metaphors

dear fisers,

just a brief remarks on last week messages. Starting with the pervasiveness
of "metaphors" in language (Rafael) and science (Ray), I wonder whether
metaphors could be taken as a convivial argument in favor of the
minimization principle of brain columnar discharges that Cajal and Freud
suggested (and recently Allan and I discussed). Once a brain has
"finalized" into some minimal information content for a particular
cognitive episode, and somehow stored it in some kind of memory, it will
tend to re-encounter such memory content for abstractly similar phenomena,
as long as the abstract difference in brain minimization operations is
below a certain threshold (of course, the context is decisive in order to
lower or magnify such threshold). In short--metaphors would be a favourite
cognizing strategy for a brain following a sort of overall variational
(minimization) principle of neuronal excitation...

James Barham points on biological information/complexity were also quite
intriguing. He was mentioning at the end the possible connection with
social complexity. Perhaps some further comments about that could help in
order to take from a new angle the discussions we had about the nature and
evolution of social complexity.

best regards

Pedro

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Pedro C. Marijuan. TEL 34 976 761927, FAX --761861 and -- 762111
Dept. Ingen. Electronica y Comunicaciones, CPS Universidad de Zaragoza,
Maria de Luna 3, Zaragoza 50015, SPAIN
email: marijuan@posta.unizar.es
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Received on Wed Dec 02 15:49:19 1998