[MD] Mystics and Brains

[craigerb at comcast.net]

[Arlo] 
> I can say, Magritte's "False Mirror" is a picture of an eye, close-up, with the 
> pupil enlarged and black in the center. Does that capture the meaning of the 
> painting?
 

I hope your answer is "No".  If so, you've conceded my point that words don't have meaning like paintings. 

[Arlo]
> Take the metaphor, "Man is a wolf". Restate that to me using only "literal" 
> language. Do you feel your restatement captures the meaning of the metaphor? 

Depends on what you meant by the metaphor.  "Men flirt with women" does it for me.  But the exercise is irrelevant.  That literal & metaphorical meaning are different does not entail that the latter can be reduced to the former.   

[Arlo]
> Art, music, language are all symbolic systems.

Yikes.  Is music for you those dots that appear on the lines of the bass & treble clefs?

[Arlo]
> As such, they use symbols to point to "things".

What does Magritte's "False Mirror" point to/symbolize?  What does Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony" point to? What does the sentence "Plan ahead" point to?  (the future?)  Reread your Wittgenstein on the "picture theory of language".

[Arlo]
> When I say "the house is red", and in a conversation where 
> you and I agree the shared purpose is to contrast our experience of "color", 
> this statement (a metaphor) becomes frozen over time. For example, one could 
> argue, the house is not "red", "the house" and "red" are two different things. 
> One is not the other "literally". But the metaphor points to a commonality 
> between what we symbolically refer to as "the house" and "red". 


Your underlying theory of language:  the Platonic Form of 'House' has something in common with the Platonic Form of 'Red', is about 2400 years out of date.

[Arlo] 
> What is a "car"? Any four wheeled vehicle? What about my pickup? The 
> point is, any "literal" definition is always "loose".

I agree that definitions are loose or open-ended.  But metaphors are not uses of a word that just loosely fit the definition.  "Man is a wolf" is not a metaphor because the man loosely fits the definition of wolf (or vice versa).  ("He's a snake" or "He's a volcano" make this even more obvious.)
Craig