See this lustra na wymiar for yourself.Glass furniture,building and much more in Piotrków Trybunalski…

See this lustra na wymiar for yourself.Glass furniture,building and much more in Piotrków Trybunalski…

Useful prosthetics, pretty metaphors? (and more on DH tools) – Technoromanticism…

I am about to make a post that, seeing that citation, I realize is probably wickedly superannuated by now — but up it will go, “on spec.”

I will be combing it with intense interest to see if anyone has instruments of investigation that will solve some of the problems I have been trying to. Especially interesting to me: metaphor and Coleridgean organicism. I have a mathematical tool I developed for this almost as soon as I caught the enthusiasm for the (maddeningly fragmentary) Coleridgean way of looking at things ***, and which I see some other people have got in use elsewhere — and for which I have no contact (yet) with empirical realities of texts.

Metaphor is going better. What’s interesting is to see the whole sweep of NLP methods applied to it — something I am itching to play with, just to get a feel for how the methods work. It is amazing to see the sheer volume of high-quality thought, from really capable people, poured into this subject, considering the results. I feel a certain apprehension for the moment that cusp of comprehension comes, when the lightning that is figurative comprehension gets bottled and set to work in a machine. I don’t underestimate the task, or overestimate the proximity of true machine language comprehension. But it won’t happen without figurative comprehension. That would be a turnaround from about a hundred years of particularly influential philosophical thinking about language. (That’s a rough number of years, with a pretty big error bar on it, probably.)

Another post talked about trajectories. I’m interested in trajectories and orbits. One thing I wonder is what an organic reading or perception looks like in a neural state space.

The construction workers have scattered and presumably are sleeping; soon enough they won’t be, and they will be disassembling the world and reassembling it in terms of “fixities and definites,” and hammers.

*** filtering, as it does, a number of influences reputedly under-credited by Coleridge, and very, very oddly disconnected, incomplete and inexplicit in places that make it very frustrating as philosophy)

The Jackson quotation is characteristically interesting: “Metaphors will be called home for good. There will be no more likeness, only identity.” I’m trying to think about the kinds of worlds or representations this would be possible in. Coleridge is keen on the uniting of disparate and opposed ideas (something I.A. Richards questions on the basis of a finite granularity of representation, I think in Imagination in Coleridge. One way to look at “no more likeness, only identity” is to see it as a kind of “each in all.” (Hopefully I’ll have more to say about this kind of thing, time to actually write it, that is, in a blog post, so I’ll lay off of further analysis for this response.) But another is to see a kind of entirely punctate, separate world of things that are only self-identical, and radically incomparable to other things. In the latter conception, there would be no terms of similarity.

For complication — and a real mental stretch if anyone wants to entertain it — there is Donald Davidson’s piece on “What Metaphors Mean” in Critical Inquiry‘s special edition On Metaphor Autumn 1978, Vol. 5, No. 1. Davidson conjectures that metaphors mean just what they say — as paradoxical as that might sound. My first reaction to Davidson’s argument is to reject it like a bad transplant, with my whole immune system. But bending to see what Davidson could be getting at is pretty interesting.

So what about the interstitial parts of things, the suture-points in our minds where we bring them together? Daniel Dennett, the philosopher of mind, has raised provocative arguments about whether the mind actually does enact what is implied in metaphors of “finding out” and “filling in” — giving a lecture on this subject at the 1992 Eastern Psychological Association conference, but for which, for the moment, I can’t seem to find a reference. (The same subject is addressed later in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences: Pessoa, L., Thompson, E., and Noë, A. (1998). Finding out and filling-in: A guide to perceptual completion for visual science and the philosophy of perception. Behavioral and Brain Science, 21, 723–802. ) A circular saw and various other implements of world-maintenance are operating just outside my window right now in a way that will cut this response short whether finished or not. But for now:

Googling “Dennett” and “finding out and filling in,” I found the following (search in page for “Dennett”)–only to discover my own little echo chamber (please excuse typos and really really bad ideas expressed within it, since it was composed at the speed of a Manpower Secretarial Typing Exam:

Basically, Patricia Smith Churchland and V.S. Ramachandran dispute Dennett’s claim that the metaphors of “finding out” and “filling in” refer to illusory processes, by reference to actual psychophysical experimentation, in “Filling In: Why Dennett is Wrong,” Chapter 12 of Paul M. & Patricia S. Churchland’s On the Contrary: Critical Essays, 1987-1997.

Part of the way we perceive a whole is the way we perceive or fail to perceive the gaps within it.

But “no likeness, only identity.” … The saws outside now operate on me with the force of an ejection seat. Maybe more in a separate post.