. If you pick up a nineteenth-century prose writer’s work, you will find long, complex paragraphs. Move to, say, Hemingway, and the prose becomes crisper, the paragraphs shorter. And now complex prose has virtually disappeared in texts with emojis. Simplify things any more, and we’ll be back to runes.
Einstein knew about elevators. He knew about bicycles, cars, and trains. He even knew about flying when he wrote his famous papers two years after the Wright Brothers’ famous first flight. Walla! He put experiences together, not just fitting a new entity into an established category like “dog,” but to refine an old category by adding an insight: Weight disappears in a free fall. And that provides an insight. It provides a refinement of both concepts and engenders a new category: Spacetime. Leonora knew about hieroglyphs and emojis, and her brain recognized a class of entities that encompassed both. She might not have provided an insight as profound as Spacetime, but there’s little doubt that she had, nevertheless, an insight.
*https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108091119 Accessed March 4, 2022. For a summary issued by the Medical College of Wisconsin, see “The stuff of thought is the stuff of experience, says a new study,” published online at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-03-thought.html (Accessed March 5, 2022).
Einstein was not the first to examine the world by thought. Aristotle ran a primitive version of thought experiment in making his assumption about why things move. Galileo transferred the thinking into action by actually running experiments, and Newton added the exact math by which we still send cars down roads and rockets into space. In Newton we find a merger of thought and action, a tie between the why and how of motion that furthered Galileo’s scientific methodology and that overturned Aristotle’s thinking. Observation led to conclusion that led to prediction.
Although he was aware of experiments, Einstein did science by thinking, specifically by analogies, placing himself mentally on a train, or in an elevator, or in a fall. He turned analogy into predictive math. And his predictions work to this day. They enable us to have GPS because we know that clocks run differently when they are exposed to greater or lower gravity or faster or slower speeds. They enable us to understand the strange arcs of ostensibly bent galaxies that are rather the product of light’s bending into Einstein rings as it passes a closer “gravity well” of an intervening galaxy.
Although we might say that Einstein’s insights were derived purely from thinking, we might also acknowledge that in drawing analogies, he was relying on experience. He knew about elevators, ladders, bicycles, trains, falling apples, Galileo’s relativity, Newton’s forces, and he had experienced acceleration personally. In other words, his insights derived from experience, from his experiments similar to those we all run in the physical world, experiments that keep us from repeating a fall down the stairs. Gedankenexperiment isn’t a thought in a vacuum. It is thinking in the context of what we know because we have experience.
I make that statement in the context of a recently published article and a nine-year-old’s observation. Looking at emojis, Leonora told her parents that the text-bedecking symbols are very much like the hieroglyphs Egyptians carved in stone. That might seem to be a simple observation, but it has a profound context. It begs questions about both what we know and how we know. And then it begs the question about how we communicate.
Does Leonora have some innate understanding of the relationship between language as a symbolic representation of reality? Was her insight like Aristotle’s “motion,” already contained in her brain the way some “motive force” is “contained in the moving object”? Or did she deduce some universal principle of language after nine years of careful observation in the laboratory of her life? That is, was her knowledge a priori or experiential? Was she born with an innate understanding of language as represented in symbols that cross the physical gap between two people before she heard the first soothing sounds of care from her mother or before she cooed her first coo?
You send me a smiley face in a text. I understand. Well, I think I understand. I reciprocate. You understand. At least, you think you understand. We are connected very much as the Egyptians were able to connect with their hieroglyphs. In fact, I see you just sent me a cartouche of emojis, a happy face, a face so happy it sheds tears, a “thumbs up,” and another symbol, maybe fireworks, all logograms, pictograms, and ideograms. We have just communicated to a more complex degree as you add emojis to further refine your thoughts just as an Egyptian cartouche encapsulates several images to make a single thought, like the name Ramesses. One smiley face: “I’m happy.” Two smiley faces: “I’m super happy.” In those cartouches, the modifiers keep building until in one, we get “Protector of Egypt, who has subdued foreign lands, Ra whom the gods have borne, the founder of the Two Lands,” or his nickname “Ka nakht mery Ra,” (The strong bull, beloved of Ra), symbolized by a bird, a bull, and couple of other hieroglyphs.
And your thoughts encapsulated in the emojis you texted? What were they about? Why were you happy? Something in the “real world” that you observed? Maybe something that happened to a mutual friend? Certainly, what lies at the center of our symbolic connection is experiential, some happy circumstance that you or I observed and that we communicated by an emoji, or, as Leonora might say, a “modern hieroglyph carved not in diorite but in cyber-stone, in digits, in pixels? And we drew an analogy: Whatever symbol you sent = Happiness (or Fun, or Joy).
So, Leonora opens us up to a complexity of thoughts about knowing, thinking, and sharing. And her insight came because she had seen hieroglyphs somewhere, had learned about them, or, should I say, had experience with them. They were part of a pattern stored in her neurons.
In February, 2022, Leonardo Fernandino, Jia-Qing Tong, Lisa Conant, and Jeffrey, R. Binder published in PNAS online “Decoding the information structure underlying the neural representation of concepts,” a work on how the brain classifies. * That we can recognize a blond Golden Retriever and a red Irish Setter as “dogs” or a Chevy or a Ford as “cars” lies in our stored conceptual knowledge as patterns of dogs and cars. In short, as the authors write, our neurons through experience “encode sensory-motor and affective information about each concept, contrary to the long-held idea that concept representations are independent of sensory-motor experience.” Leonora had seen pictograms in texts and hieroglyphs on Egyptian monuments. She tied them together in a mutual pattern, and, walla! She had an insight: When we send an emoji, we are not different from Egyptians who put hieroglyphs on stone monuments. The “stuff” of language, the essence of communication hasn’t changed. We went from runes and hieroglyphs to letters that relate to images (an A, for example, related to a drawing of an ox’s—alep’s—horned head rotated), and now we’re back to pictograms. Really, think of texts you have received. Some of your friends have sent not words, but simple emojis, the new hieroglyphs.
And think of what that means for communication. If you pick up a nineteenth-century prose writer’s work, you will find long, complex paragraphs. Move to, say, Hemingway, and the prose becomes crisper, the paragraphs shorter. And now complex prose has virtually disappeared in texts with emojis. Simplify things any more, and we’ll be back to runes.
Einstein knew about elevators. He knew about bicycles, cars, and trains. He even knew about flying when he wrote his famous papers two years after the Wright Brothers’ famous first flight. Walla! He put experiences together, not just fitting a new entity into an established category like “dog,” but to refine an old category by adding an insight: Weight disappears in a free fall. And that provides an insight. It provides a refinement of both concepts and engenders a new category: Spacetime. Leonora knew about hieroglyphs and emojis, and her brain recognized a class of entities that encompassed both. She might not have provided an insight as profound as Spacetime, but there’s little doubt that she had, nevertheless, an insight.
*https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108091119 Accessed March 4, 2022. For a summary issued by the Medical College of Wisconsin, see “The stuff of thought is the stuff of experience, says a new study,” published online at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-03-thought.html (Accessed March 5, 2022).
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