Re: Dialectics/Phil of Math
It's also important to remember that the "material world" includes our brains, so that the various chemical and biological processes there imply that our thoughts are not exactly the same as the outside material world. Thoughts may be a reflection of the material world, but the "mirror" is distorted and imperfect. For example, a cat sees the world differently than I do. So does someone imbued with heroin or neoclassical ideology. JD ^^^^^^ CB: Yes, Marx and Engels sometimes specify the "reflection" metaphor as that of the _camera obscura_. The camera inverts the image that it captures. So too the brain in thinking , in forms of thought, does not just imitate the material world, but "distorts" ,"inverts", reverts, perverts, modifies the images. The reflections in the brain are definitely not identical with the outside that they represent. They are imitations, and then modified imitations. Fully symbolic representations are explicitly _not_ imitations. Hegel emphasized that abstract thoughts are _not_ pictures.
