Key Words: Epistemology; Logical construct; Concept; Simulation; Maths; Geometry
3. Innovation and Thought Game
The original purpose of making simulated products is to make some of the attributes of simulated products the same as the imitated object. But this purpose may not be able to achieve. It is possible that a tiger is drawn like a dog. Human cognition as a simulated product may also fail. No one will buy a bad toy, a wrong knowledge will bring bad results in practice. But sometimes people deliberately make the product different from the object they are imitating. For example, people added four feet and two horns to a snake to draw a dragon. There are no real dragons in the physical world, and this difference can add value to simulated products. The deliberate change is called innovation.
Similarly, the difference between human knowledge and the imitated object can also be made on purpose. The altered knowledge doesn't necessarily have corresponding real object. But Husserl said that there must be a corresponding objective object. The Phenomenology of Husserl is a great bad regression of philosophical epistemology.[1] After the innovation of simulated products, strictly speaking, they are no longer simulated products, but the products of thought games. These thought games can bring increasing value of knowledge and practical benefits. Human culture and civilization mainly come from such innovative thought games.
According to Popper, the growth of knowledge depends largely on imaginative conjectural solution.[2] Therefore, our understanding of the objective world is not mainly simulation of the objective world, but the artificial creation and a variety of thought games. People create many logical constructs, such as point, line, plane, numbers, bit, predictions, plans, axioms and theorems, and so on. These logical constructs make up the objective world 2.
Some products of guess, assumptions, and thought games may have objective things corresponding to them, but usually we can't see them. There are a lot of micro-structures that we couldn't see before that we can see now. Many distant stars were never seen before, are now or will be seen in the future. But we can never see such as forces and chemical composition. We can only guess and assume, and their confirmation can only be indirect by logical confirmation. This logical proof can only prove that they are useful, but not objective.
A complex and orderly system of thought products that has nothing to do with the object being imitated can be a tool for man. These thought products come from people's guess, assumption and logical processing. These thought games can completely disregard the laws of the objective world and only obey the rules of the subjective world. Some of the thought products thus produced were of no value to human practice and life, so they were gradually abandoned. Some of them have value, so they are retained and spread, and then new thought processing make them into more complex and ordered systems. Human culture has been evolving through this constant selection and abandonment.