This is very similar to George Lakoff's work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff
A good place to start for anyone that is interested is his book Metaphor's We Live By.
This is very similar to George Lakoff's work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff
A good place to start for anyone that is interested is his book Metaphor's We Live By.
Hoftstader's video is pressumably based on his own book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies".
> According to Lakoff, an individual's experience and attitude towards sociopolitical issues are influenced by being framed in linguistic constructions. In Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Persian Gulf (1991), he argued that the American involvement in the Persian Gulf War was obscured or "spun" by the metaphors which were used by the first Bush administration to justify it.[3] Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank, the now defunct Rockridge Institute.
I will never not find it amusing how a simple thing like money is obscured or "spun" by a thin veil of pseudointellectual bullshit.
Very interesting book. You don't really think about how often metaphors are employed in language, and their influence on how we think. The book makes some rather strong claims regarding science and philosophy being misled by metaphorical thinking, but still a good read.
And it's relevant today given how people like to anthropomorphize LLMs, and compare biology to digital machines we make. Of course there are similarities. But the point about metaphorical thinking is we are mislead by treating metaphors as literally true.
Anyway if the stronger claims in the book are at all true, it might impact how an alien species thinks differently than us (given a lot of our metaphors are biologically based). And could present significant difficulties for decoding an alien signal.
One of the best examples of a clear issue with metaphorical thinking came from discussions about the plaque installed on Pioneer 10. Some clever people thought up the idea of using a pulsar map to define where the sun/earth were. Some other clever people noted that pointing to the location with a line that ended in an arrow was very, very deeply rooted in the history of human hunting techniques and could be very hard to understand if you have never seen or even conceived of an arrow(head).
Add a slight trailing decay and I think the basic arrow motif could be intuitive for trajectory for any observer who experienced aerodynamics?
Whether it is the evolved shape of a flying creature or an abstract depiction of a meteorite (or even a comet!), there is a kind of intuition about the sharp end and the flaring of air or fluid around it, with some sort of trailing tail from whence it came...
One can imagine many observers who could find our space probes would also have some of these experiences?
Of course, all of this assumes some kind of visual perception and cognition to even recognize the plaque as having markings made with an intent to communicate some abstract ideas...