> Substituting “ideas” for “mental structures” (as you suggest above),
> I get the following: [mental] ideas reflect the structure of the physical
> (and social) world. This is so because ideas reside or emerge from
> our brain, books, etc.
"Because," indeed. If we weren't part of the world, if our bodies did not abide by the same laws of the physical world, we would *not* be able to appropriate the world mentally. All analogies are faulty, but bear with me: If a computer can "talk to" a printer, it is because at a certain fundamental level the printer *is* a computer and the computer *is* a printer (or both are something even more primitive than what we call a computer or a printer). Point is that there is a common structure, and resulting functions, that you can then out of convenience assign to specialized devices that you design such that they are better at performing one function in contrast with the other functions. So there is a common fundamental structure that allows for back-and-forth "communication" between the computer and the printer. (Please interpret this as a metaphor, not as a general theory of how the human brain works.) Similarly, at a certain fundamental level, the set of phenomena we call "mind" results from the mimicking by our bodily structures (e.g. our nervous systems) of the structures (physical, social) we thought out -- the content of those formal structures we call "ideas." Ultimately, our difficulties to perceive and make sense of the world stem from the inadequacy of our bodily structures to mimic the structures out there. The good thing about the evolution of universal mental functions in human brains is that we can partially overcome those limitations. Just like turning into a software problem a procedure that used to be hardware-bound may simplify its solution. One way or another, we keep going...
> But brains and books are different, no?
Indeed. The point I was making is that our ideas reside somewhere physical. Our brains are physical. They occupy a place in the spacetime. They are subject to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Just like books are. Etc. Our brains are just a piece of the physical world, though "organized" or structured in such a manner that they exhibit (well, this will sound presumptuous, but what the heck) the most amazing properties to behold. That reflecting about reflecting gets us an indeterminacy will not come as a surprise to you (like planning to plan under socialism!). After all, we're talking about a piece of the physical world that somehow evolves the power to reflect on itself. Paradoxes come with the territory.
> Brains are internal to the
> cognitive system (the human being) and the physical basis of mental
> activity which attempts to process and make sense of the external
> world of books, cultural products, etc. If our head [does not come]
> pre-equipped with some sort of “cognitive framework”, how do we
> construct one “out of nothing”, and one that seems to mirror the
> structures of the physical world?
Your last sentence is the point I'm making, actually. Woj seems to be saying that ideas and the world that ideas refer to are fundamentally divorced from each other. But like Barbra Streisand's Hello Dolly!, when the ideas tell the world: "You go your way and I'll go mine," the world goes (roughly speaking) in the same direction as the ideas. And vice versa, chicken-and-egg way! And that's why the silly (or momentous) controversy between idealism and materialism remains unresolved.