<div dir="ltr"><div>Dear EricS, </div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">I think the best defense off my understandings is in the paper that you have [re]read, so perhaps you might just disregard what follows. But I perhaps it might have a few new thoughts, so I will "offer" them. You write:</blockquote><div><br></div><div> </div><div style="margin-left:40px"><i><b>
Case 1: There are certain formal presentations that claim to capture what makes a dynamic \u201cevolutionary\u201d. </b></i></div><div><br></div><div>Given my history, I cannot let this pass. Most of my writing over the last half century has been motivated by a confusion I see amongst my colleagues between their explananses and their explanandas. This literature you cite often fails to make a distinction between evolution as a theory and the theory that explains evolution. Evolution as a theory holds that organisms have descended through the ages they have become modified to the circumstances of their existence. It is a thesis about the causes of descent with modification. Natural selection is a theory offered in explanation of that pattern of descent. The literature you describe has often fused these two metaphors into one and therefore is fundamentally unfalsifiable as a theory that explains evolution. Work such as that done on the Darwin's Finches in which adaptation is observed in situ in a taxonomic group and then a selection mechanism is located which seems to explain that adaptation is relatively rare, or was when I was last sentient. </div><div><br></div><div>You will say, quite rightly, that the water is way over this dam, and I am a silly old bugger for calling back the flood. But I think that it's useful to remember that Darwin's theory, the whole theory, was a lovely nest of metaphors beginning with the idea of species and working up through taxonomy, phylogeny, and evolution which is then explained by the grandest metaphor of all, natural selection. There was grandeur in that view of life which is no way captured by mathematics. But you have already stipulated that, so I should not harangue you. Oddly enough, even DS wilson gets this wrong. </div><div><br></div><div>Next point: I wrote. </div><div><br></div><div>
<blockquote type="cite" style="margin-left:80px"><div><div><div><b><i><span style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif">It follows that every sighting of a thing previously not encountered has to be a metaphor.</span> </i></b></div><div><b><i><br></i></b></div></div></div></blockquote><div><div><div>And then you responded:</div></div></div><div style="margin-left:40px"><b><i><br></i></b></div><div style="margin-left:40px"><b>This
is the point I telegraphed above: Nick\u2019s usage of \u201cmetaphor\u201d is so wide
that he is willing to make a logical-ish claim that \u201cIt follows that\u2026.\u201d
In my usage, no such \u201cit follows\u201d can be asserted.</b></div><div style="margin-left:40px"><b><br></b></div>I think my definition of (scientific) metaphor is actually narrower than is common, given that I insist on a formality of analysis. But speaking of logic, I wonder if you would agree with the statement that every perception is an abduction. That is, to see something (in the broadest sense of seeing) we have to assign it to a category. Categories by their nature are arrangements of prior experience. We could then go on to wrangle over whether all abductions are metaphors, if we cared to, but I doubt we would. </div><div><br></div><div>I can see your coming back to me to say that I am confusing perception with the reporting of perceptions. You are right. I am confused about that. I am not sure there is really any useful distinction there to be made. But let's not have that argument because we don't really have to. For a perception to be scientific it must be reported, and I think you agree that every report of a new experience must be in terms of previous ones. Even if I have just seen a unicorn for the first time and even if you insist that I have genuinely seen the unicorn in its true unicornity, you will agree that <b><i>my report</i></b> will be something like "I just saw a horse with a white narwhal horn in the middle of its nose -- unless, of course, somebody has previously told me that that's what a unicorn <b><i>is</i></b>. </div><div><br></div><div>Thanks for your generosity. </div><div><br></div><div>Nick </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div> </div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Mar 22, 2026 at 6:04\u202fAM Santafe <<a href="mailto:desmith@santafe.edu" target="_blank">desmith@santafe.edu</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>This is good, Nick,<div><br></div><div>There are some things you say here to which I think I can reply constructively. I will commit the indiscretion (c.f. Pound) of responding to a couple of sentences that weren\u2019t addressed to me, and then others that were.</div><div><br></div><div>(TL:DR of course)<br id="m_2169717526572001725m_-3687529388876943206lineBreakAtBeginningOfMessage"><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Mar 21, 2026, at 16:07, Nicholas Thompson <<a href="mailto:thompnickson2@gmail.com" target="_blank">thompnickson2@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><div><div dir="ltr"><div><br></div><div>I will work backwards. What is the test by which you determine whether your talc-ing of the lens has improved your vision or whether it has made it worse? That's not a rhetorical question. Work it through in your imagination. How exactly do you determine this? This is the question that lies at the bottom of EricS's complaint about TK. </div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>As usual for me, I don\u2019t know how to describe a general system, but I think I can work backward from example cases. </div><div><br></div><div>Note: I will need to say later that you seem to scope the word \u201cmetaphor\u201d much wider than I ever would, and as a result you seem to assimilate categories that to me are very different and need to be handled differently. Because I tend to see lots of different types at work, my examples tend to be fairly narrow and particular.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Case 1: There are certain formal presentations that claim to capture what makes a dynamic \u201cevolutionary\u201d. They are derived from the population geneticists\u2019 conventions. As formal systems, they are whatever they are. Terms are defined; you can check whether they are coherent, and wherever they are, you can calculate things with them. There isn\u2019t anything in this exercise of a formal system that one could regard as being \u201cin error\u201d, as long as you use the terms in ways that keep them coherent. To the extent that they get bound do observations of phenomena, they are being treated as a model (in one sense of that term; several somewhat different senses exist). </div><div><br></div><div>The place where metaphor enters is in the choice to see this formal system, as opposed to some other one, as a model, and here I think we can argue that there are understandable motives, and also errors. I take this to be the main program you are after, and one that I also want. </div><div><br></div><div>Within the usual setup, there is an (appropriately) ugly term called \u201cunits of selection\u201d. It has all sorts of problems and inadequacies, hacks, compromises, and so forth. For a very limited range of cases, it is a good abstraction, and sufficient for certain statistical needs. (That last sentence has a trumpy structure.) It is related to another term that need not be ugly but is often made so: \u201clevels of selection\u201d, for which the obligatory book to cite (whether or not one has read it) is Samir Okasha\u2019s. </div><div><br></div><div>I will argue that the choice to insist, cult-like, that an evolutionary process can only be formalized around \u201cunits of selection\u201d is an instance of making a metaphor in which the source domain is our folk-experience of \u201corganisms\u201d about as it would have been available (and would have seemed unproblematic) to Darwin. And I would argue that an error is made when the metaphor is applied to systems in which the target lacks infrastructure that could ever let it take on capabilities that organisms have (say, of long-term type-stability of kinds that biology usually doesn\u2019t even question), and that are essential for organisms to provide what they provide to evolutionary dynamics. This misattribution gets particularly acute for Origin of Life problems, so they bring it into sharp relief. </div><div><br></div><div>Notably, the _only_ reason I am willing to make this charge is that I can construct other formal systems to adopt as models, which don\u2019t insist on anything that is metaphorically so literally bound to organisms a la Darwin, and that will be more faithful to the play-out of the phenomena to which they are being applied \u2014 even by the terms that the evolutionists set out for themselves about what is the specifically \u201cevolutionary\u201d aspect of some dynamic. This is the usual situation of not knowing there was a question until having constructed an answer enables one to articulate that question.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Case 2: I second either DaveW or John Searle (different as those two are) in not much liking the \u201cbrain is a computer\u201d classification, and in thinking it is a mis-used metaphor. In two ways, my objection can\u2019t be like Dave\u2019s is: 1) I don\u2019t have something else that I want to put in place of the \u201ccomputer\u201d source domain, and 2) I don\u2019t understand the mystics\u2019 position. And Searle in general has too much other baggage that I don\u2019t want to endorse, that I have only maybe a sliver of overlap with him. But I can say I have my own, very tentative, objection. A place I differ from the others is that I am a lot more optimistic that current ML systems will have _a lot_ to say about brains and thought, along lines Marcus advocates, and I think there is a crisp question one can pose from that view.</div><div><br></div><div>For me, the core of the objection is that, as I use the term \u201ccomputer\u201d, if I mean a formal system, then I intend one of the formalized classes: maybe Church/Turing equivalent, or maybe some formalized process calculus, or maybe various kinds of gradient-descent as in neural net architectures with their training protocols. If I mean the common/sub-formal usage, I intend the family-resemblance sense in which we will clump many engineered systems as \u201ccomputers\u201d if they will carry some parts of the formal markings without inconsistency (von Neumann machines that don\u2019t have infinite Turing tapes, but that will carry out algorithm fragments exactly as the Turing machine would if the tape isn\u2019t limiting to that fragment, etc.)</div><div><br></div><div>My speculative resistance to the \u201cis a computer\u201d assignment, is that it seems to make brains a sub-class of some other engineered system, or to suppose that the partial ability of brain activity to carry formal markings without inconsistency gives us reason to believe that there are _no other markings_ that it might also carry that are worth articulating, and that are essential to its brain-ness or thought-ness. I take this to be Searle\u2019s point in saying \u201cmy brain is like my stomach\u201d: it is its whole self, which may as well be indefinitely complicated and unknown to me, beyond a few of its functions that I can describe. Don\u2019t, if I can use a Glen construction correctly, \u201cpre-emptively register\u201d. </div><div><br></div><div>My optimism for bringing in the computer metaphor heavily is that it seems entirely reasonable to suppose that there are many things the brain does, which we experience and classify (in our folk language since antiquity) as \u201cthinking\u201d, that computers are also doing, and that for practical purposes they are doing \u201cin the same way\u201d. </div><div><br></div><div>About the latter I need to give two details to be understandable, because here I think there is a puzzle to solve (tip to TK). I would maybe _not_ want to pursue either of the arguments that: 1) the brain _cannot_ be doing what the ML computing machines are doing, because they are different substrates; or 2) that the brain _should_ be doing what the ML computing machines are doing because Hopfield designed them to imitate what he understood neurons to be doing. A much more fun problem for me would be the conjecture: There is a certain class of pattern-finding and pattern-modeling problems that are richly furnished by the world, for which there is a class of \u201cmost easily found\u201d ways of solving them. Brains and ML computing machines may be doing effectively the same thing, because they have both found these easiest ways, in spite of some difference of substrate, and perhaps guiding the convergence of other aspects of substrate (approximated, let us guess, by Hopfield et seq.) This is the kind of computational-complexity or algorithm-type argument I would make for protein folding, or for metabolism, along similar lines. Abstract a little bit away from material things, and ask about the nature of patterns of events in a world of noise, and then ask for paths of least resistance.</div><div><br></div><div>So the metaphor of \u201cis a computer\u201d had great service to give, if it directed us to understand the nature of problems, after which, like WIttgenstein\u2019s ladder, we have the sense to throw it away. </div><div><br></div><div>Moreover, the ability of computers to do _really what_ brains are doing in one respect, while being different in others, gives us angles on the brain by disaggregating these aspects, in ways we rarely get with whole brains, apart from idiosyncratic cases of pathology that expose part of the machinery, though generally not for the sake of making it easy for us to interpret.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>I think one could go on, with similar rather narrow cases of this kind.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Continuing my self-indulgence, I do want to repeat something I wrote some months ago, about one aspect of the term \u201cmetaphor\u201d. My understanding is that, narrowly, it applies to a specific language construct: calling one thing by the name of something else that both speaker and listener understand it is not. I am willing to extend that as far as \u201creferring to one thing in the image of another that both referrer and recipient know it is not\u201d. So, to go beyond just names, to general constructs for images or referents. </div><div><br></div><div>I would not, then, refer to just-any-old-gesture in some direction as \u201ca metaphor\u201d. I think (in current American English usage; I won\u2019t proclaim about old Greek), the deliberate violation is a core sense of the term \u201cmetaphor\u201d that sets it apart from other assimilation-indicating terms, like \u201canalogy\u201d, or \u201cfamily resemblance\u201d, or various other senses of \u201cmodel\u201d. </div><div><br></div><div>I am actually even violating my own usage here, in the previous two examples, in that the known-and-intended name violation is often _not_ part of what the units-of-selection crowd or the brain-is-a-computer crowd do. i will say that, when processed properly, that violation aspect does arise and makes them (imagistic) metaphors-proper.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div dir="ltr"><div>We would like to think it's not "just" a social test. This is where Peirce takes off, I think: yes, it's a social test, but it's not "just" a social test. In fact, the long term social test has methods, it has rigor, it has precision, it has all the good things that collective human cognition can have. These are scientific methods and the pursuit of such methods will lead you to have fewer surprises in your life. The one thing it will never have is experience of entities beyond the realm of human experience. It follows that every sighting of a thing previously not encountered has to be a metaphor. </div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>This is the point I telegraphed above: Nick\u2019s usage of \u201cmetaphor\u201d is so wide that he is willing to make a logical-ish claim that \u201cIt follows that\u2026.\u201d In my usage, no such \u201cit follows\u201d can be asserted.</div><div><br></div><div>There are all kinds of new sightings in my world that \u201ckinda remind me of\u201d something else more familiar. That is the part of what you say that I think is generic. We are little systems (pace Dave) in a world that is bigger than we are, and there is no general solution to the Problem of Induction. For that reason we cannot help but classify.</div><div><br></div><div>But such classification can be any-old kind of binding of situations and systems. I think that when people on the list have preferred \u201cmodel\u201d over \u201cmetaphor\u201d for cases in point, it is the sense of \u201cmodel\u201d that: two phenomena are somehow in some common category, and whatever that category is, I am willing to take one as \u201ca model of\u201d the other. </div><div><br></div><div>I actually think that, at one remove, this is what we do with our formal systems as well. Once declared into existence, a formal system becomes one more thing-in-the-world. We can exercise it, participate in its use, and grow our own experience-base with it. When we \u201cbind\u201d that experience with the formal system to our experiences with some other phenomena \u2014 taking the formal system for \u201ca model of\u201d the naturally occurring phenomenon \u2014 that binding occurs in ineffable domains that can be as hazardous as those that assimilate experiences with distinct natural phenomena. It is here that the question of what empiricism is becomes both hard and interesting. </div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>EricS. I have, as you know, enormous respect for you,, and gratitude for your open-mindednss back in the old days when we heathens were allowed to tread the sacred halls of the Institute and, if we were very respectful, pet the cat.. When i remember those days, it is bizarre to me that we cannot share a good laugh about the contradictions in your paragraph: </div><br><div><div><div><div style="margin-left:40px"><b><i>It is tempting to laugh at the way to take Glen\u2019s meaning; where when Glen argues that one should
look through the lens in the sense of meaning-making, Nick
claims innocently to understand that as looking through the lens
at <span style="background-color:rgb(0,0,255)"><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">(invented?</span></span> Freudian-style emotional motives. There will
never be a thrust that gets through that parry, we have watched
it for decades. All good fun. </i></b></div></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I think you left out a couple of words, perhaps in an act of social generosity. But let\u2019s see if I can understand what you say is a contradiction. </div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>First we need to clear up some metaphysical ground. Two bird watchers out for a walk in Santa Fe on a recent afternoon. </div><div><br></div><div>BW#1: I just saw a blue-footed booby. </div><div>BW#2: There are no blue-footed boobies in Santa Fe in April.</div><div>BW#1: Nonetheless, I just saw a blue-footed booby. </div><div><br></div><div>Now there are several understandings of this situation that resolve the contradiction and still leave BW#1's assertion to be true. </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>This can go down lines a lot like Imre Lakatos\u2019s critique of the Logical Empiricists\u2019 program. But, I understand, not the point of this thread of sentences. </div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>These include all sorts of altered states, delusion, illusion, etc. . And there is the intenSionality issue; BW#1 may speak a language in which "blue-footed booby" refers to the bird which BW#2 would call a "Stellars Jay." Science can handle all of those. </div><div><br></div><div>The tricky understandings are those in which we declare BW#1 to be telling some sort of lie. He is joking, he is faking, he is claiming falsely, he is arguing dishonestly, etc. Now these understandings all imply that BW#1 is disingenuous. Such claims can, of course, can be verified, but such verifications involve long experience with the speaker and his context and require one to assume that he is not to be trusted or does not know the nature and quality of his own acts, or both. Such claims are inherently insulting, and, at the best, require great circumspection and tact in their verification. </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I agree. Bad Faith is a nasty charge to level against somebody, and I think I don\u2019t want to do that. </div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>So, lets assume that Nick is being honest when he says what he first sees when he reads a correspondent's posts is a troll under a bridge grumping about who is walking over his bridge. Let's assume that that is what Nick naively sees. That's his first impression. </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I actually believe this. How much it was the point of the \u201clenses are for seeing meaning through\u201d analogy, versus how much not, is a fair question. My take was: the trolling is largely for entertainment, and to add force and emphasis here and there, but there was a serious accusation \u2014 to the main point of the thread \u2014 of behaving like an Analytical Philosopher of my acquaintance, who when she hears \u201cNecessity is the mother of invention\u201d responds with \u201cTell me about your mother\u201d, sort of refusing to admit that she knows there is relevant context beyond the surface forms. Moreover, refusing to admit she can figure out that there must be other context, even if unknown to her, by choosing, among the many glosses for a word, one that clearly made the sentence senseless. (In the case of the Analytical Philosopher, over years, I came to learn that she often didn\u2019t actually know about some of this context, and with time to deliver it across gradually, she became quite willing to engage with it, to her credit. So she turned out to be a good-faith actor. Just very, very hard to have a non-maddening conversation with, in any short spell.)</div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>And let's assume that he has to actually apply all sorts of analytical tools to see through to the valuable arguments beneath. Let's not assume (unless you are prepared to make the argument) that he is lying about having this experience.</div><div><br></div><div>Now this is tricky, because I (a somewhat respected correspondent) have been goaded into reporting a first impression of the words of another (more respected correspondent) which is apparently discordant with your understanding of the latter . </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Dunno. Is the affect you sincerely perceive actually there? Or is it invented or imprinted? I am _so_ lucky I am a third person who can\u2019t know either, and I can stay off to the side. Too much responsibility if I had to have an opinion. So my saying that the affect response is not the point is not a claim that I either agree or disagree with the affect assertion. </div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>The one thing we cannot do is shrug. If there is one thing that must be true about scientists is that they care about disagreement. Obviously, not all disagreements are of equal importance, so one has to prioritize. But if one does tackle a disagreement, one has to examine not only the disagreement between two experiences, but the lenses through which those experiences have been seen. </div><div><br></div><div>Those of us who use metaphors must be willing to examine them. We can never say, "Of course that is what my metaphor means." That is all I have ever been saying. </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>And of course, with this, I have been on board all along, which is why I post. Where I bicker, it is usually about how many different categories there are, and when those differences matter. </div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div>Those of you who claim (if there are any of you) that some things are directly seen while others arrived at through analysis, pretense and sophistry must be prepared to explain how some experiences come to be simple while others are complex. </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Nick </div></div></blockquote><br></div><div>Anyway; enough out of me for today, </div><div><br></div><div>Eric</div><div><br></div><br></div></div>.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..<br>
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</blockquote></div><div><br clear="all"></div><br><span class="gmail_signature_prefix">-- </span><br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div>Nicholas S. Thompson</div><div>Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology</div><div>Clark University</div><div><a href="mailto:nthompson@clarku.edu" target="_blank">nthompson@clarku.edu</a></div><div><a href="https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson" target="_blank">https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson</a></div><div><a href="https://substack.com/@monist" target="_blank">https://substack.com/@monist</a></div></div></div>