How The Quran Uses Embodied Cognition to Models Objects

Let's pick up from the last essay -> our analysis of the word 'الفُلْك' which we said that despite meaning the same word, has various contextual meanings.

If in one case the word 'Fulk' (الفُلْك) means 'ship' or 'vessel' (7:64), and if in the other it means 'orbit' (21:33), then think: what's that element which either case features that can be found or 'gleaned' in the other? (Commutativity)—as in, is there something 'vessel-like' about the being or motion of celestial objects? And also, is there something 'celestial' or 'orbital' about vessels or ships?

Do ships generally follow what might be called 'precise orbits'? And do celestial objects move as a ship might sail? Yes, on reflection the answers are positive. When God says that the celestial objects move in exclusive 'orbits' (21:33), he's indeed describing the course which they follow, and this course being specified or specifiable reflects that function that we find in the word 'vehicle'. In this very standard concept is found that idea which unites these contexts.

The Vehicle as a synonym to 'Fulk'

In common usage, vehicle can both refer to a physical 'structure' and a figurative schema; a car or train on one side, or, on the other, power lines and cables as a vehicle by which electricity is delivered to homes. Recognize the polysemous property of the word 'vehicle'?

As a thought experiment: We are given a problem—to deliver electricity to homes. Now, once we've recognized this, you are already thinking about how this possibility can, could, may or would, be actualized—as in, we're specifically and unknowingly contemplating -> in a negative sense -> what we'd call the 'vehicle', in fact, we're living it, embodying it cognitively.

The negative sense of this concept as opposed to the clearly exemplified and delimited sense of it, is the 'embodiment' or 'co-experiencing' of it!. Understand it this way: if you're holding your chin, scratching your head, thinking -> 'how do I build this thing, or 'solve that thing', or 'deliver that thing'' you are embodying a specific cognitive state. That!, is precisely what the Quran points to as 'Fulk', the object-as-experience. I recommend the works of phenomenologists like Heidegger, Husserl and Mianong (Husserl's idea of intersubjectivity in particular, and Heidegger's readiness at hand).

Now, generally speaking, a vehicle is a universal archetype of sorts, always required—always that medium or 'relating-relation', and which is no less complex, no less primary and standalone as the things which it connects together, as William James stresses in his radical empiricism approach. 

"The relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves."

W.James "A World of Pure Experience" (1904)

What's noteworthy is that the connection is already possible by virtue of the necessity which the vehicle introduces (the vehicle couldn't exist without its content could it?). It implies its conditions of possibility: the objective, teleological structure itself, as well as preconditions of necessity—i.e., the precise equation (or sufficient reason) that realizes in the situation its best and often only course of action. We don't have to doubt the possibility of A making the transition to B—the fact that R exists makes this given and possible a priori.

This abstraction we're making—of the necessity which the relation R, the vehicle, brings about—is really our attempt at capturing that universal idea or class concept that we here, circumstantially, call 'vehicle': a most general characterization of it, essentially, vehicle proper, as opposed to this or that thing that plays the role of 'vehicle', like the power lines.

The archetype 'vehicle'. This generic concept is exactly what we're seeing used across those Quranic cases. The exception is that in the Quran the conditions in which this expression is concretized are also given—that is, the concept, though generic, is not restricted to the abstract, but is instantiated, so that it's understood by way of those conditions which make this expression possible in the first place. This is the polysemy-polysynthesis unification which the Quran performs at the structural level - at once justifying the polysemous part -> 'contextual-diversity' of a word, by having any of those other contexts add to & enrich our understanding of any single one of them!.

This is a perfect example of 'isogenous' relations (algebraic topology), a powerful morphism, stronger than a simple commutative (isomorphic) relation. We can understand this formally through the formula of modus ponens (it's the formal-logic expression of it really). p is the concept, q is its domain (anything predicable of or statable about p), entailment means 'necessarily implies'. If p 'necessarily implies' q it's because q, the notion of 'contextuality' or 'universe of discourse' is already given alongside the idea of a concept as a constitutive element, prior to the representation of any specific concept or universe of discourse.

. Nothing can be said about p outside of some specific context, the specific - most immediate context is whatever p already means, i.e the conditions of its very existence or possibility (so that we're simply 'deriving' what p is). This simply the constructive steps that go into the expression of p.

(p → q) = (p ⊢ q)

• A Morphism from A to B, and from B to A involves their co-efficient → the rule in question being already both or ‘in both’.

• If A = B, then A = all elements under B, so that A in equaling B, permeates it entirely.

A mechanical exposition (Error-Correction)

Now what are those conditions? (The conveyance of those conditions is just a way of describing the world from the perspective of 'vehicle'). Well, we must first think of some 'negative' or 'hostile' medium, a medium whose effect on our journey from A to B is adverse, or if you will, a medium that would prevent or stop electricity from getting from the power station to your household. Firstly, a physical conductor is required—a cable.

This conductor, as the name suggests, must be a conductive material (copper/aluminum) through which electricity can flow, for we can't transmit electrons through empty space or non-conductive materials. This is only the first of the challenges which must be subdued from an engineering standpoint; to successfully deliver electricity across distances. The prospect itself already places us within that landscape in which the conception -> intuition in this case, of vehicle is implied.

The second challenge concerns this conductive medium we derived—namely resistance. As electrons travel through those long cables, the voltage decreases due to resistance, compelling us to use thicker cables or boost voltage at the source. After this, we must deal with heat dissipation—resistance converts electrical energy into waste heat, so we need cooling systems (air gaps, oil cooling, etc.) to prevent cables from overheating and failing.

• Next, we have to deal with grid synchronization—multiple power sources must maintain the exact same frequency (50/60 Hz) and phase alignment, or they'll fight each other and destabilize the entire network.

• Load balancing—electricity demand fluctuates constantly throughout the day, so we need real-time monitoring and control systems to match power generation to consumption and prevent grid collapse.

• Fault protection—we need circuit breakers, relays, and protective systems to instantly isolate damaged sections when cables fail, transformers blow, or short circuits occur, preventing cascading blackouts.

Essentially, there needs to be a compact, error-correcting system in place to successfully conduct the transmission of electricity from one physical point to another. This is, by the way, the case with everything you can possibly think of. There isn't an entity that isn't, in itself, an error-correcting system—that is, if we think of the entity teleologically, as embodying some role or purpose in the grand scheme of things, a role or purpose which its physical existence is built merely to expedite.

As soon as we begin to think of the 'means by which' to actualize some seeming impossibility, we're already operating within that domain which the archetypal idea 'Fulk' captures. One can even go as far as to say that the universe is inherently impossible, and that the order we see is just 'error-correction' at a scale beyond human estimation scale:

Error-Correction as Universal Structure

• Biological: DNA repair mechanisms, immune systems, homeostasis, neural plasticity¹

• Material: Crystal lattice self-organization, chemical equilibrium, thermodynamic stability²

• Social: Market corrections, legal systems, cultural adaptation³

• Technological: All engineered systems require redundancy and fault tolerance⁴

This is why we used the expression 'pareto-solution'—because that abstract universal, or what we call the atomic concept, is inherently 'problematic'. Nothing truly corresponds to it except the process, albeit endless, of attempting to establish correspondence—Gödel's incompleteness theorem, a central feature of any 'atomic

concept'.⁵

Complex systems seem to inherently develop error-correction mechanisms, or they collapse—it's a universal requirement for maintaining organized complexity against entropy.⁶ This is why we have the aforementioned concept of entropy; the universe's default state appears to be maximum entropy (complete disorder/dissolution), and all organized structures exist in spite of this relentless tendency toward chaos.

The Thought Experiment Method

This is an example of how an atomic word, in this case 'Fulk' or 'vehicle', is gleaned in the Quran. We perform what's essentially a controlled thought experiment. The Quran gives all the scenarios wherein this concept is to be considered. We perform the thought experiment within those parameters, moving between these seemingly different themes- And we do this 'Isogenously', and what's derived is not so much a single idea as an experience which the single idea or insight stands for.

Just as the image of a green leaf plays in your mind that scene of the water droplet that awakens the seed, the fibers slowly weaving the structure that leads it from bud to stem, the green pigment gathering in chambers as the small shoot unfolds into the leaf you see. The expression fulk or any other Quranic term must serve that same function, but with a nuance. Notice how your vision of the green leaf isn't random, it rides on those facets that comprise the leaf's own being, it demands a certain architectonic view, conditions strung together by that which the experience itself approximates - the 'green leaf'.

In the Quran, the contexts in which some word appears are those conditions the assimilation of which makes the thought experiment possible, and by extension, makes the concept imaginable. Think of Einstein's special relativity thought experiment, the trainstation, the train, the two people, one at the platform, the other in the train, the lightning strike, the clock, the light. There's a logistical or strategic aspect to the configuration of ingredients of that experiment right?. The ingredients of this thought experiment, are to a Quranic word, the specific 'contexts' and themes in which it occurs. You need all to make sense of even one.

This bit is from Einstein's book on the theory of relativity (Relativity: The Special and General Theory 1920). Think of the 'Body of reference' here as all the contexts/places where a specific word occurs, regardless of its 'morphological status/form', this is our rigid body, now a 'place-specification' would be a specific place wherein this word is encountered. Just as you know that time square is a place in 'new york', a city on earth, so you understand that instance of a word as an instance in the conspectus of various contexts of its occurrence, and by extension, to understand it , you must understand that conspectus.

It's clear that by making this a demand, the Quran places a clear emphasis on the subjective, experience-based factor, for it's this imaginary, intersubjective discourse with the concept that allows us to understand the book the way it was intended and built to be understood.

From Celestial Kinematics to First-Person (phenomenology) dynamics

We needed the celestial domain to be shown what fulk is fundamentally, or simply, the kinematics of celestial motion show this process in pure form. The next moment, we will have transitioned to a first-person view, a human being, a scientist, thinking about the fastest path—no, the easiest path—something takes to get where it's going. Should the object I'm looking at be subject to some factor x, how exactly would it behave?

Such a question hinges on a presupposition of which not even the scientist himself is aware: that the object should behave in some unequivocally specific way. He knows that there are a variety of ways it may behave, but in his mind there's one that must follow from the given-but-elliptical laws of physics. Okay, the scientist, after some exhaustive experimentation, finds it, he even wrote a fixed formula that denotes it. But after a while, he begins to think that there's something more fundamental to this object, far more fixed than his initial investigation has led him to believe.

He now sees his own work as only a certain aspect of that evidently more comprehensive object, he's growing to see that there must be something fixed about it, regardless of the value of the unknown factor x, something that does not change however much change it may allow when subjected to different conditions. He understands what professor 'Baldwin' meant when he defined the function of implication as 'a meaning by which belief, the attitude of acknowledgment in judgment is rendered.'¹ He's reached a conceptual singularity—this object is essentially that which behaves like this, and what I originally observed was only a modification of it, a certain morphotic state nested in it.

What does the end of this process look like? The scientist is able to see this same object in many forms, he recognizes it as immediately as he recognizes a friend down the street, on a photograph. He sees it in places where it shouldn't be, he sees faint traces of it, its effect, he uses it as an analogy, as a metaphor, as figures of speech.

It goes further—he can interpolate it into any extrinsic process and know -> not necessarily how it may affect or change the process , but how it already does, and how this influence predates his discovery. It has a certain metaphysical grip on him, but so does he on it. So powerful is this interaction that he may make the mistake many scientists make of reducing this force to ontology, even basing his entire scientific beliefs on it, yet it is just one experience among a plethora of others he could readily reproduce this same process with.

Abraham's story perfectly captures this, and shows where a scientific inquiry of this sort should ultimately lead, should any ontological devices begin to suggest themselves to the inquirer.² What may appear as ontological is only the world seen through the eyes of the phenomenon, conveying in more familiar terms the fact that it's the least element of that set. Change the lens, and the world shifts.

The subject holds the power to 're-view' and 're-think' those things. There's a formula for this, it's double negation.

P 𠪪P

The Cognitive Structure of Fulk

Now, do you not see that gaping space that stands between you and the household to which you're extending a cable, that yawning chasm of engineering challenges, is really the mental structure that we copy when grasping fulk, a structure in which restrictions and parameters become clear, choices, controllable, avoidable, replaceable, inescapable—in a word, parameters.

For incontrovertible evidence as to the purely structural and therefore cognitive basis of these objects, look no further than the fact that we don't only use it to express how, say, an electric grid can be extended from point A to point B, but to articulate any such process involving linking two points through some mechanism. It's really a cognitive structure that we specifically apply to scenarios of this sort. Think of how many other such cognitive structures we unknowingly extemporize to treat cases of one form or another. Your newfound awareness of the purely cognitive, although object-dependent value of 'fulk', despite seeming as no more than 'awareness', allows you to employ it, to know it as a framework that you can readily interpolate into any problem you come upon.

Meaning, given a different problem—say, understanding consequences of introducing a species (an element) into a new environment—we can interpolate 'fulk' as a structure into this scheme, directing it at the new element, and through targeted case studies, observing how this new element behaves in different and diverse contexts, until a general enough conception is formed.

A conspectus is simply that which describes the most fixed and invariant properties of an object, like:

• How water is fluid

• How a feline is a stealth-oriented predator

• That a predator is an organism that obtains nutrition by capturing and consuming another organism, known as its prey

• That 'organism' is something that requires sustenance in the form of nutrients, and complex interlocking metabolic functions to grow and continue to exist

• That it's that whose continued existence comes in the form of complex metabolic systems that convert externally acquired food source into time

When general propositions of this sort are conceived, one can say we can predict how the aforementioned new element would behave and affect the environment into which it is to be introduced, and draw the broad spectrum of implications from this general definition. We've here employed 'fulk' as a cognitive tool to reduce an otherwise unpredictable and capricious object to a precise behavioral course whose every outline can be deduced from a simple datum, a phrase perhaps no more than a few words long.

CITATIONS:

• W.James "A World of Pure Experience" (1904)

• On teleology and sufficient reason: Leibniz, G.W. (1714). "Discourse On Metaphysics". [On the principle of sufficient reason - why things are as they are rather than otherwise]

• On archetypes as organizing principles: Jung, C.G. (1959). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Collected Works Vol. 9, Part 1. [If you want to lean into the "universal archetype" language, though your usage is more logical than psychological].

• Baldwin's theory of implication: This appears to reference James Mark Baldwin's work on belief and judgment. Most likely from: Baldwin, J.M. (1906). Thought and Things: A Study of the Development and Meaning of Thought, or Genetic Logic, Vol. 1: Functional Logic, or Genetic Theory of Knowledge. Macmillan. ↩ You can find this specific section in Ogden & Richard's 'The Meaning Of Meaning' (1923), the appendix titled 'Baldwin'.