Maps and Thought

After surfing over to a particularly tedious discussion of determinism at Pharyngula, I felt a need to cleanse my palate with a bit of math, namely Conceptual Mathematics. The focus is the centrality of the map, or function. A lot of things that I'm not used to thinking of as maps, really turn out to be.

Addresses are maps, of course, but names are too. So are the various things we do to organize and categorize our world.

I've been reading about maps in another context, as well. Brain maps play a prominent role in the discussion of mammalian senses in Dawkin's The Ancestor's Tale. People, platypuses, star moles, and presumably all other mammals have a number of maps of their bodies encoded on their brains. These maps are usually something like homeomorphic to the actual body parts, in the sense that parts nearby in the body get mapped to nearby locations in the brain. The maps are usually distorted - the star mole devotes most of his touch map to his sensitive nose, and the platypus concentrates on his electrosensitive bill. Higher topological structure are there too. Paired senses that compare inputs, like binocular vision, pair their maps to extract the range information.

We know that these biological maps have some plasticity - map parts devoted to rat whiskers atrophy if the whisker in question is removed. The maps we make in thinking are surely some of the most fundamental tools of intelligence. I wonder to what extent the proliferation and generalization of these maps was the key element in the evolution of human intelligence.

More on this theme later.