Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

[Steven A Smith]

Roger -

I think your invocation of neural nets as a model of how complex pattern 
matching/associations get built/learned by humans is motivated, if not 
as a deep explanation of how our mind/brian works, but how it *might*.   
The work at LANL on the petavision project which primarily was modeling 
the visual cortex touched on this some...

As for "layers", I suspect two things might be true:  physical 
instantiations of these complex pattern matching systems (e.g. the human 
perceptual system) might have some layers imposed by the hardware.   
There is *some* processing at the retinal level, probably little to none 
in the optic nerve, a good deal more in the visual cortex and then "yet 
more" in the cerebral cortex. This class of decomposition of the problem 
seems highly motivated and likely.   I think your point, however, is 
more once the cerebral cortex and langauage centers get involved?

I think it is fascinating to notice what you point out, that the 
patterns we coin/invoke to try to understand better do not match the 
patterns our pattern-recognizers were "built on".   It seems like a 
top-down/bottom-up duality.   But can we dismiss that we *don't* have 
pattern recognizers which are atuned to thes pattern types you reference 
(logic, coherence, hierarchy, modularity, homology, etc.?).  I suppose I 
can believe that at the wetware level we *might not* but at the 
associative memory we surely seem to?   I think this is why we *impose* 
the illusion of hierarchy even when there is little/none?  There is some 
kind of template/prototypical pattern somewhere driving that, no?   Just 
as the anecdotal experiments with children who grew up in cities vs in 
natural surroundings having different structure detectors (straight 
lines and rectangular regions vs curved lines and myriad freeform shape 
recognizers)

I agree with your point about bricolage vs engineering and in sympathy 
with you, went looking for the adjectival and as you may have turned to 
the French whence bricolage comes...  but my French is abysmal and could 
not wade deep enough.  Along the way I was surprised that modern F/E 
translation dictionaries all use DIY as the definition... I find that 
sadly low-dimensional...   I thought immediately of another borrow word 
from the French: "bric a brac" which added a nice bit of parallax to it.

Just to feed the fires of an in-person dialog on this topic, I think 
there is a good reason that both Jenny Q and Dave W threw down, and that 
would be (I am guessing) their deep interest in Alexander's Pattern 
Languages.   I do think of their specific collection of patterns in 
Architecture in "A Pattern Language" to be somewhat a collection of  
"bric a brac" in the best way.   I'm a big fan of starting with the most 
intuitive and ad hoc and only applying formalisms and structure as it is 
recognized rather than imposing it from the top.

- Steve

PS>  Do you EVER visit SFe?  I haven't cracked a single book I bought 
when you were leaving... I have friends and colleagues dying and 
downsizing so fast that my own damn library is growing faster than I can 
even shelve properly.   Bastards!


On 6/11/17 8:57 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
The pattern is that people recognize patterns. Patterns of sensory 
experience that get resolved to people, places, things, phenomena.  
Patterns of gesture, utterance, markings on media which get recognized 
as language.  Patterns of linguistic expression which contend to be 
seen as models, or metaphors, or analogies, or similes, or 
congruencies, or homologies, or patterns.

At this point, one might ask: how many layers of pattern recognition 
are there between sensory experience and arguments about models and 
metaphors?  But our best artificial examples of pattern recognizers 
are deep neural nets, and they don't care about no stinking layers.  A 
 "layer" in a net might feed its conclusions to the "next layer", to 
itself, to its peers, to its ancestors, to its descendants, to any of 
the above with a delay, or all of the above.  The net architecture is 
probably written to allow as many of these connections as are feasible 
and to use the back propagation of error to prune. And next week's 
architecture will have more feasible connections than last week's.

So that's a model of why we can get in such a muddle when we talk 
about patterns of patterns, we try to impose patterns of logical 
consistency, coherent architecture, hierarchical structure, 
modularity, levels of organization, and so on, all of which are good 
patterns, but they are none of them the ruling pattern that our 
pattern recognizers are built on, which is all of the above, and some 
other principles as yet to be recognized, in whatever proportions works.

Pattern recognition is a form of natural selection.  The result is 
bricolage rather than direct application of engineering principles.  I 
was trying to find the adjectival form for bricolage.  Adventitious, 
fortuitous, seredipitous -- but all of these imply a kind of luck, and 
promiscuous implies undiscriminating.  I'm looking for the word for 
discriminating in its selection of elements but entirely open to 
whatever solution might be available.  Hmm.

All of this leaves aside the issue of whether the pattern recognized 
is true or false according to the pattern of empirical falsification 
or the pattern of feels right.

-- rec --

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 8:57 AM, Nick Thompson 
<nickthomp...@earthlink.net <mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>> wrote:

    R.

    Y-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-s…………….............?

    And the pattern is…………………?

    N

    Nicholas S. Thompson

    Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

    Clark University

    http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
    <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>

    *From:*Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com
    <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>] *On Behalf Of *Roger Critchlow
    *Sent:* Sunday, June 11, 2017 7:11 AM
    *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
    <friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com>>


    *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

    I think I'm starting to see a pattern here.

    -- rec --

    On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 11:56 PM, Tom Johnson <t...@jtjohnson.com
    <mailto:t...@jtjohnson.com>> wrote:

        Dave West writes: "... An example, "the future is in front of
        us."

        Unless you're a member of some Andean tribe whose name I've
        forgotten.  Then the past is in front of use because we know
        what it is, we can see it.  And the future is behind us
        because we know not what it is.  (Source: a recent SAR lecture
        that isn't online yet.)

        TJ



        ============================================
        Tom Johnson
        Institute for Analytic Journalism --     Santa Fe, NM USA
        505.577.6482 <tel:%28505%29%20577-6482>(c) 505.473.9646
        <tel:%28505%29%20473-9646>(h)
        Society of Professional Journalists <http://www.spj.org>
        *Check out It's The People's Data
        <https://www.facebook.com/pages/Its-The-Peoples-Data/1599854626919671>*

        http://www.jtjohnson.com <http://www.jtjohnson.com/>
        t...@jtjohnson.com <mailto:t...@jtjohnson.com>
        ============================================

        On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 8:53 PM, Jenny Quillien
        <jquill...@cybermesa.com <mailto:jquill...@cybermesa.com>> wrote:

            If there is a WedTech on this thread I would also
            certainly attend. So I vote that Dave gets busy and leads
            us toward the light.

            Jenny Quillien

            On 6/10/2017 8:24 PM, Prof David West wrote:

                Hi Nick, hope you are enjoying the east.

                The contrast class for "conceptual metaphor" is
                "embedded metaphor" ala Lakoff, et. al. An example,
                "the future is in front of us." Unless, of course you
                speak Aymaran in which case "the future is behind us."

                Steve, I do not regularly attend WedTech, but if this
                thread becomes a featured topic, I certainly would be
                there.

                davew

                On Sat, Jun 10, 2017, at 07:35 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

                    Hi, Dave,

                    Thanks for taking the time to lay this out.  I
                    wonder what you call the present status of
                    “natural selection” as a metaphor. In this case,
                    the analogues between the natural situation and
                    the pigeon coop remain strong, but most users of
                    the theory have become ignorant about the salient
                    features of the breeding situation.  So the
                    metaphor hasn’t died, exactly; it’s been sucked
                    dry of its meaning by the ignorance of its
                    practitioners.

                    I balk at the idea of a “conceptual metaphor”. 
                    It’s one of those terms that smothers its object
                    with love.  What is the contrast class? How could
                    a metaphor be other than conceptual?  I think the
                    term  subtly makes a case for vague metaphors.  In
                    my own ‘umble view, metaphors should be as
                    specific as possible. Brain/mind is a case two
                    things that we know almost nothing about are used
                    as metaphors for one another resulting in the vast
                    promulgation of gibberish. Metaphors should sort
                    knowledge into three categories, stuff we know
                    that is consistent with the metaphor, stuff we
                    know that is IN consistent with the metaphor, and
                    stuff we don’t know, which is implied by the
                    metaphor.  This last is the heuristic “wet edge”
                    of the metaphor.  The vaguer a metaphor, the more
                    difficult it is to distinguish between these three
                    categories, and the less useful the metaphor is. 
                    Dawkins “selfish gene” metaphor, with all its
                    phony reductionist panache, would not have
                    survived thirty seconds if anybody had bothered to
                    think carefully about what selfishness is and how
                    it works.  See,
                    
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767990_On_the_use_of_mental_terms_in_behavioral_ecology_and_sociobiology
                    
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767990_On_the_use_of_mental_terms_in_behavioral_ecology_and_sociobiology>ThTh

                    This is why it is so important to have something
                    quite specific in mind when one talks of layers.
                      Only if you are specific will you know when you
                    are wrong.

                    I once got into a wonderful tangle with some
                    meteorologists concerning “Elevated Mixed Layers”
                    Meteorologists insisted that  air masses, of
                    different characteristics, DO NOT MIX.   It turns
                    out that we had wildly different models of
                    “mixing”. They were thinking of it as a
                    spontaneous process, as when sugar dissolves into
                    water; I was thinking of it as including active
                    processes, as when one substance is stirred into
                    another.  They would say, “Oil and water don’t
                    mix.”  I would say, “bloody hell, they do, too,
                    mix. They mix every time I make pancakes.” The
                    argument drove me nuts for several years because
                    any fool, watching hard edged thunderheads rise
                    over the Jemez, can plainly see both that the
                    atmosphere is being stirred AND that the most air
                    in the thunderhead is not readily diffusing into
                    the dryer descending air around it.  From my point
                    of view, convection is something the atmosphere
                    does, like mixing; from their point of view,
                    convection is something that is DONE TO the
                    atmosphere, like stirring.  You get to that
                    distinction only by thinking of very specific
                    examples of mixing as you deploy the metaphor.

                    Nick

                    Nicholas S. Thompson

                    Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

                    Clark University

                    http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
                    <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>

                    *From:*Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com
                    <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>] *On Behalf Of
                    *Prof David West
                    *Sent:* Saturday, June 10, 2017 11:36 AM
                    *To:* friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com>
                    *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy

                    long long ago, my master's thesis in computer
                    science and my phd dissertation in cognitive
                    anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of
                    metaphor and model, specifically in the area of
                    artificial intelligence and cognitive models of
                    "mind." the very first academic papers I published
                    dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine,
                    the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.

                    My own musings were deeply informed by the work of
                    Earl R. MacCormac: /A Cognitive Theory of
                    Metaphor/ and /Metaphor and Myth in Science and
                    Religion./

                    MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from
                    "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is
                    like something else to either "dead metaphor" or
                    "lexical term" depending on the extent to which
                    referents suggested by the first 'something'  are
                    confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the
                    second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar
                    system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and
                    electrons are like planets plus orbits are at
                    specific intervals and electrons can be moved from
                    one orbit to another by adding energy
                    (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As
                    referents like this were confirmed the epiphor
                    became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the
                    Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge
                    of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the
                    model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect
                    and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning
                    chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool
                    for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might
                    you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom _as if_
                    it were a tiny solar system."

                    In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the
                    computer is like a mind, the mind is like a
                    computer — should have rapidly become dead
                    metaphors. Instead they became models "physical
                    symbol system" and most in the community insisted
                    that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn,
                    Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the
                    idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary
                    sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm
                    that those thinking with that paradigm cannot
                    perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.

                    MacCormac's second book argues for the
                    pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor
                    and its relationship to models (mathematical and
                    iillustrative) in both science and religion. The
                    "Scientific Method," the process of doing science,
                    is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have
                    become a dead metaphor as there is abundant
                    evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but
                    only after the fact as if it had been done that
                    way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s
                    theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.

                    If this thread attracts interest, I think the work
                    of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of
                    potential ideas and a framework for the
                    discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be
                    behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.

                    dave west

                    On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith
                    wrote:

                        I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.

                            Given that we have been splitting hairs on
                            terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the
                            topic that has been grazed over and over,
                            and that is the distinction between Model,
                            Metaphor, and Analogy.

                            I specifically mean

                             1. Mathematical Model
                                
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_model>
                             2. Conceptual Metaphor
                                
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor>
                             3. Formal Analogy
                                <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy>

                            I don't know if this narrows it down
                            enough to discuss but I think these three
                            terms have been bandied about loosely and
                            widely enough lately to deserve a little
                            more explication?

                            I could rattle on for pages about my own
                            usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that
                            would just pollute a thread before it had
                            a chance to start, if start it can.

                            A brief Google Search gave me THIS
                            reference which looks promising, but as
                            usual, I'm not willing to go past a
                            paywall or beg a colleague/institution for
                            access (I know LANL's reference library
                            will probably get this for me if I go in
                            there!).

                            
http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818
                            
<http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818>

                            
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