Matt, I used the term "figurative science" to refer to science used as metaphor. As I attempted to illustrate, science provides these in abundance. I was suggesting that science informs modern thought covertly as well as overtly. No one but writers set about to "create" metaphors. Metaphors just happen, as ideas resonate within the culture at large. The wealth of scientific metaphors highlights how pervasive these scientific ideas are in this culture.
But as to metaphor itself, it has become a topic of frequent discussion here this week. I suggested some time ago that the concept of "pre-intellectual cutting edge" to me is not so much a mystical idea as a description of how the process of metaphor begins. We create internal representations, metaphors, through the process of sensation and perception. When we have a sense perception it is a matter of physics and chemistry. Waves of light and sound roaming free in the environment impinge upon organs of sensation that have evolved to respond to them. These nerves create analog patterns of electrochemical activity that are sent to the brain. The brain functions to filter out the irrelevant "static" in these impulses and organizes and stores whatever it deems relevant from the sensation. All of this is pre-intellectual, pre-rational mental activity. The creation of perceptions and memory is a non-rational process whereby emanations from TiTs are recorded organically. We are never talking about TiTs but about our representations of them. These representations in memory form a temporal buffer. It is a system for the storage and accessing of past events. I subscribe to something like a connectionist model of cognition. So that as memories are accessed repeatedly or events in the world are witnessed repeatedly, those patterns of thought are strengthened. Their conjunction to similar patterns strengthens and "consciousness" begins to take on a fractal structure that is self similar across scale. As a pattern of thought is repeated, it grows stronger like the trunk of an oak, other patterns branch off of it and likewise begin to grow and branch. This overall branching web of thought allows not only memory of the past but modeling of the future. The overall structure of "consciousness" allows for a limited, weird sort of time travel. So that rather than having to experience time sequentially we have a form of random access to reflections from the past and dreams of the future. I have also argued that the two main mental processes that act to organize this mental structuring are generalization and discrimination. There is a sizable body of psychological research in these areas but I like to call them "lumping" and "splitting" and you don't need to spend at lot of time in the Psych Abstracts to recognize their significance. The point of this is to show that this process of metaphor is at the very core of our thought processes both intellectual and pre-intellectual. The intellectual process is just an elaboration, so that we can talk about our internal representations with all those other beings around us that we have created internal representations of. One final note: when ideas come along that threaten the internal logic of our fractally structured thoughts; a couple of things can happen. The most commons is rejection of the new input. But sometimes new input is of such a quality as to resist rejection. This can force a radical reorganization of the very structure of our thoughts. Kohler called this a gestalt shift and Fritz Pearls developed it into a form of therapy. Once a gestalt shift occurs, as when we view optical illusions, the old pattern is not wiped out. The old and new exist side by side each shedding light on the other. Frequently the old and new are not opposite or mutually exclusive at all. They are just different. The old still applies sometimes but the new applies sometimes too. Thus I would say that the idea of illusion is a metaphor for how we can hold ideas of science, religion and philosophy side by side in our temporal buffers without causing brain damage. So when I say the science is my favorite way of thinking about things it is a bit like eye dominance. I favor the scientific set of illusions over others mostly because as a fractal structure of thought science allows the inclusion of more data into a coherent structure of thought than the others I use. But who know I may just be a couple of days short of the next big shift... Case p.s. To whom it may concern: despite having been labeled a computer nerd I seem to have a problem with using e-mail. Lately I have been known to spam the discussion with duplicate copies of things just received. I am sorry for the inconvenience. moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
