Metaphors Of The Mind :: essays research papers

<a href="http//www.geocities.com/vaksam/">Sam Vaknins Psychology, Philosophy, Economics and external Affairs Web SitesThe brain (and, by implication, the Mind) has been comp ared to the latest technological macrocosm in every generation. The computer metaphor is now in vogue. ready reckoner hardware metaphors were replaced by software metaphors and, lately, by (neuronal) network metaphors. Such attempts to get wind by comparison are common in every world of tender-hearted knowledge. Architects and mathematicians have lately come up with the structural idea of "tensegrity" to explain the phenomenon of life. The tendency of adult males to see patterns and structures everywhere (even where there are none) is well documented and probably has its survival value added. An opposite purport is to discount these metaphors as erroneous, irrelevant, or deceptively misleading. Yet, these metaphors are generated by the homogeneous Mind that is to be described by th em. The entities or processes to which the brain is compared are also "brain-children", the results of "brain-storming", conceived by "minds". What is a computer, a software application, a communication theory network if not a (material) standard of cerebral events? In other words, a necessary and sufficient connection mustiness live on amongst ANYTHING created by humans and the minds of humans. Even a gas pump must have a "mind-correlate". It is also conceivable that representations of the "non-human" parts of the Universe exist in our minds, whether a-priori (not deriving from experience) or a-posteriori (dependent upon experience). This "correlation", "emulation", "simulation", "representation" (in short close connection) between the "excretions", "output", "spin-offs", "products" of the human mind and the human mind itself - is a key to understanding it. This claim is an instance of a much broader category of claims that we can learn about the artist by his art, about a creator by his creation, and generally about the declination by any of its derivatives, inheritors, successors, products and similes. This general contention is especially strong when the blood line and the product share the same nature. If the kickoff is human (father) and the product is human (child) - there is an enormous amount of data to be safely and surely derived from the product and these data will surely apply to the origin. The closer the origin and the product - the more we can learn about the origin. The computer is a "thinking apparatus" (however limited, simulated, recursive and mechanical). Similarly, the brain is a "thinking machine" (admittedly much more agile, versatile, non-linear, maybe even qualitatively different).