The Human Mind: Origin in Geometry

Within 53 years after the public acceptance of Mendel's laws (in 1900 a , b ), the genetic material was identified and described (by Watson and Crick b , c ). Today, 53 years after the modern era began in the scientific study of language (with Chomsky's Syntactic structures d ), there is no agreement as to whether universal grammar exists, or whether language as such exists at all e , that is, there is no agreement as to which square is square-one. Under the circumstances, a new approach is justified. It is the goal of this paper to place the scientific study of mind, language and brain onto a theoretical basis, beginning with naturally-occurring human language. The human mind has two major components, one with its antecedents in biology and behaviour, the other with its antecedents in geometry. It is the geometric component, consisting of language, tool-use, the mathematical sense, and the sense of truth and falsity, that distinguishes and defines the human being. Thus the constructions of language conform to the commutative, associative and distributive laws, and have their ultimate source in geometry. Equations have a symmetrical deep-structure based on the fact that one side is “equal” to the other: The “equals” symbol represents the axis of symmetry, and functions as a kind of main verb. The deep structure of the ordinary sentence is derived by moving the attachment for the “equals” to one of the branches, generating the asymmetrical Subject–Verb–Object relationship. Tool-use, with its Subject (the tool), Verb (movement of the tool), and Object (the workpiece), and manipulation of mental images, is an extension of the sentence. The sense of truth and falsity shares a common source with the right and wrong answers of arithmetic. a Iltis, H. (1932) Life of Mendel. G. Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London. 336pp. b Portugal, F.H. and Cohen, J.S. (1977) A century of DNA. The M.I.T. Press. Cambridge. xii+382 pp. c Watson, J.D. and Crick, F.H.C. (1953) A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid. Nature, 171 (4356), 737–738. d Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. Mouton and Co., The Hague, 116 pp. e Evans, N. and Levinson, S.C. (2009) The myth of langage universals: language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(5), 429–492.