[FRIAM] The metaphor in the room

[Steve Smith]

I've spent my self-conscious life/energy trying to understand whence 
comes "understanding", and fortunately the bulk of my life (/what 
happens whilst making other plans/) has been un-selfconscious, with a 
lot of breathing, walking, wood-splitting, tree-climbing, hell-raising, 
etc along the way.

  "understanding" as a placeholder for other related terms like 
"insight" and "apprehension" implies (for me) an act of model-fitting 
(primarily) and by extension, model-extension?  If/when there are 
"leaps" ("revolutions") of intuition (personal)/ scientific paradigms 
(collective),   I presume there is some kind of "pull back" to a 
meta-understanding of one's personal (or collective) model of modeling.  
  It is fascinating to me that we (can and) do this at all.

As LLM's expose *(behaviour*  which appear to some degree, 
indistinguishable from incredible model-fitting and meta-model fitting 
unto model extension/revision, we have a new line of parallax.

My love of metaphor is probably little more than my appreciation of 
stereoscopic vision (or more aptly, motion parallax?).   Having a 
plethora of POVs to look at phenomena through, a plethora of meta-models 
to munge into (maybe more?)apt models to choose from can be very 
powerful (or at least obsessive/addictive?)

I suspect that most use of metaphor in science is post-hoc, it gets 
added (e.g. ES' -Verschränkung/ entanglement, interlinking, entwining, 
interlacing) after a more A)intuitive to those steeped in the topics and 
B) formalized in mathematical models with an eye to communicating said 
models/intuition to the un(der0initiated.  glen has occasionally 
challenged with something like:  "why use 'metaphor' when you really 
just mean 'model'?" and I do in fact concede that most use of metaphor 
is acutely figurative/convenient/superficial and as it gets more and 
more formal/grounded it approaches a formal model.

Without significant machinery for manipulating metaphorical models  
formally, it is perhaps an art to manage metaphors honestly.   The likes 
of Lakoff, et al... would seem to be good at it (up to a point) and 
there are in fact huge (by number not percent) communities of people who 
study the use and application of (conceptual/blending) metaphor 
formally.   I ache for (yet) more formal tools to normalize all of 
this.   As Marcus references - hypergraphs/graph-matching  is a domain 
which has melted somewhat under computational power (O(N^2)).

I'm going to go back to talcing the surfaces of my lenses so I can 
inspect them under a (lensed) microscope now... there is nothing more 
interesting to a navel than it's own navel.

On 3/21/26 6:21 am, Santafe wrote:
> It has seemed to me that there is a bit of a parallel to the thing 
> Nick does that I mostly post objections to (and that I read Glen as 
> objecting to, though I should only speak for myself), and the thing 
> Kuhn does that I object to in reading him.
>
> So I’ll talk about Kuhn (TK):
>
> In Structure of Scientific Revolutions, TK plays sociologist, and 
> comments on power structures, economies of scale, thoughtlessness, 
> exploitation at the expense of exploration until one’s back is 
> completely against a wall, and other such sociological phenomena.  No 
> argument from me, against all that's happening.  Also in Venture 
> Capital, consumer behavior, finance, religion, political movements, 
> cults, instigation and prosecution of wars, etc.  Indeed, were I to 
> describe it in _any_ area of the interplay of individual and group 
> cognition, I could take up TK’s characterization and not change much 
> (sometimes nothing at all) except the name of the subject matter.
>
> But along the way in that sociology, TK treats the role of scientific 
> empiricism as if it were somehow just given, and one can refer to it 
> as an adjudicator (a kind of toss-off), without any attention to 
> whether it actually is given, whether it is hard, or whether the 
> indefiniteness of that problem of _reasoning_ and _analysis_ plays any 
> role in when people think they can exploit versus when they decide as 
> clans that they are forced to explore (so, I am granting much of the 
> rest of the structure of TK’s sociological picture, and not pursuing 
> the many places I think he errs in imposing it).  TK’s 
> passing-over-in-silence of this dimension is more striking, since the 
> previous generation or two of philosophers of science had mainly 
> wanted to worry about that question, and had clearly run aground on 
> giving a good analysis of it, though they made many practically 
> sensible and apt observations in the general direction.
>
> To me, if there is anything that makes describing the pursuit of 
> scientific understanding a topic to write about under its own name, as 
> opposed to writing a completely generic treatment that might have a 
> title like Mass Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, or perhaps 
> bookended by something titled The Wisdom of Crowds, the nature of the 
> reasoning problem of what constitutes empiricism would be at the 
> center of putting “science” in the title of that monograph.
>
> To come back to the Nick/Glen exchange, I don’t mind that lens 
> grinders look at lenses, while hopefully they also sometimes look 
> through them to decide what good criteria are for grinding strategies. 
>  (Indeed, I don’t think anybody in the list would argue against the 
> need for both).  It’s also perfectly fine to write very general 
> treatises on human behavior.  So, TK’s book could have been entitled 
> People are Often Lazy in Ways that Make Them Effectively Stupid, and 
> That Can Lead to Cycles, and I could then have reviewed the book as a 
> useful if not terribly surprising sociological analysis.  I tend to 
> take those things as established for so long by now. that repeating 
> them isn’t so engaging, and I itch to move on toward differences in 
> the substrate, where maybe we can say new things that weren’t said 
> before.
>
>
> It is tempting to laugh at the way Nick deliberately refuses to take 
> Glen’s 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 (invented?) 
> 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 do want to distill and call out from the thread what seem to me to 
> be several clean formulations of questions that interest me, and that 
> seem still very open:
>
> From SteveS:
>
>     Scientific language is a *lossy compression layer over a
>     high-dimensional formal plenum*, not a generative metaphor system.
>
> (I would modify that it has elements of both — as I know Steve already 
> intends — and that their co-traveling is one of the interesting aspects)
>
> and then:
>
> /What might we know anecdotally of the contexts where generative 
> metaphors are used in recognizing new models for observed phenomena? /
>
> From DaveW:
>
> ... the proper, even essential and inevitable, use of metaphor is as 
> and "exploratory tool (epistemic scaffold).
>
> (that whole note actually).
>
> Hard to offer good content in reply to these, because that would 
> require an actual insight, as does all work that might become 
> satisfying.  I like the well-articulated problem, though.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>> On Mar 20, 2026, at 14:51, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> This seems like a fantastic attempt! It's still layered with 
>> sophistry. You're saying I've stripped you of the capacity or 
>> interest. Yet that's clearly not true. You're reifying a thought 
>> experiment, a counterfactual. That's fine.
>>
>> The attempt to look at the world naively is a good one, though, even 
>> if what you're looking at is the *presentation* of my meaning 
>> ("anger", "contempt", "rage", troll metaphor, etc.). It's good to 
>> strip away layers of the narrative like that to see if you can view 
>> something naively, "objectively". But it's still an analysis of the 
>> presentation, not the target of the arrangement of lenses and mirrors 
>> I tried to assemble.
>>
>> IDK. I've done all I can, I think. My intent was to circumscribe and 
>> directly target why Schmulik would/will eventually ghost you: because 
>> you look at his metaphor instead of through it.
>>
>> I'd like to leave off congratulating you on the attempt in the hopes 
>> that you'll do it again later, in some other context, but without 
>> adding the pedantic counterfactual. Just for grins, I'll add that a 
>> medium dose of psychedelics, in the proper set & setting of course, 
>> can help doff one's debilitating obsessions. And I recommend shrooms. 
>> You can buy the spores on the internet. They're legal pretty much 
>> anywhere. And grow them in your closet. Doing so adds a little 
>> connection to nature and the plant to help layer the trip. Cleanse 
>> your doors of perception! 8^D
>>
>>
>> On 3/20/26 11:21 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
>>> Ok, Glen,  You win.  You have stripped from me any capacity or 
>>> interest in how metaphors mean, the limits of what they do and 
>>> don't convey.  I am in that state.  Now, without reference or 
>>> exploration of any metaphor, please help me understand what you 
>>> meant by the following passage:
>>> */But if you actually want to *understand* what some other agent is 
>>> trying to say, you read *through* their text. You use it as a lens. 
>>> If, every time you picked up your eyeglasses, you only looked *at* 
>>> the lenses, those glasses would be useless as a tool. Every time you 
>>> meet a missive focusing on the metaphors used, you are 
>>> explicitly/purposefully misunderstanding the author. If metaphors 
>>> are a tool, you're ignoring their tool-ness. You promote the 
>>> means/tool to an end. [⛧] /*
>>> It's funny, because before you stripped me of my ability to think 
>>> about metaphors, I thought I understood you precisely.  You want me 
>>> to take life just as it presents itself.   Ok.  I can do that, sort 
>>> of. It's what I do most of the time. As we both know, there is 
>>> nothing simple about how the world presents itself.  There is always 
>>> a past and a future and the naive present is always an amalgam of 
>>> the two.  We live neither in nor for the moment.  But I will hum 
>>> along.   What do I see in this case?  Well, first I naively see 
>>> anger and contempt.  I could try to mitigate that experience, by 
>>> examining the text, but no, I am not permitted to do that in this 
>>> world of naive perception.  What I see, is a man incoherent with ... 
>>> rage?   What I see is a creature lurking in the dark moist crevaces  
>>> under a bridge shouting, "Who's  that treading over my bridge?" 
>>> Thats what I naively see.  But none of that is helpful to me in 
>>> trying to reap the benefit of your prodigious mind. So I try to NOT 
>>> take what I see naively to be all that is there to be seen.  I say 
>>> to myself, this is a man who has given me some really great working 
>>> metaphors. This is a man whose thought is respected widely by people 
>>> whose thought I respect.  Before he stripped my of my analytical 
>>> powers, I was led to try and squeeze every bit of juice out of the 
>>> dry- skinned fruit he grumpily proffered.  Now, I just see an angry 
>>> man living in an incoherent world.
>>> Please, please Glen give me back my powers of analysis so I can see 
>>> you as I used to see you.
>>> N
>>> On Fri, Mare 20, 2026 at 7:28 AM glen <gepropella at gmail.com 
>>> <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>    Fools have more to say, and more impact, than, for example, 
>>> nit-picking grammar nazis.
>>>    Anyway, here is the counterargument, AGAIN! OK. I grant you all 5 
>>> of your points. As a fan of postmodernist approaches, the 
>>> examination of every layer of every narrative in the stack *can* be 
>>> worthwhile and interesting, especially for academics. I'm glad you 
>>> are also a postmodernist.
>>>    But if you actually want to *understand* what some other agent is 
>>> trying to say, you read *through* their text. You use it as a lens. 
>>> If, every time you picked up your eyeglasses, you only looked *at* 
>>> the lenses, those glasses would be useless as a tool. Every time you 
>>> meet a missive focusing on the metaphors used, you are 
>>> explicitly/purposefully misunderstanding the author. If metaphors 
>>> are a tool, you're ignoring their tool-ness. You promote the 
>>> means/tool to an end. [⛧]
>>>    People use their deeply embedded metaphors to communicate. If all 
>>> you can do is yap about their metaphors, you are blocking their 
>>> ability to communicate and your ability to understand what they mean.
>>>    I'll turn your moral back around on you. You can choose to ignore 
>>> my counter argument, yet again. Or you can tell me why it's more 
>>> important to look at the lens than through the lens. [⛤]
>>>    [⛧] A good analogy, here, is that of paraphilia 
>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia 
>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia>>. You have a fetish. 
>>> Rather than a metaphor *enhancing* your ability to see the world, 
>>> you've fetishized them. You think the metaphor *is* the world. Like 
>>> a fetishist, you're aroused by the tool, not the objective.
>>>    [⛤] I can shunt a counter-counter argument in advance. In a 
>>> mostly rhetorical world, if you merely look *through* the metaphor, 
>>> you're at risk of being a victim of purposefully designed 
>>> narratives, intended to exploit or mislead you. Therefore, a 
>>> critical thinker must *also* look at the lenses, not merely through 
>>> them. But this argument fails because if you can't even look through 
>>> the lens in the first place, then you can never critically analyze 
>>> how it [mis]directs your gaze. So the *first* and primary skill is 
>>> to be able to look *through* metaphors. Looking at them is a 
>>> secondary skill. And, like the grammar nazis, a fetish for the form 
>>> preemptively excludes an understanding of the function.
>>>    On 3/19/26 1:10 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
>>>     > 1. Metaphors are everywhere.  We can disclaim them all we 
>>> like, but they are deeply embedded in the way in which we proceed 
>>> from thought to thought.  They lurk in how professionals talk to one 
>>> another and also in the manner in which professionals talk to the 
>>> public.
>>>     > 2. There is a lot of evidence these days that scientists have 
>>> "lost" the public.  This is a very dangerous situation. My suspicion 
>>> is that this has to do with the metaphors we use when we talk to the 
>>> public about what we do.
>>>     > 3.  We all seem to agree that there is truth and falsehood 
>>> disguised in every metaphor.
>>>     > 4. Given the ambiguity of metaphors, I am interested in a 
>>> method for understanding their role in thought and communication, 
>>> particularly in understanding the manner in which truth and 
>>> falsehood is deployed in them.  How are we to distinguish between a 
>>> better and a worse metaphor if all contain elements of falsehood. 
>>> What am I to take from your metaphor?  What are you to take from mine?
>>>     > 5. Given the entanglement of truth and falsehood in metaphor, 
>>> it's worth exploring distinctions between what implications a 
>>> speaker intends by a metaphor, what the coherence of the metaphor 
>>> can logically sustain by way of implication, and what implications 
>>> hearers take from the metaphor.
>>>    --
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> ¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
>> ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, 
>> ἵνα σώσω.
>>
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