quote:
Platonic forms are ideas in the mind of God. Mental or spiritual, whatever you prefer. These forms are not constructs but "essences." They are eternal and immutable. That's all I know about it.
Platonic forms are no more than the circuitry in our brain which allows us to generalize the vast amounts of input we recieve.
The brain recieves several terrabytes of information every day. Were it to simply "store" this information, we would almost instantaneously run out of memory space. The storage capacity in our brain, even though it is quite large, is not infinite. There are something on the order of 10^9 neurons, and 10x12 synaptic connections.. so there is a limit.
So how is evolution going to solve the problem of processing, storing, and making informed decisions on this vast amount of information our senses pick up. Well.. as it turns out, the same things keep popping up in the information over and over again. In information science, this is called redundancy. The information the brain recieves through its senses is highly redundant.
So what are these redundancies? Well, oddly enough they're what plato called "forms". They are lines, circles, cubes, spheres, cylinders, solid patches of color, patches of color with highlights and shadows, textures, wood, trees, eyes, faces, arms, water, sky, etc.
So evolution has produced neural circuitry that exploits these redundancies to dramatically reduce the amount of raw "data" that the brain processes while at the same time extracting the maximum amount of meaningful "content". What you call "forms" are recognized in the perceptual centers of the brain in a multi-stage process, where first the basic processing and filtering is done with edge detection, region detection, texture detection, shape and size inference from shadows and highlights, texture, color, etc. Then this information is matched against the set of instinctual or learned sets of basic patterns and sent further up the chain until you percieve a "girl", or an "apple".
The ideal form is an agreggate match pattern stored in the brain that will match a set of qualities of sensory input. In other words, the ideal circle is a neural pattern used to match the various real circles you see and turn the large amounts of data used to represent the pattern of the circle into a single bit of data "circle" that the brain can more easily process.
That plato and other philosophers dimly recognized that something of this nature was going on is clearly evident. However, they misunderstood what was really happening. Instead of a magical world of "Forms" existing somewhere in fairy land of which the rest of the world is shadows.. what we really have here are the products of symbolic data compression and pattern recognition to make the data percieved by the brain useful.
If plato knew what we now know about how the brain works, perhpas the dialogs on "forms" might read a little differently, and mention things like "shannon information", "redundancy", and "symbolic pattern recognition".