[FRIAM] model, metaphor, and things

[Prof David West]

>From Iain McGilchrist, *The Matter of Things, vol I, Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World*. (Top 5 most important books I have read.)

"Explanation, science's forte, is a subset — an explicit, rigorous, disciplined subset, but still a subset — of understanding. All understanding depends on metaphor. What we mean when we say we understand something is that we see it is like something else of which we are already prepared to say 'I understand that'. That, in turn, we will have understood because we have likened it to something else we had previously understood, and so on. It's metaphors all the way down.

In science this inescapable role of metaphor is manifest in the model the science uses in order to seek an explanation of the phenomenon it is investigating. Models are simply extended metaphors. The choice of model is crucial here because the problem for seekers after truth is that that choice governs what we find. We find more or less according to what we put there. Since a model always highlights those aspects of what it is modelling that fit the model, any model soon begins to seem like an uncannily good fit, which means we espouse it with still greater confidence.

Even the sense data that go into selecting the model are not innocent. Perceptions are laden with theory. We never just see something without seeing it *as* a something. We may think that our theories are shaped by observations, but it is as true that our observations are shaped by theories. This means we can be blind to some very obvious things in our immediate environment. We don't look where we don't expect to see so that our expecations come to govern what we *can see*. This is why the model is crucial. In the past such a model was often something in the natural world — a tree, a river, a family. Nowadays, unless otherwise specified, it is the machine."

Quotation of Evelyn Underhill:

"It is notorious that the operations of the average human consciousness unite the self, not with things that really are, but with images, notions, and aspects of things. The verb 'to be', which he uses so lightly, does not truly apply to any of the objects amongst which the practical man supposes himself to dwell. For him, t*he hare of Reality is always ready-jugged*: he conceives not the living, lovely, wild, swift-moving creature which has been sacrificed in order that he may be fed on the deplorable dish which he calls 'things as they really are'."

Quotation from *The Function of Reason*, by Alfred North Whitehead:

"The man with a method good for purposes of his dominant interests is a pathological case in respect to his wider judgement on the coordination of this method with a more complete experience. Priests, scientists, statesmen and men of business, philosophers and mathematicians, are all alike in this respect. We all start by being empiricists. But our empircism is confined within our immediate interests. The more clearly we grasp the intellectual analysis of a way [of?] regulating procedure for the sake of those interests, the more decidedly we reject the inclusion of evidence which refuses to be immediately harmonized with the method before us. *Some of the major disasters of mankind have been produced by the narrowness of men with a good methodology.*"

BTW— jugged hare is an English country dish: hare marinated in red wine and juniper berries, then slow cooked with some of the hare's blood. AKA *civet de lievre*.

I find McGilchrist's books exhilarating—2,000 plus pages of rich empirical evidence and densely reasoned argument that supports almost all of the essays, books, and ideas I have been espousing for 25 years. Including, a path for incorporation of all the hallucinogenic experiences.

davew
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