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> Wouldn't it be more useful to accept that we're always trying to explain the world in metaphors and find tools to separate the good metaphors from the bad one
by wsgeorge 10y ago
> Wouldn't it be more useful to accept that we're always trying to explain the world in metaphors and find tools to separate the good metaphors from the bad ones?
Absolutely.
I completely disagree with Epstein's conclusion as it reads from the text. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and interpret him as trying to steer clear of the oversimplification a satisfying analogy can encourage. In fact, he hammers on some of the ridiculous consequences of overenthusiastic embracing of this metaphor.
I wouldn't want to believe he doesn't understand, as you put it, that "we're always trying to explain the world in metaphors and find tools to separate the good metaphors from the bad ones".
- xg15 10y agoI think it also highlight that different people - even experts from different fields - can have vastly different definitions for things that seem common - e.g. what a computer is or even what "information processing" entails. So I could kind of understand him if he wanted to defend against people who heard "the brain is like a computer" and then jumpted to conclusions "oh, so the brain has a hard drive and a processor and can be programmed to do stuff"...
- wsgeorge 10y agoExactly. This happens when formal definitions of these "common things" are absent, or ignored in the argument. He's genuinely right in calling out naive conclusions about the brain based on current computing.