[In Investigations, Stuart Kauffman develops his concept of auto-catalytic molecular sets. It occurs to me that this metaphor may be extendable: Idea systems can be autocatalytic too. Why? How do metaphors work? Here are some of my early musings in this regard. Okay, I suppose I did get carried away exercising and contorting some of my favorite metaphors.….]

From Investigations: “If story is not the stuff of science, yet it is how we get on with making our ever-changing lives, then science, not story, must change….I come, hesitantly, to believe we need both science and story to make sense of  [the] universe…”

Whoo-boy. The first thing to say is that I would be much less hesitant to make such an assertion. But, then, I have a first-approximation theoretical framework for why this should be so—a tentative way of linking story and science, in (and I mean this both figuratively and literally) an autocatalytic way. Let me try this out: “All life wants to live.” Well, sure; that is definitionally redundant. But why not? Organization is organized also. And, philosophers notwithstanding, organization truly does, in our physical reality, seem to work via self-reference, bootstrapping (autocatalysis), and even tautology. Here is an example from my (professional) world: Asynchronous communication with feedback oscillates. That is, in a feedback system, the waveform from A to B materially affects the waveform from B to C, and thus from C to D…and so on. Not a bad analogy, I think, considering that, metaphorically, this process happens, with the same effect, where higher-order interpersonal communications are concerned, and also with lower-order “machine language” inter-neuronal communication.

…Which conveniently segues to the heart, or maybe the brain, of the matter: metaphor itself. Bluntly, human language is far more and far richer than simply a matter of communicating “know-how” and “know-that”. There is, as Kauffman points out, the matter of semantics. But, I am quite convinced, there is a more amazing story to language than even this. All words are, of course, low- to medium-level metaphors: They represent, or usefully suggest something in physical reality that has importance to the user of those words in such a way that functional or structural parallels can be inferred and engaged. When put into a syntactical environment, such “micro-phors” bootstrap themselves—they are self-referential and self-catalyzing to the point of propagating (more or less via the usual Darwinian methods) sentences, paragraphs, monographs….

But what I am really getting at is this: To be useful to critters such as humans, metaphors can only come from a metaphor generator and abstractor such as the human mind (I won’t bother, at this time, to justify or explain the use of the provocative word “mind”). Yet metaphors profoundly shape the mind. Did the mind invent the metaphor as a tool to aid in its own propagation, or was it the other way around?

Metaphors, too, want to live. In a very real sense, they are autonomous agents. Okay, so they may not directly perform work themselves, in a thermodynamic sense. But neither does a queen bee “work”—identify, cultivate, and harvest energy—yet she is essential for the propagation of the hive as a whole. Metaphors (metaphorically speaking) have evolved a way to engage physical thermodynamically-abled bodies to generate language in order to propagate themselves, to the benefit of both parties. The complex and complicit relationship of the physical and the non-physical: symbiosis at its most charming.

In the local biosphere known as a person, or the somewhat more extended biosphere of a society (more specifically, a culture), what might be the contribution of a metaphorical organism (and I mean a literal organism—only a metaphorical one, if you get my meaning) be, and what might be the mechanism by which it links its processes to those of the physical body? I admit this all needs some working out, but allow me to speculate:

All creatures great and small, literal or metaphorical, exist in their personal spaces-of-the-possible. As this system—the organism and its personal space—is evidently (using a slightly anthropic argument) a non-equilibrium one, some way of navigating its largely uncharted waters and “here-be-dragons” lands is critical—at least if the organism is going to resist death or capture by unfriendlies long enough to propagate itself. But it is difficult to pre-state even the dimensions involved (they may not be fixed anyway), so the geography is more than a gamble, but, literally, unknowable. But it is not necessarily un-transversable. Consider the journey of a two-dimensional being, Ian Flatt, and his three-dimensional traveling companion, Buddy Maas. They may not be familiar with the whole of the terrain, but they have heard of, and wish to visit, a fine bar on the other side of town. (You have to imagine a folded map, not only representing, but actually being, the metropolis we are talking about.) The trek may take hours for Flatt, as he must follow the surface of the land. Maas, of course, can be on his third one-mint julep by the time Flatt shows up. In effect, Maas took a shortcut. To Flatt, it would have seemed that Maas gone through a wormhole in space—which, in a sense, he has.

Dimensionally speaking, we live in many layers of abstraction simultaneously. It is true, of course, that we are most comfortable dealing with what we “dimensio-centrically” think of as the “macro-world”. And yet, when we really think about it, we are aware of all kinds of abstractional layers (“hierarchies” is a more-or-less adequate synonym). For example, I might, for convenience, think of myself as a complete and self-contained sentient being, but, in my heart of hearts, I know that I am really a “system”, with all kinds of mini- and micro- civilizations (intestinal flora; eukaryotes with various genetic pedigrees; colonies of micro- and metaphors—physical and non-physical, biological and otherwise, with diverse cultures and creeds) “living” within me, all working pretty much in harmony, howbeit (presumably) not knowing much about bigger picture, and that they are made up of even more micro-civilizations. One can cast glances in the other abstractional direction as well. How far? How high is up? Or can autonomous agents of any kind exist, in a quantum fashion, only in abstractionally stable levels? Who knows? Seemingly, who knows and when he knows it all depends on the parsing mechanism.

But we were discussing worms and their holes. [Think of that! “Wormhole”—a cosmological metaphor used to introduce light into a metaphorical tunnel metaphor.] It might be stretching the image a bit, but perhaps not overly (metaphors are naturally elastic things, after all), to think of metaphors as a kind of wormhole—a shortcut through possibility space. (“Aw, be brave,” we can here the metaphor saying. “Use me. Abuse me. Stretch me. I can take it! Consider my canary, ‘Hypothesis’. In this dimensional spelunker’s gallery, his job is to test the air and, if necessary, die in our stead.”) All this has—Darwin would love it, I just know—a survival benefit—a professional one, at least, and perhaps a physical one as well. Complexity begets even more complexity, and, in a very complex possibility system, a well organized, well engineered, and well-funded transportation system is required, lest our ways of making a living become mortally compromised. Language provides this “transportation system”. But language-as-communication is not enough. Symbols and meta-symbols; word-painting and poetic images; rhymes and rhythms; similes and allegories…the narrative story: These are “food” for the metaphor system. They catalyze the counterpoint that serves as the abstractional gradient used in the detection and measurement of the metaphorical energy sources utilized by that system.

Earlier, I alluded to the human parsing mechanism. For whatever reason, humans seem to favor stories with initial and boundary conditions. Proper stories have a beginning, a development of some kind, and a conclusion, with or without coda: “Once upon a time”; “Call me Ishmael”; “They lived happily (or otherwise) ever after”; “The rest is silence”; music up. Anything without form along these lines is somehow less than satisfying—to the metaphorical metabolic system, something like a vegan meal without the full complement of amino acids, I suspect. Even “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship” is taken as a conclusion, rather than evidence of a continuing and continuous story.

This parsing mechanism seems to engage across the abstractional gradient as well as within each level, but, in most people, more the latter than the former. Hence occupational and intellectual specialization. And hence the reductionist science increasingly practiced and increasingly preached since the Enlightenment. I admit to a semi-pejorative stance. But in fairness, I  have to admit that reductionist science has been extraordinarily and spectacularly successful in its hour and 15 minutes of fame. I am setting out to build a house; I want its engineering to be completely and conspicuously Newtonian. But, perhaps—just perhaps—reductionsism is coming up to an abstractional cul-de-sac in the space of the possible. Such things do happen—hence the need for paradigm shifts. Now, when the paradigm commandos have us boxed in, ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa, and my regiment needs to blast a tunnel out of a dimensional dead-end, I would greatly prefer The Old Man to be a renaissance kind of guy—one whose parsing mechanism is equipped to get us through wormholes—rather than an abstractionally fixated staff bureaucrat.

That is the Whence. The Why We Need It of non-reductionist science is best parsed into another chapter….