[FRIAM] "analogies we live by"

[glen]

I dug out 10 posts that I think provide the corpus for this discussion. Attached. And I may find the energy/desire to do some kind of work fleshing it out. But first, Steve's invocation of "explanation" (either in the xAI sense or the science/knowledge sense) reminded me of Melanie's article: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt6140.

In contrasting Hofstadter's conception versus Lakoff's, and in light of our (well, some of us) reification of LLMs as humans or humans as LLMs, the question that consistently emerges is What is the relationship between computation and body?

I've expressed my stance several times, I think. That formal definitions of "compute", like the one Lee proposed awhile back (by Soare) [⛧] that requires computation be definite, do not exist outside or apart from bodies of some kind. So in the context of both Dave's brain-computer and Eric's actual-formal evolution, my stance is not Platonic (or Popper's World 3 ... or whatever). Even/especially things like code/proofs executable as software have bodies. To some extent, if it can't be executed, then it's not True/real, hearkening back to "effective procedures" or somesuch. But going back to Eric's question on 7/16/25 6:19 PM about what work is done by the theory itself, assuming some of these abstractions (analogies, computable expressions) are schematic, we can make them less semantic/bound/definite by making them polysemous/multiply[bound|defined]. So in Eric's case, the terms in the/a logic of evolution can be unbound and rebound to a new context (and maybe tested for inference and fidelity after the rebinding). Or in Dave's (and Steve's and Melanie's), unbind our "language" about people and rebind them to LLMs. Then as in ALife, rebind evolution and maybe even brain-computer (given models like Beliefs, Desires, and Intention or other forms of agency). I'm too ignorant to understand [un|re]binding in RNA Worlds - but I assume something similar could be done, as Eric seems to suggest.

So my answer to the relationship between computation and body, maybe resolving Hofstadter vs Lakoff, lies in this [un|re]binding of the "logic". And where such [un|re]binding fails, you can ratchet it back a bit. Maybe not *all* the terms in the logic can be [un|re]bound, but *some* can. To be clear, I'm also talking about functions being [un|re]bound/implemented, not merely atoms.

To me, that sort of program would lead to a methodologically useful theory of analogy/metaphor. I feel like I've been infected with something like type theory in saying this. I can't help but think there is a cadre of people already doing this work. They just don't call it "theory of metaphor".


[⛧] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203100806-2/logic-modeling-logics-models-rudolph-lee

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