Solaris to Earth (over)

May 28th, 2007 Fred McVittie Posted in Cognition, Consciousness, Embodiment, Grasp, Imagination, Lem, Stanislaw, Metaphor |

It has been estimated that between 75 and 90% of spoken and written language in not literal and concrete, referring to primary experiences with the material substances of the world, but is ‘metaphorical’. It is further believed that this use of metaphor in language reflects a similar widespread use of metaphor in thought, and that most of the cognition we engage in, both conscious and non-conscious, is non-literal. Metaphor allows us to think about aspects of lived experience which would otherwise be unavailable to the senses and therefore unthinkable. These include entities and forces which are simply beyond the reach of the senses because they are too small, too fast, too large, too distant etc. but also includes the many abstract concepts that have been created by human culture and cognition including ‘justice’, ‘truth’, ‘romantic love’ etc. Even such apparently literal and concrete phenomena such as our understanding of numbers has been shown not to be direct (at least above very small numbers), but grounded in metaphor. This dominance of both conscious and non-conscious cognition by metaphor is so great that an entity, person, animal, or artificial intelligence which was only able to process information directly and had no means of embodying abstractions through metaphor would barely qualify as the possessor of a mind at all. It is almost true to say that our modern concept of mind itself is as a kind of metaphor machine.

Our relation to the metaphorising processes which constitute cognition and the formation of mind range from unquestioning acceptance to more self-conscious awareness that we are not thinking or speaking literally. When we speak about atoms we feel that the language is concrete (except to a physicist who knows the truth about atoms), whereas when we speak about God we are not quite so sure if we are talking literally or metaphorically. An uncertainty that will also vary depending on our religious preferences.

Given the ubiquitous concerns with abstractions that seems to characterise the being of human, it is fair to say that most of our phenomenology, and most personal thought and interpersonal discourse is metaphorical. For the most part we live cognitively in a world which is not directly available to the senses, which is beyond human bodily experience. Instead we live in a world of shifting metaphors in which abstract ideas mould themselves into shapes of objects, spaces, and forces that we can see with our minds eye, touch with the mental feelings, move through with the body in our minds. These transient thought forms dissolve and combine, blending and elaborating into complex architectures of thought as our attempts to grasp the ungraspable lead us to constantly build and rebuild these mental structures using the blueprints of embodied experience.

This shifting internal landscape of embodied metaphor, call it ‘imagination’, is the ground for what we experience daily as normal waking consciousness. Behind the clear and constant solidity of waking awareness there is this ongoing dream populated by shape-shifters and transformers. Our consciousness lives on Earth, our imagination lives on Solaris.