[FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy
Steven A Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Sun Jun 11 11:43:23 EDT 2017
Roger -
I think your invocation of neural nets as a model of how complex pattern
matching/associations get built/learned by humans is motivated, if not
as a deep explanation of how our mind/brian works, but how it *might*.
The work at LANL on the petavision project which primarily was modeling
the visual cortex touched on this some...
As for "layers", I suspect two things might be true: physical
instantiations of these complex pattern matching systems (e.g. the human
perceptual system) might have some layers imposed by the hardware.
There is *some* processing at the retinal level, probably little to none
in the optic nerve, a good deal more in the visual cortex and then "yet
more" in the cerebral cortex. This class of decomposition of the problem
seems highly motivated and likely. I think your point, however, is
more once the cerebral cortex and langauage centers get involved?
I think it is fascinating to notice what you point out, that the
patterns we coin/invoke to try to understand better do not match the
patterns our pattern-recognizers were "built on". It seems like a
top-down/bottom-up duality. But can we dismiss that we *don't* have
pattern recognizers which are atuned to thes pattern types you reference
(logic, coherence, hierarchy, modularity, homology, etc.?). I suppose I
can believe that at the wetware level we *might not* but at the
associative memory we surely seem to? I think this is why we *impose*
the illusion of hierarchy even when there is little/none? There is some
kind of template/prototypical pattern somewhere driving that, no? Just
as the anecdotal experiments with children who grew up in cities vs in
natural surroundings having different structure detectors (straight
lines and rectangular regions vs curved lines and myriad freeform shape
recognizers)
I agree with your point about bricolage vs engineering and in sympathy
with you, went looking for the adjectival and as you may have turned to
the French whence bricolage comes... but my French is abysmal and could
not wade deep enough. Along the way I was surprised that modern F/E
translation dictionaries all use DIY as the definition... I find that
sadly low-dimensional... I thought immediately of another borrow word
from the French: "bric a brac" which added a nice bit of parallax to it.
Just to feed the fires of an in-person dialog on this topic, I think
there is a good reason that both Jenny Q and Dave W threw down, and that
would be (I am guessing) their deep interest in Alexander's Pattern
Languages. I do think of their specific collection of patterns in
Architecture in "A Pattern Language" to be somewhat a collection of
"bric a brac" in the best way. I'm a big fan of starting with the most
intuitive and ad hoc and only applying formalisms and structure as it is
recognized rather than imposing it from the top.
- Steve
PS> Do you EVER visit SFe? I haven't cracked a single book I bought
when you were leaving... I have friends and colleagues dying and
downsizing so fast that my own damn library is growing faster than I can
even shelve properly. Bastards!
On 6/11/17 8:57 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> The pattern is that people recognize patterns. Patterns of sensory
> experience that get resolved to people, places, things, phenomena.
> Patterns of gesture, utterance, markings on media which get recognized
> as language. Patterns of linguistic expression which contend to be
> seen as models, or metaphors, or analogies, or similes, or
> congruencies, or homologies, or patterns.
>
> At this point, one might ask: how many layers of pattern recognition
> are there between sensory experience and arguments about models and
> metaphors? But our best artificial examples of pattern recognizers
> are deep neural nets, and they don't care about no stinking layers. A
> "layer" in a net might feed its conclusions to the "next layer", to
> itself, to its peers, to its ancestors, to its descendants, to any of
> the above with a delay, or all of the above. The net architecture is
> probably written to allow as many of these connections as are feasible
> and to use the back propagation of error to prune. And next week's
> architecture will have more feasible connections than last week's.
>
> So that's a model of why we can get in such a muddle when we talk
> about patterns of patterns, we try to impose patterns of logical
> consistency, coherent architecture, hierarchical structure,
> modularity, levels of organization, and so on, all of which are good
> patterns, but they are none of them the ruling pattern that our
> pattern recognizers are built on, which is all of the above, and some
> other principles as yet to be recognized, in whatever proportions works.
>
> Pattern recognition is a form of natural selection. The result is
> bricolage rather than direct application of engineering principles. I
> was trying to find the adjectival form for bricolage. Adventitious,
> fortuitous, seredipitous -- but all of these imply a kind of luck, and
> promiscuous implies undiscriminating. I'm looking for the word for
> discriminating in its selection of elements but entirely open to
> whatever solution might be available. Hmm.
>
> All of this leaves aside the issue of whether the pattern recognized
> is true or false according to the pattern of empirical falsification
> or the pattern of feels right.
>
> -- rec --
>
> On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 8:57 AM, Nick Thompson
> <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net>> wrote:
>
> R.
>
> Y-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-s…………….............?
>
> And the pattern is…………………?
>
> N
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
> <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
>
> *From:*Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com
> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>] *On Behalf Of *Roger Critchlow
> *Sent:* Sunday, June 11, 2017 7:11 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
>
>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy
>
> I think I'm starting to see a pattern here.
>
> -- rec --
>
> On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 11:56 PM, Tom Johnson <tom at jtjohnson.com
> <mailto:tom at jtjohnson.com>> wrote:
>
> Dave West writes: "... An example, "the future is in front of
> us."
>
> Unless you're a member of some Andean tribe whose name I've
> forgotten. Then the past is in front of use because we know
> what it is, we can see it. And the future is behind us
> because we know not what it is. (Source: a recent SAR lecture
> that isn't online yet.)
>
> TJ
>
>
>
> ============================================
> Tom Johnson
> Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
> 505.577.6482 <tel:%28505%29%20577-6482>(c) 505.473.9646
> <tel:%28505%29%20473-9646>(h)
> Society of Professional Journalists <http://www.spj.org>
> *Check out It's The People's Data
> <https://www.facebook.com/pages/Its-The-Peoples-Data/1599854626919671>*
>
> http://www.jtjohnson.com <http://www.jtjohnson.com/>
> tom at jtjohnson.com <mailto:tom at jtjohnson.com>
> ============================================
>
> On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 8:53 PM, Jenny Quillien
> <jquillien at cybermesa.com <mailto:jquillien at cybermesa.com>> wrote:
>
> If there is a WedTech on this thread I would also
> certainly attend. So I vote that Dave gets busy and leads
> us toward the light.
>
> Jenny Quillien
>
> On 6/10/2017 8:24 PM, Prof David West wrote:
>
> Hi Nick, hope you are enjoying the east.
>
> The contrast class for "conceptual metaphor" is
> "embedded metaphor" ala Lakoff, et. al. An example,
> "the future is in front of us." Unless, of course you
> speak Aymaran in which case "the future is behind us."
>
> Steve, I do not regularly attend WedTech, but if this
> thread becomes a featured topic, I certainly would be
> there.
>
> davew
>
> On Sat, Jun 10, 2017, at 07:35 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>
> Hi, Dave,
>
> Thanks for taking the time to lay this out. I
> wonder what you call the present status of
> “natural selection” as a metaphor. In this case,
> the analogues between the natural situation and
> the pigeon coop remain strong, but most users of
> the theory have become ignorant about the salient
> features of the breeding situation. So the
> metaphor hasn’t died, exactly; it’s been sucked
> dry of its meaning by the ignorance of its
> practitioners.
>
> I balk at the idea of a “conceptual metaphor”.
> It’s one of those terms that smothers its object
> with love. What is the contrast class? How could
> a metaphor be other than conceptual? I think the
> term subtly makes a case for vague metaphors. In
> my own ‘umble view, metaphors should be as
> specific as possible. Brain/mind is a case two
> things that we know almost nothing about are used
> as metaphors for one another resulting in the vast
> promulgation of gibberish. Metaphors should sort
> knowledge into three categories, stuff we know
> that is consistent with the metaphor, stuff we
> know that is IN consistent with the metaphor, and
> stuff we don’t know, which is implied by the
> metaphor. This last is the heuristic “wet edge”
> of the metaphor. The vaguer a metaphor, the more
> difficult it is to distinguish between these three
> categories, and the less useful the metaphor is.
> Dawkins “selfish gene” metaphor, with all its
> phony reductionist panache, would not have
> survived thirty seconds if anybody had bothered to
> think carefully about what selfishness is and how
> it works. See,
> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767990_On_the_use_of_mental_terms_in_behavioral_ecology_and_sociobiology
> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311767990_On_the_use_of_mental_terms_in_behavioral_ecology_and_sociobiology>ThTh
>
> This is why it is so important to have something
> quite specific in mind when one talks of layers.
> Only if you are specific will you know when you
> are wrong.
>
> I once got into a wonderful tangle with some
> meteorologists concerning “Elevated Mixed Layers”
> Meteorologists insisted that air masses, of
> different characteristics, DO NOT MIX. It turns
> out that we had wildly different models of
> “mixing”. They were thinking of it as a
> spontaneous process, as when sugar dissolves into
> water; I was thinking of it as including active
> processes, as when one substance is stirred into
> another. They would say, “Oil and water don’t
> mix.” I would say, “bloody hell, they do, too,
> mix. They mix every time I make pancakes.” The
> argument drove me nuts for several years because
> any fool, watching hard edged thunderheads rise
> over the Jemez, can plainly see both that the
> atmosphere is being stirred AND that the most air
> in the thunderhead is not readily diffusing into
> the dryer descending air around it. From my point
> of view, convection is something the atmosphere
> does, like mixing; from their point of view,
> convection is something that is DONE TO the
> atmosphere, like stirring. You get to that
> distinction only by thinking of very specific
> examples of mixing as you deploy the metaphor.
>
> Nick
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
> <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
>
> *From:*Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com
> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>] *On Behalf Of
> *Prof David West
> *Sent:* Saturday, June 10, 2017 11:36 AM
> *To:* friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Model, Metaphor, Analogy
>
> long long ago, my master's thesis in computer
> science and my phd dissertation in cognitive
> anthropology dealt extensively with the issue of
> metaphor and model, specifically in the area of
> artificial intelligence and cognitive models of
> "mind." the very first academic papers I published
> dealt with this issue (They were in AI MAgazine,
> the 'journal of record' in the field at the time.
>
> My own musings were deeply informed by the work of
> Earl R. MacCormac: /A Cognitive Theory of
> Metaphor/ and /Metaphor and Myth in Science and
> Religion./
>
> MacCormac argues that metaphor 'evolves' from
> "epiphor" the first suggestion that something is
> like something else to either "dead metaphor" or
> "lexical term" depending on the extent to which
> referents suggested by the first 'something' are
> confirmed to correlate to similar referents in the
> second "something." E.G. an atom is like a solar
> system suggests that a nucleus is like the sun and
> electrons are like planets plus orbits are at
> specific intervals and electrons can be moved from
> one orbit to another by adding energy
> (acceleration) just like any other satellite. As
> referents like this were confirmed the epiphor
> became a productive metaphor and a model, i.e. the
> Bohr model. Eventually, our increasing knowledge
> of atoms and particle/waves made it clear that the
> model/metaphor was 'wrong' in nearly every respect
> and the metaphor died. Its use in beginning
> chemistry suggests that it is still a useful tool
> for metaphorical thinking; modified to "what might
> you infer/reason, if you looked at an atom _as if_
> it were a tiny solar system."
>
> In the case of AI, the joint epiphors — the
> computer is like a mind, the mind is like a
> computer — should have rapidly become dead
> metaphors. Instead they became models "physical
> symbol system" and most in the community insisted
> that they were lexical terms (notably Pylyshyn,
> Newell, and Simon). To explain this, I added the
> idea of a "paraphor" to MacCormac's evolutionary
> sequence — a metaphor so ingrained in a paradigm
> that those thinking with that paradigm cannot
> perceive the obvious failures of the metaphor.
>
> MacCormac's second book argues for the
> pervasiveness of the use and misuse of metaphor
> and its relationship to models (mathematical and
> iillustrative) in both science and religion. The
> "Scientific Method," the process of doing science,
> is itself a metaphor (at best) that should have
> become a dead metaphor as there is abundant
> evidence that 'science' is not done 'that way' but
> only after the fact as if it had been done that
> way. In an Ouroborosian twist, even MacCormac;s
> theory of metaphor is itself a metaphor.
>
> If this thread attracts interest, I think the work
> of MacCormac would provide a rich mine of
> potential ideas and a framework for the
> discussion. Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be
> behind pay walls — the books and JSTOR or its ilk.
>
> dave west
>
> On Fri, Jun 9, 2017, at 03:11 PM, Steven A Smith
> wrote:
>
> I meant to spawn a fresh proto-thread here, sorry.
>
> Given that we have been splitting hairs on
> terminology, I wanted to at least OPEN the
> topic that has been grazed over and over,
> and that is the distinction between Model,
> Metaphor, and Analogy.
>
> I specifically mean
>
> 1. Mathematical Model
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_model>
> 2. Conceptual Metaphor
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor>
> 3. Formal Analogy
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy>
>
> I don't know if this narrows it down
> enough to discuss but I think these three
> terms have been bandied about loosely and
> widely enough lately to deserve a little
> more explication?
>
> I could rattle on for pages about my own
> usage/opinions/distinctions but trust that
> would just pollute a thread before it had
> a chance to start, if start it can.
>
> A brief Google Search gave me THIS
> reference which looks promising, but as
> usual, I'm not willing to go past a
> paywall or beg a colleague/institution for
> access (I know LANL's reference library
> will probably get this for me if I go in
> there!).
>
> http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818
> <http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631221081_chunk_g97806312210818>
>
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