[Xmca-l] Re: Rogers day

[Annalisa Aguilar]

Lovely thread spinning Douglas!


(Am taking my time reading the Bates chapter Alfredo so generously added to this topic discussion.)


I don't know if this is fair game, but I always got the sense that Lakoff has thought, perhaps too long, on the metaphor, with the idea that his tenure on the topic would mandate wrapping anyone else's exceptions into questions, just to not seem priggish.


And Huw, we await the throwing of your exceptions into the ring; all 20 of them!


Also to Douglas, I had an insight that perhaps is already obvious to some experienced thinkers about it (including yourself), whether percepts might be stored imagistically (as a base container of thought among all animals for it being an embodied copy, like a shadow is a copy of a thing in silhouette), except for humans who have developed language possess an alternative option to abbreviate a percept into a word-meaning, such that word-meaning becomes something of a jack-in-the-box upon usage, then to be packed up for the next usage (and may be why word-meanings change over time). Additionally, that metaphor works alongside word-meaning as an engine for economy so that instead of image to word-meaning to image, or word-meaning to image to word-meaning, the connection is image to image or, word-meaning to word-meaning, or word-meaning to image or image to word-meaning, which makes cognition more efficient (at least by a third). When I say "to" I mean more a mapping connection, rather than a 1:1 connection. Like a Venn diagram is a mapping (though overlap) a group with another group (like Late Wittgenstein's family resemblances), and that this is different than the connection extending between a trunk and a leaf connected with a branch. We wouldn't say that a trunk is a leaf, but that there is an association and their connection is via a branch.


I'm not sure I'm making all that much sense and that's OK because I'm just thinking out loud.


We know for example that inner speech can be abbreviated. Virginia Woolf would have very telegraphic writing as she developed her stories, and then she would elaborate to "unpack" this code she had captured through exercising her inner speech, to herself. Kind of like an algebra of storywriting/storythinking


And so to be stored in memory, the percept is made fast with the image/word-meaning but then unpacked upon usage. And I'm also thinking that this isn't a symbol, because a metaphor is far richer than a symbol because a metaphor by its very nature has a lived context (otherwise, how could be map it?) whereas a symbol might not, just a representative or reference in a two-dimensional sense. And this may explain why analytical logic is so unpopular among the human beasts because the symbols appear to be so arbitrary. While a metaphor extends to the world, and so the cognitive load is offloaded to the environment (and not the mind, so much) so all that is required is the imagistic reference (or word reference) pointing to the world. Everything represented in a very small box. A firefly in a glass jar.


This overlap (mapping) creates the layers of depth-of-meaning (with patterns) that might not so readily adhere to a logical symbol, which has a more mechanical interaction symbol to symbol.


I also had an insight that this referential mapping to the world could explain why there are different forms of learning and different forms of cognition and conceptualization, which would explain different sorts of intelligences (no one intelligence being better than any other, just different).


Then, with regard to dreams, I had always thought of dreaming as the brain's garbage collection during sleep, and that collection is based upon what the mind was preoccupied with during waking hours. Nightmares would be an instance of brain constipation, holding onto things too long that are best let go. It is fascinating that we can never dream about anything that we do not already know about in the waking world. We can make things up, like the horns of a rabbit, which do not exist, but such a thing is a complex of objects we have witnessed in the world. We don't tend to dream about things that have a strange logic, such as the son of a barren woman.


Which sort of works with my hypothesis above about mapping and overlapping.


I did also have to laugh, because how do we know whether animals dream? Did someone host an interview with Dick Cavett or something?


Anyway, given that we have the basis of imagistic cognition (in the animal kingdom) and word-meaning cognition (in humans because of language), as a human, since a human is still an animal, though a very polluting one, could do both, one or neither, and this lends to add many variations of thinking across a population.


Then a word more about the unconscious. Given what I've said so far, perhaps the unconscious is just like misplacing our keys. We record something and we know we've got it stored away in the same way we might distractedly set down our keys, but we've forgotten where we left them until such time we stumble across them while looking for something else.


What is also intriguing is that cinema seems to go in reverse, because it is image to word-meaning to image as word-meaning, since there is more language-like structures, syntaxes, and grammars to cinema construction, which of course does also change over time.

Kind regards,

Annalisa
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