[MD] Analogues and metaphors, etc.

[Jan Anders Andersson]

Great article David, thanks.

Regarding the posiibilities for constructing a working selfconfident AI it is interesting how the concept of it self should be represented, if possible at all. Electronic and digital values are present in any electronic device.

I must confess to the readers of my book "Money and..." that I was using the erected penis as an idiom for the uncontrollable self. I liked it because it's so digital, either on or off, 1 or zero. Strange enough, the opposite case it s for women where 1 is off while 0 is on. Female readers are those who like it and hate it most.

Jan-Anders

> 5 sep 2014 kl. 00:19 skrev david <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> "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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