[FRIAM] Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

[Steve Smith]

On 5/28/20 9:32 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Steve, 
>
> After thinking about them I think curved manifolds are real just as
> right triangles.  Perhaps my introspection deludes me.
I think manifolds "just are", to call them "curved" is to place them in
the reference frame of Euclidean.   To a creature who lives on the
surface of a sphere or a torus, a euclidean straight line or
poly-gon/hedron would be "just wrong".  Euclidean straight lines are now
curved and vice-versa.  The problem is that *we* are mostly
experienced/habituated to thinking in Euclidean Straight lines (what
light (nearly)travels along at the scale of gravitational flux we live
in).  In another post I appeal to global scale navigation for an
alternative, and in my orbital mechanics dreams I claim that I
*experience* a (pseudo) complex manifold *directly* (following the
isoclines of "least action" in Guerin's terminology?) or
conserved/budgeted Delta-V.
> I think you agree with me about thinking without language. 
> Sometimes.  In the morning I don't think, "Now I am going to open this
> cabinet to get a bowl..."

I think I agree that on a good day this happens (otherwise I'd not have
coffee and my avocado-toasted-bagel until later in the day).  

I had a friend/tenant living in my house for couple of years (2016-2018)
who had a brain injury 30 years ago which was treated with a variety of
physical and talk therapy, psychotropics, ECTs, and other "mind bending"
things like EMDR and bilateral-something-or other.   He had a horrible
problem with "sequencing".   Once he DID formulate something in language
he would be stuck with that formulation...  and if interrupted while
executing or if someone tried to inject into or reorder his formulation
, he would get stalled and all but have to "start over" and talk himself
through his formulated steps until he got to the point where he had been
derailed.  Things he had done habitually in his life (driving, cooking
his favorite chile, etc. were mostly immune to this...)

I will agree that there are many familiar/practiced sequences of
impulses and actions that we atomize to the point that it takes
virtually no conscious attention to execute them.  For example, not long
after I learned to type, my ability to translate language into pixels
(ink, ???) is entirely subconscious.   If I *think* too much about what
my fingers are doing, I get fumbly and have to do a lot of backing up
and starting again.  My orbital dreams felt like I was training myself
to "gesture in 3D delta-V phase space"... I don't claim that anything
I've done in my dreams is particularly registered to real orbital
mechanics (though it resembles it in some ways as best I can tell), only
that it is (was) becoming subliminal/subconscious/embodied.  

I believe you are also a tennis player (you current, me long-since
deprecated skill) so you know the huge "lexicon" of
motions/trajectories/gestures your body knows how to execute in phase
space... from your serve to a "rush to the net" or an "overhead slam" or
a variety of top, side, back-spin ways to stroke the ball.   I can
*still* without a racquet in my hand for decades or a foot on a court
"feel" these things in my body... which allows me to watch Tennis on TV
(mirror neurons) in a way I will (and have) never been able to watch any
other sport... even though I've thrown a few spiral passes, kicked a few
soccer balls, hit a few home runs (or pop flys), and sunk a few
freethrows/3pointers/layups in my life, they never really got fully
encoded the way a decade or more of (weakly) competitive tennis did.

I *think* this is the level of "sensorial grounding out" that
Lakoff/Nunez appeal to at the bottom of their own "metaphors all the way
down" conception.   In deference to my trying to allow some of the
layers to be analogies, models and mappings,  I suppose I might say "it
is mappings all the way down" until it hits the hardware (wetware) where
I contend there are still "mappings" but rather different than the ones
we think of in the "mappings" from metaphorical target to source
domains.  The grounding under the ground are the kinds of ion-channels
described recently in his Touch/Pressure/Temperature/Proprioception
paper link. I hope Glen will agree with me (not so that I feel I am
*right* only because I *think* this captures/resolves a lot of what we
have argued here and offline?)  somewhat on this alternative of "maps"
all the way down?

I think your sense that space-time is "bent" or "curved" is an example
of where the metaphor (mapping) has been atomized.   To your conception
(I suggest) absolute space is Cartesian and the *real* topology of space
is "curved" in that frame of reference.   I say this because I think
until I started working with global-scale navigation and more recently
dreaming in orbital mechanics, I pretty much felt the way you describe
the "shape of space".

I think it is similar to the duality I've described here before between
*believing* or *understanding* or *knowing* that the moon orbits the
earth while the earth-moon system orbits the sun whilst *experiencing*
it as "the sun and moon, each on their own schedule, rise in the east
and set in the west.  Every day!".  The earth doesn't spin at all (the
sky does!).

Mumble,

- Steve