[MD] Dawkins a Materialist (is watching?)

[Case]

Ian,

The process of metaphor begins on the cutting edge of experience. As
sensation is transformed into perception, representations are formed. We
call them memories. Our thought processes are fundamentally different from
the things they represent. But we like to think there is some degree of
correspondence.

Our imagined world is "like" the real world. This is the first metaphor.

In this sense I think it is true to say everything is a metaphor. But
metaphors are fingers pointing at the moon. The more fingers you can see
pointing the easier it is to triangulate on what they are pointing at.

Everyday language is a vehicle for expressing metaphor metaphorically.
Sensation, perception, representation and expression are all stages in the
process of metaphor.

In the everyday world we survive by assimilating ambiguity. We see the
likeness and dissimilarity of things and weight their relationships
accordingly. Certainly metaphors die but often they are only transformed by
circumstance. Jung was especially able to identify ideas and stories that
resonate across time and culture. He pointed to images that evoke emotional
responses in many people and speculated that they had structural even
evolutionary significance in human awareness. 

Perhaps metaphors die. But more likely they are simply expressed
differently. New metaphors are created and adopted with astonishing speed in
the modern world. For every one that dies 10 spring up. But dead or alive
they are still fingers pointing at Quality. The problem is that not all of
them point in the same direction.

Language is an especially slippery material with which to construct reality.
The texture and shading of connotation can be especially troubling.
Mathematic circumvents this through metaphors devoid of ambiguity.

Few of us can tolerate such an unambiguous world, however the metaphors Math
offers are of such sublime significance that philosophers from the Greeks to
the Enlightenment to the Post-Moderns have served mainly to aid in the
assimilation and general understanding of them.

Case

p.s. Ok this does not really follow what you said but this is what you said
made me think about.






-----Original Message-----
From: moq_discuss-bounces at moqtalk.org
[mailto:moq_discuss-bounces at moqtalk.org] On Behalf Of ian glendinning
Sent: Friday, January 19, 2007 6:32 PM
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Subject: Re: [MD] Dawkins a Materialist (is watching?)

Case, (Mark, DMB and Marsha mentioned ...)

I can hear the shouts of obfuscation already ... I have another
excluded middle here ... but I've seen it like this.

At one extreme the view is "everything is metaphor" - nothing is
literally real or literal. In some sense I actually subscribe to that
view, but I'll need to elaborate, and suggest a stiff brandy at this
point.

One reason I latched onto the Johnson quote you brought up (or was it
Arlo) is because Lakoff & Johnson's "Metaphors We Live By" and "Fire,
Women and Dangerous Things" made a big impression on me.

Every piece of language is (or more precisely was) a metaphor, or
derived from one. A symbol of something else, a gesture, an
onomatopeic sound, whatever. "Was" is important. Gradually metaphors
die. (DMB had to point out the open-handshake gesture to us, because
in daily life the reason for the meaning is forgotten and irrelevant).
They actually die by the authority of social adoption (as Mark poined
out, the "accepted" meaning of word is a social phenomenon.). At some
point we (socially) accept a word's meaning directly from (sight and
sound of) the word, without thinking there is any metaphor to decode
first, in fact we positively forget it ever was a metaphor. And the
provenance of the word may thoroughly disguise the fact it ever had
any metaphorical connotation, thanks to translation, spread and
adoption of usage from culture to culture, language to language, and
don't forget the original languages and cutures that gave us the roots
of the words die too. (The Sanskrit "Rta" passages of Pirsig are my
favourites BTW) (Wow, I said all of that without the "m" word - meme
that is.)

Most words therefore do not seem to be metaphors to us. They are dead
metaphors. And most are so long dead, we may have no idea where the
metaphor lies buried, to ever be able to demonstrate its metaphorical
origins. (Lakoff and Johnson also deal with the invented -
deliberately meaningless tokens - neologisms that get attached to new
things too ..... there is always an element of either derivation or
connotation somewhere ...)

So here you have it. The difference between "metaphorical" and
"literal" is really just time ... or distance on the evolutionary
axis.

So if we're talking about our most fundamental (metaphysical) division
of reality, Quality in this case ... we're still at (haven't even
reached) base camp on the evolutionary axis. Everything evolves from
here. Quality is effectively both literal and metaphorical at the same
time, (possibly a duality ?). Alternatively you could say the
distinction becomes meaningless.

As Marsha points out quality is not so much undefined, and
undefinable, as a matter of principle, being the chosen origin for our
metaphysics. Worrying about defining the meaning of Quality is
lierally (hah!) pointless. It's simply the chosen (deemed) root of our
world-view, and a very effective one at that.

We can (must) use literal sounding talk about it without any care as
to whether there is anything under it on which it is metaphorically
based.

OK shoot.
Ian
PS BTW Case, when you say Pirsig was "talking nonsense" which bits of
the MoQ do you not buy ?

On 1/19/07, Case <Case at ispots.com> wrote:
> [IG] But Case, you explained this perfectly already when you said
> "Johnson's exposition is filled with anthropomorphic metaphors that
> make his meanings clear when understood as such. When taken literally
> they become gibberish. Understanding what he says requires the ability
> to translate his metaphorical language."
>
> I couldn't have said it better. It's about explanation and
> understanding, not literal meaning. If we choose to misunderstand, all
> language can be made to look like gibberish. Even mine ;-)
>
> [Case]
> Oddly enough the problem works both ways. I originally read Chapter 11 of
> Lila in this light. It was only after being called on it a couple of times
> and on rereading it twice that I finally got the message that he was not
> speaking metaphorically he really was saying nonsense.
>
> I would be especially happy to be proven wrong on this one.
>
>
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