Hacking Metaphors, Frames and Other Ideas
Butterfly effect and Schrödinger's cat are 2 very common ways of signalling one's belonging to the class of the scientifically literate. But they are almost always told wrong. They were both constructed as illustrations of paradoxes or counterintuitive findings in science. Their retelling always misses the crucial 'as if'. This is an example of metaphor…
Read more →I'm not sure how 'burning' these issues are as such but if they're not, I'd propose that they deserve to have some kindling or other accelerant thrown on them. 1. What is the interaction between automatic metaphor processing and deliberate metaphor application? Metaphors have always been an attractive subjects of study. But they have seen…
Read more →Everybody is agog at what AI systems can do. Nobody thought even 10 years ago that machines could be trained to recognise images or transcribe natural speech as well as they do now. And because of this leap forward everybody has started worrying about AI taking over the world because it will soon be able…
Read more →Innovation is the ‘in’ thing. Innovate or die is the buzz up and down the hive mind. Everybody is feeling like they must innovate all of the things all of the time. But is the incessant innovation the right mode of approaching this? We constantly spin up stories of the intrepid innovator and the change…
Read more →TL;DR Why is this important? Many people believe that mental representations are the next goal for ML and a prerequisite for AGI. Does machine learning produce mental representations equivalent to human ones in kind (if not in quality or quantity)? Definitely not, and there is no clear pathway from current approaches to a place where…
Read more →In some circles (rhetoric and analytics philosophy come to mind), much is made of the difference between metaphor and simile. (Rhetoricians pay attention to it because they like taxonomies of communicative devices and analytic philosophers spend time on it because of their commitment to a truth-theoretical account of meaning and naive assumptions about compositionality). It…
Read more →Note: These are rough notes for a metaphor reading group, not a continuous narrative. Any comments, corrections or elaborations are welcome. Why should you read WFDT? Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind is still a significantly underappreciated and (despite its high citation count) not-enough-read book that has a lot to…
Read more →Frege’s trauma I found the following quote from Frege on the Language goes on holiday blog and it struck as the perfect starting point for this essay which has been written for a while now: “Frege (“Logic in Mathematics”): Definitions proper must be distinguished from elucidations [Erläuterungen]. In the first stages of any discipline we…
Read more →People often talk about music as if it were language. Leonard Bernstein even recorded a series of lectures applying Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar to music . Chomsky himself answered a question on this in a not very satisfying manner. Some people can get very exercised over this. But it seems to me that a…
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