Re: metaphors

> ...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...

This idea sounds very compatible with Gerald Edelman's ideas on brain
development, and the implied epistemology therein; i.e., that broad patterns,
or "maps", are formed by neural connections, which--though he does not say it
outright--compact information into its most abstract form.

Allan
Received on Wed Dec 09 09:56:06 1998