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Points and lines inside human brains

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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 produced by our brain, untenable in our physical/biological realm: currently used terms like “lines, surfaces and volumes” label non-existent, arbitrary properties. We 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: miniscule bounded physical surface regions stand for the basic objects in a traversal of spacetime, instead of the usual Euclidean points. Our account makes it possible to erase of 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. We propose a novel approach, based on point-free geometrical standpoints, that banishes infinitesimals, leads to a tenable physical/biological geometry compatible with human reasoning and provides a region-based topological account of the power laws endowed in nervous activities. We conclude that points, lines, volumes and infinity do not describe the world, rather they are fictions introduced by ancient surveyors of land surfaces.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Nonlinear Science, University of North Texas, 1155 Union Circle #311427, Denton, TX, 76203-5017, USA

    Arturo Tozzi

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Manitoba, 75A Chancellor’s Circle, Winnipeg, MB, R3T 5V6, Canada

    James F. Peters

  3. Department of Mathematics, Adıyaman University, 02040, Adıyaman, Turkey

    James F. Peters

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  1. Arturo Tozzi
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Tozzi, A., Peters, J.F. Points and lines inside human brains. Cogn Neurodyn 13, 417–428 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-019-09539-8

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