The Mesocosm

As human beings, our particular size (in the meter range) strongly influences how we interact with other objects. Some are close to our size, and they are the touchstones by which we try to understand things that are much bigger or much smaller. Planets and stars fall into the ‘much bigger’ category: we might group them into the macrocosm. Amoebae and bacteria fall into the ‘much smaller’ category: they constitute the microcosm. A tennis ball or a chair, objects that we directly interact with – we can see, touch, and use such things – sit somewhere in between and with us are part of the mesocosm. That’s a human perspective, of course!

 

I’m slowly working my way through Philosophy in the Flesh, a tome by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. They posit that we should recast philosophy in terms of three main points. The first three sentences in the book (appropriate for philosophers I suppose) encapsulate the story: “The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.” Lakoff and Johnson think the discoveries of cognitive neuroscience force us to rethink the basics of philosophy and reject the mind-body separation of Cartesian dualism. They think that the way we think (both conscious and unconscious) are highly influenced by our neural architecture, by biological evolution, and by how we interact with objects relative to our size and timeframe.

 

At the simplest level, we learn by what we see and what we can manipulate. In scientific terms, one might call this observation and experimentation. Babies and toddlers do this a lot. One might posit that as they explore their surroundings, they begin to conceptualize. And in some mysterious way, learning takes place. They begin to understand not just what they can see and touch, but as children grow older they are able to imagine what they cannot see and touch. Lakoff and Johnson might argue that human biology (and by extension, interacting with others in one’s environment) both shapes and limits the way the human thinking does its magic. When we go to school and learn about science, we might even have the opportunity to extend our scope beyond the mesocosm. The authors write:

 

One thing that science has done successfully in many cases has been to extend our basic-level capacities for perception and manipulation via technology. Instruments like telescopes, microscopes, and spectroscopes have extended our basic-level perception, and other technologies have expanded our capacities for manipulation. In addition, computers have enlarged our basic capacity for calculation. Such enhancements of basic bodily capacities extend the basic level for us, the level that is at the heart of embodied realism.

 

Embodied realism. That’s the two-word philosophical backbone of the book. The three instrumental ‘scopes’ mentioned made me think of astronomy, biology, and chemistry, respectively. Spectroscopy is at the heart of chemistry, which lengthscale-wise is in the nanocosm. We can’t see discrete entities as small as single atoms and molecules, but we can infer their structure based on measurements in the electromagnetic spectrum – the ‘spectra’ of the spectroscope. I’ve themed my G-Chem 1 classes around this idea: how we make visible the invisible!

 

Conceptually, though, the way we picture this nanocosm is by imagining blobs made up of balls connected by springs. The blobs are constantly in motion and may interact with one another depending on their properties. But the mind’s-eye picture is mesocosmic – I played pingpong as a child and that’s my picture of small balls. At one point, I even had a bunch of pingpong balls (both white and orange) in a transparent container that I would bring to class as a demo, shaking it around to demonstrate atoms of a gas bouncing off the walls of a container. (Now I just use computer animations.) But we can go further. Lakoff and Johnson write:

 

What fills out embodied realism, permitting us to move far beyond mere observation and manipulation… is the existence of conceptual metaphor, which allows us to conceptualize one domain of experience in terms of another, preserving in the target domain the inferential structure of the source domain. Mathematics allows us to model metaphorical theories and to calculate precisely inferences about literal basic-level categories. Such inferences can then be projected onto scientific subject matters to give explanatory accounts for existing data and to make predictions.

 

This is especially true for the tougher parts of chemistry. I teach P-Chem, much dreaded classes for chemistry and biochemistry majors. The math is heavy-going. Many students struggle through the course. But the mathematics is uncannily powerful, and allows us to access abstract ideas that seem so far out of the realm of what we can see and touch in the mesocosm. That’s part of what makes math challenging once you leave the familiar realms of counting objects to more abstract relations. Yet mathematical models have their limitations like any other model. And what is a model, if not a way to represent something outside the mesocosm to the human mind built evolutionarily to interact within the mesocosm and yet be able to have thoughts outside it.

 

If there’s one thing in particular, outside of balls and springs, that I ask students to conceptualize in my chemistry classes, it is energy diagrams. Higher up means more energy and reduced stability. I gesticulate frequently in class and my arms move up and down to embody this idea. Lower down means lower energy and being in a more stable state. To break a chemical bond, the system moves up in energy. The chemical system must receive energy from the outside to break bonds. Conversely, and non-intuitively, making a chemical bond moves the system down in energy. Energy flows out of the system. Energy is conceptually protean and abstract, but we can count it and keep track of it.

 

I’d like to think that teaching again in-person and using bodily motions as part of my explanations helps student learning. Not so easy to do via online learning, but I suppose I could make videos of myself. I still feel that something is lost in translation through the flat screen, but I’d be hard-pressed to tell you exactly what that is. I’d like to think there’s something particular apt in learning person-to-person physically in the same space and sharing the mesocosm directly!

 

P.S. Interested in the osmocosm? See here.