August 13th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Our ability to experience the physical world is constructed and constrained by a number of laws, roughly corresponding to Newtonian/Cartesian physics. (Only roughly because ‘folk physics’ also plays a part). These physical laws are significant because the represent the organisation and codification of embodied experience. Put another way, these laws represent the physical world as explored and indexed by the instrumentation of the human body and sensorimotor system. (We are reminded here that any data-gathering process or instrument can only ever gather information which interacts with the instrument used in the gathering; approaching the world with a thermometer produces a different understanding of the world than if one approaches it with a geiger counter, or a calorimeter, or a light meter.)
We may, of course, devise experimental techniques and notation systems which allow us to think about phenomena which are outside the zone of human embodiment, but when we do this we inevitably resort to metaphor, effectively thinking about the unembodiable as if it were within our area of understanding. So, for example, we understand electricity by thinking of it as if it were a flow of liquid through the wires, a current. Our experience of the world is organised through an informal physics, the key feature of which is its capacity for embodiment, its availability for expression in the language of sensorimotor activity.
When we consider our ability to conceptualise, to think about our experiences or to imaginatively explore now ideas and situations, we are reliant upon the same sensorimotor language and, largely, the same physics. As noted above, our ability to formulate ideas which appear to be beyond the scope of the sensorimotor depends upon the implementation of conceptual metaphor, however, even though the vocabulary of this sensorimotor language of conceptual metaphor is the same as that applied to embodied physical experience, the grammar is different. We might say that, although the materials of thought are the same as the materials of action, the physics applied to these materials has significant differences as well as similarities.
An evident example that will be familiar to all is the physical property of object permanence. In the physical world one of the most fundamental principles is that an object, a tree say, will continue to exist unless some large force acts upon it. It will not simply vanish without a trace. Moreover, the tree will continue to exist in some form even if it is acted upon by a force. A forest fire will undoubtedly change its nature but this change will be consistent with certain well-known and predictable laws, and much of the tree will be conserved throughout this transformation. In the conceptual realm however, this principle of conservation does not apply, or at least not in anything like the same way. To stay with the example of the tree, we utilise this concept as part of our sensorimotor vocabulary as a metaphor whenever we want to talk about certain abstract concepts. So we say ‘family tree’ when we want to give conceptual form and structure to the abstract concept of ‘family’. We effectively borrow the physical structure of a tree to organise our thoughts about relations which, while they clearly exist, have no tangible qualities. Relationships between family members, being abstract, would be simply ‘unthinkable’ without the metaphor of a tree to provide a structure to our thoughts.
The key difference between this conceptual tree and the ‘real’ tree in the corner of the field that we pass each day when walking our dog is that, while the tree in the field is unlikely to change into anything else, a tree in the mind may well transform radically, or disappear completely. For instance, when thinking and talking about our family we may shift from talking about our ancestors to talking about our genes. If we did this it is quite likely that, in making this apparently simple turn in the conversation, we would move from referring to our family tree to talking about the ‘gene pool’ from which we emerged. What this reveals is that, behind this seemingly trivial moment in the play of our thoughts and language, one massive organising metaphor has suddenly and unremarkably changed shape. The tree that was standing in our minds, with the members of our family perched on its branches has suddenly become a body of water; a lake perhaps, or an ocean, teeming with genetic life.
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