[MD] Analogues and metaphors, etc.

[Dan Glover]

David,

Wonderful article! Thanks so much for sharing it. I think it
beautifully explains why I hammer so hard on John about context as
well as giving a great accounting as to why social and intellectual
patterns are seen in the MOQ as exclusively the domain of human
beings. We are human beings so our culture is molded around that.

Many and perhaps even most people use language without ever delving
beneath its surface. I think the same could be said for the MOQ.
People read Lila one time and they think they got it. They don't seem
to sense the subtlety contained within the metaphors that make up the
book.

"What’s emerging from these studies isn’t just a theory of language or
of metaphor. It’s a nascent theory of consciousness. Any algorithmic
system faces the problem of bootstrapping itself from computing to
knowing, from bit-shuffling to caring."
http://chronicle.com/article/Your-Brain-on-Metaphors/148495/

Dan comments:

A person could almost use this excerpt from the article as a blurb for the MOQ.

Thanks again,

Dan

http://www.danglover.com

On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 4:19 PM, david <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> "In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our
> environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and
> heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy,
> engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And
> they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing
> that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into
> an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality.
> Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create
> the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it." -- Pirsig, ZAMM
>
>
> It looks like there is empirical evidence to support Pirsig's assertion that we invent and use analogues, although these guys talk about it in terms of "metaphors".
>
>
> "...The hypothesis driving their work is that metaphor is central to
> language. Metaphor used to be thought of as merely poetic ornamentation,
>  aesthetically pretty but otherwise irrelevant. ..For
> centuries, metaphor was just the place where poets went to show off.    But in their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By, the linguist
> George Lakoff (at the University of California at Berkeley) and the
> philosopher Mark Johnson (now at the University of Oregon)
> revolutionized linguistics by showing that metaphor is actually a
> fundamental constituent of language. For example, they showed that in
> the seemingly literal statement "He’s out of sight," the visual field is
>  metaphorized as a container that holds things. The visual field isn’t
> really a container, of course; one simply sees objects or not. But the
> container metaphor is so ubiquitous that it wasn’t even recognized as a
> metaphor until Lakoff and Johnson pointed it out.
> From such examples they argued that ordinary language is saturated with metaphors."
>
>
> "The MOQ resolves the relationship between intellect and society, subject
> and object, mind and matter, by embedding all of them in a larger system of
> understanding. Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are
> social and intellectual values. They are not two mysterious universes that
> go floating around in some subject-object dream that allows them no real
> contact with one another. They have a matter-of-fact evolutionary
> relationship. That evolutionary relationship is also a moral one." -- Pirsig in Lila
>
>
> I think their work might also support Pirsig's assertion that the levels have a matter-of-fact-evolutionary relationship, specifically the connections between the biological and social levels such that the structure of the body (matter) shapes the structures of thought (mind).
>
>
> "Lakoff and Johnson’s program is as anti-Platonic as it’s possible to
> get. It undermines the argument that human minds can reveal transcendent
>  truths about reality in transparent language. They argue instead that
> human cognition is embodied—that human concepts are shaped by the
> physical features of human brains and bodies. "Our physiology provides
> the concepts for our philosophy," Lakoff wrote in his introduction to
> Benjamin Bergen’s 2012 book, Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning.
>  Marianna Bolognesi, a linguist at the International Center for
> Intercultural Exchange, in Siena, Italy, puts it this way: "The
> classical view of cognition is that language is an independent system
> made with abstract symbols that work independently from our bodies. This
>  view has been challenged by the embodied account of cognition which
> states that language is tightly connected to our experience. Our bodily
> experience."
>
>
> http://chronicle.com/article/Your-Brain-on-Metaphors/148495/
>
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