This, from http://www.freepress.net/ : A bipartisan majority on the House Judiciary Committee yesterday passed the "Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act" -- a good bill that would use antitrust law to protect Network Neutrality. Special thanks to those of you who called the key members who cast the deciding votes. The question…
How often do you hear someone say that the brain is a computer? This statement is not literally true. The brain is certainly not like a desktop computer. Brains don’t look like computers; there’s no CPU in the head. Neurons aren’t all wired together to an executive control center. Human brains have a massively parallel architecture. Cognitive scientists who have carefully thought through this issue arrive at this same conclusion: the brain does not really resemble a computer, certainly not any sort of computer in general use today.
The brain as computer is a seductive metaphor. According to Edwin Hutchins, “The last 30 years of cognitive science can be seen as attempts to remake the person in the image of the computer.” See Cognition in the Wild (1996).
Metaphors are models, however, and models are imperfect versions of the reality they portray. Metaphors accentuate certain parts of reality while downplaying other parts.
Unfortunately, many people “reify” the brain-as-computer metaphor: they accept this metaphor as literal truth, leading to various misunderstandings about human cognition.
Here’s another big difference between brains and computers: human cognition is fault-tolerant and robust. In other words, our minds continue to function even when the information is incomplete (e.g., while we’re driving in the rain) or when our purposes or options are unclear (e.g., navigating a cocktail party). Computers, on the other hand, are always one line of code away from freezing up.
In Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (1992) Gerald M. …
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!
The above is an excerpt from “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” a poem on which John Godfrey re-told an ancient Indian fable that serves as an allegory. The lesson is this: the lens through which we view reality accentuates some features while downplaying others. It must be this way, because we are creatures of limited attentional capacities.
Metaphors are the lenses through which we view our world. In abstract fields like religion and politics, the use of metaphors isn’t just fanciful (although it can be fanciful); the use of metaphors is absolutely necessary to understand abstract concepts. Further, research has shown that the use of conceptual metaphors is systematic, not ad hoc.
Just as physics students understand the flow of electricity by reference to the flow of water, the rest of us use metaphors to understand our own abstract concepts (e.g., in the fields of religion and politics). More important, without metaphors, we would have no meaningful understanding of most abstract concepts. Therefore, whenever we discuss any abstract concept, we are compelled to relentlessly engage in the use of metaphors–there is no other way to talk or write about such things.
Not convinced? What does this matter? Read on and consider the examples. This was literally and truly a life-changing idea for me.
In Metaphors We …
I have had the opportunity to exchange email and links with a man named Josh, who I invited to visit this blog. Josh’s initial comment was: “Thanks for the Invite! But I must say… you and I are in for many future debates!” I could also tell that Josh and I were different by looking at the homepage of his blog, where he writes: “I enjoy apologetics, studying the Bible, and reading various amounts of other important literature. My passion in life is to please Christ.”
Recently, Josh referred me to an article he wrote last year, an article entitled “The Scientific Truth” published on his blog: http://defendtruth.blogspot.com/. Below is my reaction to his article.
Josh:
Thank you for bringing my attention to your article: I’m truly glad we can have this conversation. We certainly come from different perspectives. Different perspectives, but not necessarily different backgrounds. When I was young, I was told to fear God and to read the Bible. I was told that my questions were “just a phase” and that I would learn to simply love God and stop asking impertinent questions. I was sent to Christian (Catholic) schools for 15 of my years of education.
I don’t pretend to know all the answers. I am now an agnostic regarding many things. I believe that the evidence only goes so far and we need to be brave enough to repeatedly say “I don’t know.” I struggle to find explanations that make the most sense …
Another theme that came up during the Memory and Representation session at the recent Popular Culture Association convention in Atlanta was how using different names for things can shape our memory of events. For instance, labeling people as "heroes" may shift attention away from inquiries as to whether their deaths…