Comments on: Mind Wide Shut: Recent Books on Mind and Metaphor

By: Maker Faire, 2008: Austin, Texas | Roy Christopher

Maker Faire, 2008: Austin, Texas | Roy Christopher — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 23:30:58 +0000

[...] had the pleasure of seeing Gary Marcus talk about his book Kluge, where he introduced us to the term “buttfact” (answers one [...]

By: Roy Christopher

Roy Christopher — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:09:38 +0000

Thanks for the comments and recommendations, Gyrus. I’m not scared of relativism. :]

Kluge is a very practical book, and in it Marcus doesn’t touch on the mystical at all. I still recommend it though, not only for its practical tack, but also for its lucidity and its levity. It’s a highly readable book about what is typically a very heavy subject, without being a dumbing-down of the science involved.

By: Gyrus

Gyrus — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:18:13 +0000

Thanks for the book tips. On the more poetic-psychological side of things, I recently read Robert Romanyshyn’s Mirror and Metaphor: Images and Stories of Psychological Life, which is worth a go. Certainly far too relativist for Pinker (let alone wayward and oblique), it’s also, thanks to its deeply phenomenological grounding, filled with convincing observations about how narrative and metaphor form the basis of human consciousness.

I’ve some time for the “kluge” theory (I recall Arthur Koestler being a fan of the idea that the mismatching between the older and new parts of the brain explain our schizoid tendencies). Does any part of his theory account for the capacity—at times at least—that humans have for acting with great integration? At least, feeling it—does he see mystical experiences of oneness as “illusion”, a forgetting of the haphazard brain?

Related to all this, I recommend Steven Mithen’s The Prehistory of the Mind. His theory is that “modules” of intelligence evolved in the hominid line (e.g. social intelligence, technical intelligence, etc.), and the sapiens sapiens breakthrough was to create interchange between them, “cognitive fluidity”. His metaphor is of a cathedral with distinct chapels; we breach the walls between the chapels.