This year’s Edge question – “What have you changed your mind about?” – brings many fascinating replies, judging from two dozen or so I’ve read so far. The one I enjoyed the most is from Rodney Brooks, an MIT robotics professor, who puts into historical context the current vogue for using the digital computer as an all-purpose model for explaining how complex systems work. As he shows, people in general and scientists in particular have always had a penchant for using the latest great technology as a grand metaphor, particularly when it comes to illustrating the operation of the human mind:
If we look back over recent centuries we will see the brain described as a hydrodynamic machine, clockwork, and as a steam engine. When I was a child in the 1950’s I read that the human brain was a telephone switching network. Later it became a digital computer, and then a massively parallel digital computer. A few years ago someone put up their hand after a talk I had given at the University of Utah and asked a question I had been waiting for for a couple of years: “Isn’t the human brain just like the world wide web?” The brain always seems to be one of the most advanced technologies that we humans currently have.
And when the next great technology comes along, we change the metaphor:
The metaphors we have used in the past for the brain have not stood the test of time. I doubt that our current metaphor of the brain as a network of computers doing computations is going to stand for all eternity either … We can think about human memory as data storage and retrieval. And we can think about walking over rough terrain as computing the optimal place to put down each of our feet. But I suspect that somewhere down the line we are going to come up with better, less computational metaphors.
It’s curious that, when confronted with the universe’s mysteries, scientists tend to do what poets do: they reach for metaphor. What’s even more interesting, though, is the way the metaphor begins to shape the way we see and think. The metaphor doesn’t just describe reality; it becomes reality. The English biologist J.Z. Young, in his great 1951 book Doubt and Certainty in Science, explained how the process worked with the invention of the mechanical clock:
In our civilization the steady flow of time developed mainly with the invention of good clocks. This conception provided an important part of the framework of the new view of a material world that man created in the seventeenth century. Moreover, natural events were compared with clocks. The heavens and the human body were said to function like clockwork. In fact, use of this model was largely responsible for the practice of speaking of the “working” of any system – a practice still deeply ingrained in us.
Today, we talk about “pinging” each other or “going offline” or using our brain’s “spare cycles.” The metaphor isn’t just a way of speaking. It’s a way of speaking that seeps into our minds and changes them.
It’s absolutely true that one can wrongly assume a metaphor is the entirety of the description, and so be misled, and have it shape the way of thought.
But “The human brain is like our current most advanced information systems technology, whatever that is”, seems to me to be a pretty good metaphor, even if it changes over time. There’s no law that says all metaphors must be constant for eternity, and that it’s bad to replace an old metaphor with a better one – or even a different but more culturally appropriate one.
There’s people now who wouldn’t know what it means to say “like a broken record”, but might understand “like the hold button locked down”. Different tech makes for different metaphors, that’s life.
Nick,
Happy New Year!
Human brain is probably the most mysterious single nature creation. It is fun to watch the evolution of the interpretation of human brain. In some sense, this evolution reflects the history of human technologies.
I like your writing and wish you all the best in 2008.
Yihong
I once heard mathematics being described as “software for the mind”. New concepts such as zero,negative numbers,imaginary numbers all added to the brain’s ability to process new “applications”. I guess metaphors are just another and even more common form of brain programming. (Here I am using metaphors to discuss metaphors :-) )
Tom
The nature of the brain can probably be approximated through sophisticated metaphors but the nature of consciousness is still elusive to science. The way to approach consciousness is from the inside and through meditation as countless mystics from different spiritual traditions did. Nowadays is fashionable to consider the brain and our genetic code as information systems and networks. With those metaphors somebody can talk about transferring our mind in a computer or doing a backup, and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies can make big money in “fixing” our “software and hardware bugs”. The digitalization of reality will go even further than that but i doubt will answer the basic questions about consciousness and human nature. Tom, undoubtly we can use fascinating mathematics concepts as tools for becoming more aware of our consciousness. Consciousness looking at himself gets into a flow that transforms itself as in a recursive loop (here’s another software metaphor…), but if we just believe in external metaphors there isn’t any transformation.
worth looking at the classic Newell & Simon “Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry” (http://home.dei.polimi.it/colombet/IA_2004/NewellandSimon.pdf) for a first-hand testimony of the intimate relationship between models of computation and models of mind.
Metaphors in themselves are not bad as a basis for theory, the trouble is they often are used as a substitute.
We actually know quite a bit about how the mind works, but most people, including many scientists, don’t to RTFM.
Happy new Year Mr. Carr!
Well said Ivo. It is really a bit a joke to think even for a moment that the brain, not to even mention consciousness, will ever be remotely categorized by metaphor. Categorization is certainly essential for the understanding of language development and structure but please!
Try to understand Goethe’s theory of metamorphosis, the Archetypal plant or for that matter any form of meditation. If it’s the realm of non traditional sense perception that enables such experience or observations then consciousness can not be understood through metaphor. Just as lobotomies where accepted just a few years ago I suspect that in time our present use of metaphor to describe brain function or consciousness will be experiences as just as ludicrous.
As long as the powers of perception that have long been atrophied are not developed, metaphoric language will be unable to capture anything other than the merest glimpse of what constitutes either brain activity or consciousness.
Alan
Man seeks to form for himself, in whatever manner is suitable for him, a simplified and lucid image of the world, and so to overcome the world of experience by striving to replace it to some extent by this image. This is what the painter does, and the poet, the speculative philosopher, the natural scientist, each in his own way. Into this image and its formation, he places the center of gravity of his emotional life, in order to attain the peace and serenity that he cannot find within the narrow confines of swirling personal experience. Einstein.
Alan – look up “conceptual metaphor”:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=conceptual%20metaphor
For years now I have used the metaphor of a non-linear dynamical system for the brain – it has its highs and lows, its storms and tempests, and this is altogether a more natural metaphor for brain activity that fits better than any manmade metaphor ..
.. so my view of the brain is like a weathermans’s view – always changing and not always predictable ..
The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher has a couple of brilliant chapters on the importance of metaphor to the evolution and development of language.
http://tinyurl.com/3cklml