The Spatiality of Ideas

It is very interesting to consider the quality of volume that ideas often seem to possess in one’s mind. While this may sound like a rather inchoate notion, I do mean something very definite by it, but I do not yet have a word to express it precisely. I shall give an example instead:
Consider a university or any intellectual institution. When I consider such a thing, it seems to occupy a particular region of some sort of space in my mind. The region corresponds, in some way, to the physical locality of the institution, i.e the region the idea comprises relates to the region representing my self within the totality of my mindspace as my physical person relates to the physical location of the institution. But when I consider more deeply the institution qua intellectual, what was once a volume seems to resolve into points, viz. people and even ideas, the latter melting into some sort of locationless nothing, and the former shrinking to moving points. This seems to be a very subconscious notion, but it is one that I think is socially common. It would be worth considering how our minds connect physical locality with ideas, and more generally how intellectual structure has a spatial element. Perhaps it is merely a matter of association through habit that I connect certain physical locations with certain ideas, but it nevertheless occurs, and has an impact on my method of thought.

If this connection is something more than rote association, however, it would create a whole new level to the database that I have been considering, if the latter is to accurately represent ideas. (I will explain this database in a future post.) There may even be multiple levels to this sort of space, for I do not think that every single one of my ideas have a real or imagined physical correspondent. And even for those that did have a direct physical correspondence, it would not be the sort of correspondent that one could, to speak analogously, point out on a map. It is almost as if this notion requires some sort of fuzziness, i.e. an indistinct notion of location when considering certain ideas.

Perhaps then the database might include a display format to overlap the sense of physicality or even of volume (however distinct either of these may be), of certain ideas, while for others there would be no physical correspondent. Although I do think in the latter case that there is still a spatial sense (since I hold that all ideas, and ideal relations, have a spatial nature) and perhaps this could be meaningfully incorporated with the physical spatiality of ideas possessing such a quality. For simplicity’s sake, this could be displayed as the center of the map being the ideas that do have a physical correspondent, and the edges of it being the ideas which only have and ideal spatiality not a physical one.

In this context it is useful to consider one of Kant's claims within the section on space in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason (A19 ff). He says that by means of an "outer sense" we present objects as outside of us, within space. The soul’s inner state, however, is intuited through a distinct form: time. But he then claims that space cannot be intuited as something within us.

This seems wholly inconsistent with my experience. My own thoughts are often highly spatial. In fact, my ideas seem to have a spatiality that is either nearly identical to that of physical objects, or one based on it, in a sort of non-temporal extension. It seems odd and almost naïve for Kant to claim that a person is at a single location in space. With respect to certain things this seems true, but that sense should be expanded to include the space of the mind.

The mind as place is an idea which becomes of primary importance when considering how best to represent information, and how human intelligence can be represented.