Psychic embedding — vision and delusion

The paper introduces the idea that the human brain may apply complex mathematical modules in order to process and understand the world. We speculate that the substrate of what appears outwardly as intuition, or prophetic power, may be a mathematical apparatus such as time-delay embedding. In this context, predictive accuracy may be the reflection of an appropriate choice of the embedding parameters. We further put this in the perspective of mental illness, and search for the possible differences between good intuition and delusive ideation. We speculate that the task at which delusional schizophrenic patients falter is not necessarily of perception, but rather of model selection. Failure of the psychotic patient to correctly choose the embedding parameters may readily lead to misinterpretation of an accurate perception through an altered reconstructed of the object perceived. 1 Mathematics and the mind Is mathematics an invention or a discovery? Should we perhaps look at it as an instrument invented by people to communicate abstract thoughts, tracing the evolution of language and conscience towards deeper subtleties of reasoning [47] [13]? Or should we instead regard it as a discovery of a natural ability of people to process and express information about nature and about themselves [31]? Paul Erdös, although an atheist, spoke of an imaginary book in which God has written down the most beautiful mathematical proofs. For most of us, however, has mathematics remained in this mystical domain or — in our zeal to understand the world — have we changed it into a concrete and artificial produce, with elaborate but useless artwork and accessories? Has Man dug out its natural beauty only to transform it into a weapon and use it to tame and subdue the world? In fact, nature is full of mathematical prodigy, from the perfection of the orange fruit to that of the honeycomb and of the spiderweb [25]. Plants and beasts compute as a genetic, unconscious necessity, and possibly so do we, mostly unknowingly. It is possible that, when we educate ourselves about mathematics, we lose the state in which we live it naturally and effortlessly. Popular culture regards mathematics as the universal language of reason, used to communicate across cultures, time and even with alien civilizations. Socially, science has been gradually adopted as the unifying language of intellect. I believe however that, at its core, mathematics does not measure our “capacity to reason,” but quite the opposite. As much as contemporary science fiction [45] tries to persuade us that knowledge of elaborate and “magical” mathematical objects (such as prime numbers) is an evolved and uniquely reasongenerated human feature [54], even plants can show this assumption wrong. And indeed, were it right — a newly arrived alien would innocently mistake a Rhododendron for the ruler of the Earth, deceived by its almost flawless use of number theory [25].