[A few additional words about metaphors and their metaphorical Dark Side, not forgetting my propensity for over-the-topness.…,]

It seems fairly clear that generalized feature detectors and processors (what I’m calling, in a linguistic context, the metaphor system) evolved because they are useful in a survival sense. (Whether “survival” is taken literally or as metaphor is part of the extended story, but let’s ignore that for now.) In other words, they are tools. And, like all tools, they can be used well or used badly—and, if it comes to ethics, for good or for bad.

The strength of metaphors comes from their appropriate resonances with physical “reality”. (I’m using the term “resonance”, as opposed to “congruence”, because that seems more, well, congruent to how our feature abstractors and processors actually work. That is to say, in my terminology, the appropriate metaphor and physical reality have the same topology.) Their weakness comes from their sometimes inappropriate resonances. “Brain puns” is one coinage for this. (In a way, I don’t care for this image. “Puns” are meant to be gotten—what’s the point of telling a joke if the tell-ee doesn’t get it?)

Before continuing, let’s make one quick excursion down a tangential rabbit hole. I’ll leave a few bread crumbs (since this is a rabbit hole, not a Minotaur’s maze, let’s make the crumbs laser pitons or something). How do features work? How do they “resonate”? Here’s my read, in part; I call it the collapse of fungibility. To a cat, sparrows are fungible—one bird is about as good as another—until it comes time to sink some teeth into one’s little head. Then there is a very specific sparrow: Fungibility collapses. An amino acid molecule is just another amino acid molecule until a specific one is needed, and available, to build that protein molecule. So, it’s fungibles all the way down, but at some point, and that point depends on the detector software and hardware, we run out of resolution, so the collapse “fuzzes out”. [Mental rabbit warrens have many sub-tunnels. Here’s an interesting one, marked “Decoherence”, but I’m out of pitons, and with tunnels all the way down….]

Being plastic, metaphors can cover a lot of territory. But the more they are stretched, the thinner their coverage, which is to say, holes develop and the topology changes, and the more brain-punny even the best metaphors become. Consider the phrase,“non-critical tree-hugging mysticism”: The phrase covers far more ground than it really can without becoming a true brain pun.  What about all those empty-headed politicians? [Yeah, I realize that this is a brain pun as well. Politicians, as a class, are usually not empty headed, only thick headed.] Terms like: “Bleeding heart (or knee-jerk) liberals”, “tin-horn dictators” “blondes”, “effete intellectual snobs”, and all the rest that attain cliché status are, I contend, malignant brain puns—malignant because they take on a life of their own, and are no longer at the service of the original meta-“metaphor-ganism”. (In this sense, I’m calling things like similes and poetic images “benign”—usually, although they have to be watched carefully [In fact, rhetoric makes other, “polyphonic” uses of figures of speech, but let’s not go into that here]. Speaking of constant vigilance, this image isn’t quite right either, as some “growths” evolve into vital organs.) And, worse: In the “hands” of competent charlatans (no, that is not an oxymoron; cf. Hitler, for example), they can metastasize. By way of example, I’m going to betray my own leanings here, but there’s no help for it: The President of my great land discusses “bad science”, by which is meant “science that doesn’t conform to official policy”. The problem is that the usage suggests to a very wide and largely gullible audience that nature works via the same mechanisms as politics, machinations and all, and therefore is obligated to conform to the designs of whomever is in power. (To be sure, I can, and may some day, make a point that science and religion are two sides of a single coin, but that is a much different and, possibly, holier can of worms.) “Bad science” is thus a brain pun at a very high level of abstraction—a fulcrum point that can be used, with a military, economic, or industrial lever, to (almost literally) move the world. (A topologically similar—I think, although this might be a brain pun about brain puns—but very mixed image here is that of latching onto a wild attractor in rodeo-abstraction space, and riding with it even while the geography and topology of space itself buck, duck, bob, and juke madly.)

The metaphor system has been around long enough, though, that it must have come up with some way of detecting and dealing with brain puns before they become malignant, right? Before I speculate about this, let me point out that the physical referents giving rise to my cancer metaphor—animal bodies—can generally rid themselves of malfunctioning cells before they become malignant, so long as their healing systems are in good shape. But once those systems become stressed….

Consider how audio is digitized. It is possible to come up with a reasonable digital representation of an analog signal, simply by detecting voltage levels over time and encoding them in binary form. “Reasonable” is, however, relative. 16 bits per sample (like compact discs) is pretty good; 8 bits (like many computer sounds) is much dodgier. Ignoring the important feature of sampling frequency, we note that the most obvious way to improve the representation is to increase the resolution. Let’s try it. (I have no virtual blackboard handy, so you have to imagine the sketch.) Since audio is detected on a logarithmic dB scale, but voltages are detected linearly, the least significant bits and most significant bits represent the signal differently. At the smallest levels, zero voltage to the first detection point, there is a massive dB shift (dBs are power ratios—in this context, voltage ratios—not absolute values), but at each successive detection points, the ratios get smaller. This means that, at the lowest levels, there is a terrific amount of distortion—inaccuracy. In early digital audio products, this phenomenon was quite obvious and egregious, aurally, especially during reverberation “tails”. Eventually, engineers figured out how to add a linearizing signal, called “dither”. In its simplest incarnation, this is low-level white noise, and it works by transmogrifying the equation’s distortion term into the noise one. (I know that this is a “lie-to-scientists”, but, here, that can’t be helped.)

I’m suggesting that this may be a good conceptual starting point (oh, a couple more examples of how we like to come up with “initial conditions”: “Once upon a time…”, and—the biggest scaffold [or maybe a skyhook] of them all—“In the beginning God created…”) for how to think about the metaphor system’s healing sub-system—and, I truly hope, how to design a tonic for that sub-system. One: Increase the resolution as far as possible. Two: When in doubt, dither. (And, by all means, give those metaphorical “killer T-cells” something useful to do, before they stir up trouble by creating metaphorical lupus or something.) Come to think of it, this is almost exactly the same topology as the lies-to-children metaphor, up to and including the dither, except that lies-to-children assumes that resolution will improve on a “need-to-know” basis: If you go into poetry, say, you never have to learn the physics of rainbows (at least this fits into the popular conception of poets). A photographer needs to know more (at the same time, less about poetry…?), and a meteorologist even more (and even less…?). My conception looks more at the ability-to-know: Unless there really is an operational theory of everything, it’s lies all the way down, of course, but fungibility collapses either when resolution deteriorates, or at some chosen level of abstraction (the “choice” usually depends on the value to the organism, given its experience level).

I can think of at least three physical-mental realizations of “dither”—that is, randomness or quasi-randomness as seen by the abstracting mechanisms. One is the neural one of REM sleep. (Another neural “randomizer” has been postulated: a kind of rapid switch, allowing different hemispheres [or “demons”, or whatever] dominance for a brief period of time. “Bipolar” abnormalities are, in this view, described as a realization of that putative switch sticking on one position for a long period.) A second is a temporal one: the unpredictability of events. [Another sub-tunnel worth exploring some day: “Is time quantum?”] The third is the quantum nature of reality, both in the physical sense, and in an abstractional one. At the lowest levels of abstraction, perceived reality seems to “shimmer” and “foam”, to wink in and out of existence. If you try to pin down a feature at such low levels…it’s not there. The very act of looking has sent the feature off on some Brownian-like dance across feature space. Uncertainty sets in. [Yet another sub-tunnel, or maybe it’s a wormhole through wormhole space: “For extra credit, discuss: Complementarity—does this metaphor retain its topology at all levels of abstractional magnification?”]

So, this is my pathology report, short version. Without exposition, I’ll introduce one more point for further musing: Notice that, without dither, the “edge of resolution” is decidedly fractal. But life appears to work best when it is close to, but somewhat south of, the edge of chaos….