8 ms·

ah, someone who paid attention in lecture! (incidentally; there’s a fairly deep literature of historians of science that have carefully documented that we desc

ah, someone who paid attention in lecture! (incidentally; there’s a fairly deep literature of historians of science that have carefully documented that we describe ourselves as analogous to the most sophisticated technology of the day: see “to lose one’s temper”, “to blow a gasket”, “i got my wires crossed”, “sorry, cache miss”, … as metaphors and idioms of mental state through the centuries that reflect the cool tech of the time in which they were coined )

pavlov 3y ago
And also the universe itself is often seen through the lens of contemporary technology. Are we living on an island that floats on a giant turtle’s back? Or are the heavens like giant clockworks? Or maybe it’s all a computer simulation? These cosmological speculations are separated by thousands of years, but they are all simply a reflection of what the person finds most awe-inspiring in their everyday life.
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  The difference is turtles all the way down was literal, but heavenly clockwork and computer program perspectives are clear metaphors.
  - horsawlarway 3y ago
    Psh - everyone knows it's a flat disc balanced on the backs of four elephants which in turn stand on the back of a giant turtle.
  - pavlov 3y ago
    Tell that to the people who subscribe to the simulation hypothesis.
  - krisoft 3y ago
    > turtles all the way down was literal Was it? What evidence do you have for that? If anything it sounds like the kind of verbal slapdown someone in authority would subject someone trying to be a smart alec. It is short. Easy to understand. And closes the kind of questioning. I would be very surprised if someone have considered it the literal truth, but of course have seen stranger things. > heavenly clockwork and computer program perspectives are clear metaphors. I don’t know about the clockwork. You will need to find someone who talks about that and ask them if they meant as a metaphor or not. On the other hand I know about the computer simulation one. That for me is not a metaphor. I seriously think that it is within the realm of possibilities that this universe we live in (including us) is a literal simulation. There would be possible physical experiments which depending on their results could make me increase or decrease my confidence in that statement. But I don’t consider it a metaphor. Now of course that is only the viewpoint of a single human, at a single point of time. So it might not matter much. But it shows that it is not that “clear” that everyone considers that view only as a metaphor.
    - civilitty 3y ago
      > I seriously think that it is within the realm of possibilities that this universe we live in (including us) is a literal simulation. Notice how you dropped the “computer” part. Without that qualifier, the “universe is a simulation” hypothesis goes back at least to Descartes and his evil demon [1]. That’s the GP’s point. The “demon,” “clockwork,” and “computer” are just metaphors to help illustrate the point. Hundreds of years ago it was a trickster demon, now it’s computers - the simulation part is the same. (The world floating on a turtle idea traces to the world turtle and several different creation myths, so it’s safe to say their believers took them a bit more literally) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon
      - CuriouslyC 3y ago
        Pretty funny to see a constructive comment downvoted faster than sweaty blather. Not a good day for HN.
      - krisoft 3y ago
        > now it’s computers - the simulation part is the same. I don't think so. I do understand this lineage of thought, and I agree with you that they are somewhat similar. But I must insist in saying that what I'm talking about is different. The trickster demon metaphor talks about a being (you) whose senses are replaced by the demon. But that means there is a you outside of the demon/computer simulation. I believe if this universe is a simulation, then I am part of that simulation. My mind is not an external observer hooked up to the simulation, but just matter simulated by the simulation according to the rules of the simulation. The thing Descartes was talking about is a Matrix situation. (Or rather to say the creators of Matrix were paraphrasing Descartes) Neo thinks he is living his life, but in truth his body is laying in a pod in the goo. I don't believe in that. I don't think that is likely true. If this is a simulation then me (and you, and this computer, and all of the people, and the butterflies and the stars) are in the simulation. And not the way how Neo is in there, but the way a cubic meter of minecraft sand is inside a minecraft world. Inside the minecraft world it is a cubic meter of sand, outside of it is just a few bytes in the memory of some program. Let me illustrate what I mean when I say that I don't speak about the universe being a computer simulation as a metaphor. Imagine that it is a simulation. What does this computer simulation have to do? Well, it seems that there are particles, and there are forces between them (gravity, electric, weak/strong nuclear force) In every iteration of this simulation it would seem that you need to calculate which particles are close to others so you can update the forces on them, so you can calculate their new state. To do this you need to inspect the distance between every two particle. That scales with ordo N^2 with the number of particles N. If the universe is a computer simulation it probably runs on a computer of immense power. But even then N^2 scaling is not good news in a hot path. Funny thing is that if the universe you want to simulate is relatively sparse (as is ours), and has an absolute speed limit (as ours seems to have), then you can shard your workload into parallel processes. And then you can run the separate shards relatively independently, and you only need to pass information from one shard to an other periodically. Now if our universe is a simulation, and it is sharded this way, then you would expect anomalies to crop up on the shard boundaries. Where the simulated mater is moved from one executor "node" to an other. We could construct small spacecraft and send them far away (perhaps other solar systems?). We would furnish these small automated spacecraft with sensitive experiments. Microscopic versions of a Newton's cradle, or some sort of subatomic oscillator, or a very precisely measured interferometric experiment. And the craft would autonomously check constantly that the laws of physics are unchanged, and work without glitches. If we don't see any glitches, then we shrug. Either we don't live in a computer simulation, or the computer simulation is not sharded this way, or the edge cases are very well handled, or the instruments were not sensitive enough, or the shards are even bigger (perhaps we should have sent the same experiments to a different galaxy?) If we see glitching, then we should try to map out exactly where they happen, and how they happen, and that would be very interesting. And if we see glitching of this kind that would increase my confidence in us living in a computer simulation. Does this make sense? You cannot design an experiment to test a metaphor. It doesn't even make sense. But I think of this as a possible literal truth, in which case you can formulate hypothesises based on it and you can check those with experiments. > so it’s safe to say their believers took them a bit more literally I believe you. Did anyone ever propose to solve a famine by sending a hunting party to cut a chunk of the turtle's flesh? Or to send gatherer's to collect the dung of the turtle to fertilise the land? Or to send holly people to the edge of the world, to peer down at the turtle to predict earthquakes? If the turtles are meant to be literal turtles these are all straightforward consequences. If nobody ever proposed anything like these, then perhaps the turtles were more of a metaphor?
  - detourdog 3y ago
    I first heard Turtles all the way down in spoken story by Kurt Vonnegut. Does anyone else have a source of the story or is that the source?
    - pavlov 3y ago
      “The world is on a turtle’s back” is Iroquois cosmology, at least.
      - lostlogin 3y ago
        Wow, thank you. I’d always thought this a Pratchett things. I see it has a history in India and China too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Turtle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Turtle
        mcpackieh 3y ago
        How could at least two cultures without a communication line between them both come up with such a quirky idea? There must be some underlying truth to it.. I'm sold. World turtle is the answer.
        the_af 3y ago
        "The Turtle Moves"!
        detourdog 3y ago
        I'm sure they stepped on turtles to go back and forth across the bering strait.
        kridsdale3 3y ago
        Chinese writing began with turtle shells as well, that's why the mostly conform to a sort of grid system, with curves.
    - DonHopkins 3y ago
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  Humans are the universe. It’s not surprising the universe uses available metaphors to explain to itself why it might exist.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  Reasoning by analogy is one of the ways we solve the framing problem. So, when explaining the universe we imagine it's an act of will by a conscious entity (ie., like how we invent). When explaining the mind we suppose it's like one of our inventions. Absent an analogy of some kind it's quite hard to determine what features are salient. Objects have an essentially infinite number of properties.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    > So, when explaining the universe we imagine it's an act of will by a conscious entity Unless I’m misunderstand you, that line of reasoning assumes one is religious.
    - mjburgess 3y ago
      We here means "our species".
    - pinkmuffinere 3y ago
      I don’t think that’s strictly required — atheists/agnostics can still “imagine” the universe is an act of will
    - pegasus 3y ago
      Not necessarily, see for example Nick Bostrom's Simulation Hypothesis. Maybe one could argue that too requires adherence to some religious dogma (Scientism? Reductionism?)
  - kridsdale3 3y ago
    And absent an understanding of electric fields and meteorology, that lightning bolt over there must have been hurled by Zeus!
- Legend2440 3y ago
  Each of these are true in a sense. There's no turtle, but we are living on an "island" floating through space. The heavens do follow predictable, clockwork rules. Computer simulations are at least a good way to describe the universe.
adolph 3y ago
I think in the case of “to lose one’s temper”, there isn’t an obvious match between the technology of the day and the early medical theory of four humours, not of metal-working. Origin of Temper, New Oxford American Dictionary: Old English temprian 'bring something into the required condition by mixing it with something else', from Latin temperare 'mingle, restrain'. Sense development was probably influenced by Old French temper 'to temper, moderate'. The noun originally denoted a proportionate mixture of elements or qualities, also the combination of the four bodily humours, believed in medieval times to be the basis of temperament, hence temper (sense 1 of the noun) (late Middle English). Compare with temperament. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_temperaments https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_temperaments
- HPsquared 3y ago
  So tempered steel is well-balanced steel, or mild-mannered. See also the well-tempered clavier. In music, the temperament is an aspect of the tuning system relating to how the dissonances of different notes are balanced.
  - adolph 3y ago
    How did WTC not come to my mind, it is one of my favorite works! Maybe because it drives my spouse up the wall so I only listen it less often than I’d like. My favorite recording is the Ishikawa from OpenGoldberg [0]. Reflecting on my response to “lose one’s temper” I can see how a straight line reading of etymology (as I proposed) might be misleading if the specific idiom did come or return from steel or string as an enhancement/extension to the original’s meaning. https://youtu.be/nPHIZw7HZq4 https://youtu.be/nPHIZw7HZq4
ben_w 3y ago
> to lose one’s temper Huh, never thought about that one before. Linguistic stuff like this is fun to find; these days I mostly spot it via learning German as a second language, so the artifice in artificial intelligence becomes “Künstliches Intelligenz” where “Kunst” is artist and “Kunststoff” is plastic, and in Middle Low German “kunst” is knowledge and ability. > coined Deliberate choice to exemplify your point, or accidental because it’s almost impossible to avoid examples like this in modern English?
- white_dragon88 3y ago
  [dead]
- AndrewOMartin 3y ago
  Something I've heard a few times is that computer "logs" refer to ships log books, but log books themselves refer to the actual wooden logs that would be thrown out of the back of ships to help determine their speed.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    >wooden logs that would be thrown out of the back of ships to help determine their speed. see also, knots
  - detourdog 3y ago
    I always thought it was related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi I think he was pouring over tables of data when he worked out algorithms.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Modern submarines still have a "log" which is a pole and sensor that extends outside of the hull to measure the speed through the water and other important measurements.
- viciousvoxel 3y ago
HPsquared 3y ago
Now the technology is starting to reflect the biology (neural networks). Inception!
- bregma 3y ago
  Give two very different things the same name and soon enough many people will believe them to be the similar in nature. If you repeat the lie often enough if will become the truth.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    Not really a lie, just biomimicry. The full name is "artificial neural network" after all. It's a lot closer to biology than the steam engine or clockwork watch.
    - civilitty 3y ago
      Abstract algebraic equations are not closer to biology than the steam engine or clockwork watch. The latter are at least physical. Gradient descent and inference doesn’t resemble the physical mechanisms that drive neurons at all. Floats and integers aren’t even capable of representing a continuous voltage potential.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      There is zero relation between a "neuron" in neural networks and a real neuron. It's entirely marketing. The field of "AI" has always been quick to market their work as magic rather than be open and honest about the reality, which is why we have been through at least 3 AI winters already.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Well, like evolutionary algorithms, the thing was designed to replicate some features of the natural one.
dylan604 3y ago
>as metaphors and idioms of mental state through the centuries after listing a bunch of things from the previous century that barely stretches a bit further back. i would have been impressed if you had come up with a phrase from medieval tech, or roman/greek/egyptian. hell, i'd settle for pioneer days tech to allow for "centuries". otherwise, it just feels like modern day analogies.
- Earw0rm 3y ago
  He's an open book? I needed to let off some steam?
  - dylan604 3y ago
    I was thinking something more like "tied up in knots" or "wolf in sheep's clothing". Things before 1800s relevancy. Open book might be a little older, but surely, there were phrases older than that
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    Do these count? As the weekend wound down Back-handed compliment
- raverbashing 3y ago
  It's possible a lot of those are not even seen anymore as such because the use has become commonplace and the original meaning was lost to time
- hprotagonist 3y ago
  > i would have been impressed if you had come up with a phrase from medieval tech, or roman/greek/egyptian the dual metallurgical and psychological senses of “temper” are from the mid-14th c.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Prior to the scientific age, most theory of mind was religious and/or philosophical, and models typically ran to mind/body duality (Descartes), ideals and essences (Plato & Aristotle, generally), or "spirit" which had numerous associations, many of them textual, which was itself the great technology of the Axial Age in which that concept emerged. Otherwise, in the scientific and technical era, you have the brain as computer, as AI, as homonculus (which really doesn't explain much), as mechanism or clockwork, as a composed of parts (much as a factory or assembly-line, I suppose), and the like.
detourdog 3y ago
I think it is more that as technology grows it spreads its terms and contexts to the point of entering pop culture. I'm not sure if the populous uses terms simply becuase they have heard them before in the same context or due to an understanding. I have to point out that P.G. Wodehouse is often used as an example of this style in recent "literature". I can't even figure out the words to describe the sources of his terms. Wodehouse use terms from anywhere in English language culture (including French I think). The odd part about it is that Wodehouse's writings are so old I find it easy to miss the references. I don't doubt we do this but do expect that is no different than my love being as deep as the ocean.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  This really has piqued my interest. Would you care to share an example or two, please?
  - detourdog 3y ago
    It's hard to think of any concrete examples but I will set the scene as best I can and recommend listen to some of the 6 or 7 hour audiobooks narrated by Jonathan Cecil. I just went searching through a bunch of quote lists to try to find examples. I grabbed some just to show the breadth of metaphors and analogs used. What I think I realized is that some of the best examples are probably descriptions of the scenes. I'm too young to know but apparently he was pioneering. I certainly find him funny with old world elocution. I hope you feel satisfied. His most famous character is Jeeves the personal gentlemen's gentlemen of Bertie Wooster. Askjeeves.com was named for Jeeves. They are set in the post Great War England/The continent and Bertie is young and part of the leisure class. Bertie is over educated and deep into night life, pop culture, and sporting. The settings are always over-privileged people trying to work out there issues while Jeeves is the observer and advisor. <snip> this I thought was good because the use of props, underpinnings, bird, orphanage, payoff. Bertie Wooster: I was standing on Eden-Roc in Antibes last month, and a girl I know slightly pointed to this fellow diving into the water and asked me if I didn't think that his legs were about the silliest-looking pair of props ever issued to a human being. Well, I agreed that indeed they were and, for perhaps a couple of minutes, I was extraordinarily witty and satirical about this bird's underpinnings. And guess what happened next. Jeeves: I am agog to learn, sir. Bertie Wooster: A cyclone is what happened next, Jeeves, emanating from this girl. She started on my own legs, saying that they weren't much to write home about, and then she moved on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique and method of eating asparagus. By the time she'd finished, the best that could be said about poor old Bertram was that, so far as was known, he hadn't actually burnt down an orphanage. Jeeves: A most illuminating story, sir. Bertie Wooster: No, no, no, no, no, Jeeves, Jeeves, you haven't had the payoff yet! Jeeves: Oh, I'm so sorry, sir! The structure of your tale deceived me, for a moment, into thinking that it was over. Bertie Wooster: No, no, no, the point is that she was actually engaged to this fellow with the legs. They'd had some minor disagreement the night before, but there they were the following night, dining together, their differences made up and the love light once more in their eyes. And I expect much the same results with my cousin Angela. Jeeves: I look forward to it with lively anticipation, sir. <snip> Jeeves: I hope you won't take it amiss, sir, but I've been giving some attention to what might be called the "amatory entanglements" at Brinkley. It seems to me that drastic measures may be called for. Bertie Wooster: [sighs audibly] Drastic away, Jeeves. The prospect of being united for life with a woman who talks about "little baby bunnies" fills me with an unnamed dread. <snip> gaming the use of chip-in Bertie Wooster: Oh, very well, then. If you're not going to chip in and save a fellow creature, I suppose I can't make you. You're going to look pretty silly, though, when I get old Biffy out of the soup without your assistance. <snip> <snip> this has a few but is a good example of using the reaction of a character in movie to describe ones self. “I felt most awfully braced. I felt as if the clouds had rolled away and all was as it used to be. I felt like one of those chappies in the novels who calls off the fight with his wife in the last chapter and decides to forget and forgive. I felt I wanted to do all sorts of other things to show Jeeves that I appreciated him.” ― P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves <snip> this is good becuase he uses Shakespeare Bertie Wooster: Well, let me tell you, Mr. Mangelhoffer, that the man that hath no music in himself is fit for... hang on a minute. [goes into the other room, where Jeeves is peeling potatoes] Jeeves, what was it Shakespeare said the man that hadn't music in himself was fit for? Jeeves: Treasons, stratagems, and spoils, sir. Bertie Wooster: [returning] Treasons, stratagems, and spoils. Mr. Mangelhoffer: What? Bertie Wooster: That's what he's fit for, the man that hath no music in himself. <snip> Aunt Dahlia: Oh, Bertie, if magazines had ears, Milady's Boudoir would be up to them in debt. I've got nasty little men in bowler hats knocking at my door.
jeepers6 3y ago
When my legs give out from below me, I don’t shout “loss of hydraulic pressure!” like some kind of arthropod. Yet we’re obsessed with framing ourselves as chains of matmul.
wpietri 3y ago
Ooh, that's very interesting. How would I find the metaphors used before, say, the industrial revolution?
kurtoid 3y ago
> cache miss Ooh, I like that one. Stealing it

pavlov 3y ago

And also the universe itself is often seen through the lens of contemporary technology. Are we living on an island that floats on a giant turtle’s back? Or are the heavens like giant clockworks? Or maybe it’s all a computer simulation? These cosmological speculations are separated by thousands of years, but they are all simply a reflection of what the person finds most awe-inspiring in their everyday life.

CuriouslyC 3y ago
The difference is turtles all the way down was literal, but heavenly clockwork and computer program perspectives are clear metaphors.
- horsawlarway 3y ago
  Psh - everyone knows it's a flat disc balanced on the backs of four elephants which in turn stand on the back of a giant turtle.
- pavlov 3y ago
  Tell that to the people who subscribe to the simulation hypothesis.
- krisoft 3y ago
  > turtles all the way down was literal Was it? What evidence do you have for that? If anything it sounds like the kind of verbal slapdown someone in authority would subject someone trying to be a smart alec. It is short. Easy to understand. And closes the kind of questioning. I would be very surprised if someone have considered it the literal truth, but of course have seen stranger things. > heavenly clockwork and computer program perspectives are clear metaphors. I don’t know about the clockwork. You will need to find someone who talks about that and ask them if they meant as a metaphor or not. On the other hand I know about the computer simulation one. That for me is not a metaphor. I seriously think that it is within the realm of possibilities that this universe we live in (including us) is a literal simulation. There would be possible physical experiments which depending on their results could make me increase or decrease my confidence in that statement. But I don’t consider it a metaphor. Now of course that is only the viewpoint of a single human, at a single point of time. So it might not matter much. But it shows that it is not that “clear” that everyone considers that view only as a metaphor.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    > I seriously think that it is within the realm of possibilities that this universe we live in (including us) is a literal simulation. Notice how you dropped the “computer” part. Without that qualifier, the “universe is a simulation” hypothesis goes back at least to Descartes and his evil demon [1]. That’s the GP’s point. The “demon,” “clockwork,” and “computer” are just metaphors to help illustrate the point. Hundreds of years ago it was a trickster demon, now it’s computers - the simulation part is the same. (The world floating on a turtle idea traces to the world turtle and several different creation myths, so it’s safe to say their believers took them a bit more literally) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon
    - CuriouslyC 3y ago
      Pretty funny to see a constructive comment downvoted faster than sweaty blather. Not a good day for HN.
    - krisoft 3y ago
      > now it’s computers - the simulation part is the same. I don't think so. I do understand this lineage of thought, and I agree with you that they are somewhat similar. But I must insist in saying that what I'm talking about is different. The trickster demon metaphor talks about a being (you) whose senses are replaced by the demon. But that means there is a you outside of the demon/computer simulation. I believe if this universe is a simulation, then I am part of that simulation. My mind is not an external observer hooked up to the simulation, but just matter simulated by the simulation according to the rules of the simulation. The thing Descartes was talking about is a Matrix situation. (Or rather to say the creators of Matrix were paraphrasing Descartes) Neo thinks he is living his life, but in truth his body is laying in a pod in the goo. I don't believe in that. I don't think that is likely true. If this is a simulation then me (and you, and this computer, and all of the people, and the butterflies and the stars) are in the simulation. And not the way how Neo is in there, but the way a cubic meter of minecraft sand is inside a minecraft world. Inside the minecraft world it is a cubic meter of sand, outside of it is just a few bytes in the memory of some program. Let me illustrate what I mean when I say that I don't speak about the universe being a computer simulation as a metaphor. Imagine that it is a simulation. What does this computer simulation have to do? Well, it seems that there are particles, and there are forces between them (gravity, electric, weak/strong nuclear force) In every iteration of this simulation it would seem that you need to calculate which particles are close to others so you can update the forces on them, so you can calculate their new state. To do this you need to inspect the distance between every two particle. That scales with ordo N^2 with the number of particles N. If the universe is a computer simulation it probably runs on a computer of immense power. But even then N^2 scaling is not good news in a hot path. Funny thing is that if the universe you want to simulate is relatively sparse (as is ours), and has an absolute speed limit (as ours seems to have), then you can shard your workload into parallel processes. And then you can run the separate shards relatively independently, and you only need to pass information from one shard to an other periodically. Now if our universe is a simulation, and it is sharded this way, then you would expect anomalies to crop up on the shard boundaries. Where the simulated mater is moved from one executor "node" to an other. We could construct small spacecraft and send them far away (perhaps other solar systems?). We would furnish these small automated spacecraft with sensitive experiments. Microscopic versions of a Newton's cradle, or some sort of subatomic oscillator, or a very precisely measured interferometric experiment. And the craft would autonomously check constantly that the laws of physics are unchanged, and work without glitches. If we don't see any glitches, then we shrug. Either we don't live in a computer simulation, or the computer simulation is not sharded this way, or the edge cases are very well handled, or the instruments were not sensitive enough, or the shards are even bigger (perhaps we should have sent the same experiments to a different galaxy?) If we see glitching, then we should try to map out exactly where they happen, and how they happen, and that would be very interesting. And if we see glitching of this kind that would increase my confidence in us living in a computer simulation. Does this make sense? You cannot design an experiment to test a metaphor. It doesn't even make sense. But I think of this as a possible literal truth, in which case you can formulate hypothesises based on it and you can check those with experiments. > so it’s safe to say their believers took them a bit more literally I believe you. Did anyone ever propose to solve a famine by sending a hunting party to cut a chunk of the turtle's flesh? Or to send gatherer's to collect the dung of the turtle to fertilise the land? Or to send holly people to the edge of the world, to peer down at the turtle to predict earthquakes? If the turtles are meant to be literal turtles these are all straightforward consequences. If nobody ever proposed anything like these, then perhaps the turtles were more of a metaphor?
- detourdog 3y ago
  I first heard Turtles all the way down in spoken story by Kurt Vonnegut. Does anyone else have a source of the story or is that the source?
  - pavlov 3y ago
    “The world is on a turtle’s back” is Iroquois cosmology, at least.
    - lostlogin 3y ago
      Wow, thank you. I’d always thought this a Pratchett things. I see it has a history in India and China too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Turtle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Turtle
      - mcpackieh 3y ago
        How could at least two cultures without a communication line between them both come up with such a quirky idea? There must be some underlying truth to it.. I'm sold. World turtle is the answer.
        the_af 3y ago
        "The Turtle Moves"!
        detourdog 3y ago
        I'm sure they stepped on turtles to go back and forth across the bering strait.
        kridsdale3 3y ago
        Chinese writing began with turtle shells as well, that's why the mostly conform to a sort of grid system, with curves.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Humans are the universe. It’s not surprising the universe uses available metaphors to explain to itself why it might exist.
mjburgess 3y ago
Reasoning by analogy is one of the ways we solve the framing problem. So, when explaining the universe we imagine it's an act of will by a conscious entity (ie., like how we invent). When explaining the mind we suppose it's like one of our inventions. Absent an analogy of some kind it's quite hard to determine what features are salient. Objects have an essentially infinite number of properties.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  > So, when explaining the universe we imagine it's an act of will by a conscious entity Unless I’m misunderstand you, that line of reasoning assumes one is religious.
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    We here means "our species".
  - pinkmuffinere 3y ago
    I don’t think that’s strictly required — atheists/agnostics can still “imagine” the universe is an act of will
  - pegasus 3y ago
    Not necessarily, see for example Nick Bostrom's Simulation Hypothesis. Maybe one could argue that too requires adherence to some religious dogma (Scientism? Reductionism?)
- kridsdale3 3y ago
  And absent an understanding of electric fields and meteorology, that lightning bolt over there must have been hurled by Zeus!
Legend2440 3y ago
Each of these are true in a sense. There's no turtle, but we are living on an "island" floating through space. The heavens do follow predictable, clockwork rules. Computer simulations are at least a good way to describe the universe.

adolph 3y ago

I think in the case of “to lose one’s temper”, there isn’t an obvious match between the technology of the day and the early medical theory of four humours, not of metal-working. Origin of Temper, New Oxford American Dictionary: Old English temprian 'bring something into the required condition by mixing it with something else', from Latin temperare 'mingle, restrain'. Sense development was probably influenced by Old French temper 'to temper, moderate'. The noun originally denoted a proportionate mixture of elements or qualities, also the combination of the four bodily humours, believed in medieval times to be the basis of temperament, hence temper (sense 1 of the noun) (late Middle English). Compare with temperament. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_temperaments https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_temperaments

HPsquared 3y ago
So tempered steel is well-balanced steel, or mild-mannered. See also the well-tempered clavier. In music, the temperament is an aspect of the tuning system relating to how the dissonances of different notes are balanced.
- adolph 3y ago
  How did WTC not come to my mind, it is one of my favorite works! Maybe because it drives my spouse up the wall so I only listen it less often than I’d like. My favorite recording is the Ishikawa from OpenGoldberg [0]. Reflecting on my response to “lose one’s temper” I can see how a straight line reading of etymology (as I proposed) might be misleading if the specific idiom did come or return from steel or string as an enhancement/extension to the original’s meaning. https://youtu.be/nPHIZw7HZq4 https://youtu.be/nPHIZw7HZq4

ben_w 3y ago

> to lose one’s temper Huh, never thought about that one before. Linguistic stuff like this is fun to find; these days I mostly spot it via learning German as a second language, so the artifice in artificial intelligence becomes “Künstliches Intelligenz” where “Kunst” is artist and “Kunststoff” is plastic, and in Middle Low German “kunst” is knowledge and ability. > coined Deliberate choice to exemplify your point, or accidental because it’s almost impossible to avoid examples like this in modern English?

white_dragon88 3y ago
[dead]
AndrewOMartin 3y ago
Something I've heard a few times is that computer "logs" refer to ships log books, but log books themselves refer to the actual wooden logs that would be thrown out of the back of ships to help determine their speed.
- dylan604 3y ago
  >wooden logs that would be thrown out of the back of ships to help determine their speed. see also, knots
- detourdog 3y ago
  I always thought it was related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi I think he was pouring over tables of data when he worked out algorithms.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Modern submarines still have a "log" which is a pole and sensor that extends outside of the hull to measure the speed through the water and other important measurements.
viciousvoxel 3y ago

HPsquared 3y ago

Now the technology is starting to reflect the biology (neural networks). Inception!

bregma 3y ago
Give two very different things the same name and soon enough many people will believe them to be the similar in nature. If you repeat the lie often enough if will become the truth.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Not really a lie, just biomimicry. The full name is "artificial neural network" after all. It's a lot closer to biology than the steam engine or clockwork watch.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    Abstract algebraic equations are not closer to biology than the steam engine or clockwork watch. The latter are at least physical. Gradient descent and inference doesn’t resemble the physical mechanisms that drive neurons at all. Floats and integers aren’t even capable of representing a continuous voltage potential.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    There is zero relation between a "neuron" in neural networks and a real neuron. It's entirely marketing. The field of "AI" has always been quick to market their work as magic rather than be open and honest about the reality, which is why we have been through at least 3 AI winters already.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Well, like evolutionary algorithms, the thing was designed to replicate some features of the natural one.

dylan604 3y ago

>as metaphors and idioms of mental state through the centuries after listing a bunch of things from the previous century that barely stretches a bit further back. i would have been impressed if you had come up with a phrase from medieval tech, or roman/greek/egyptian. hell, i'd settle for pioneer days tech to allow for "centuries". otherwise, it just feels like modern day analogies.

Earw0rm 3y ago
He's an open book? I needed to let off some steam?
- dylan604 3y ago
  I was thinking something more like "tied up in knots" or "wolf in sheep's clothing". Things before 1800s relevancy. Open book might be a little older, but surely, there were phrases older than that
- lelanthran 3y ago
  Do these count? As the weekend wound down Back-handed compliment
raverbashing 3y ago
It's possible a lot of those are not even seen anymore as such because the use has become commonplace and the original meaning was lost to time
hprotagonist 3y ago
> i would have been impressed if you had come up with a phrase from medieval tech, or roman/greek/egyptian the dual metallurgical and psychological senses of “temper” are from the mid-14th c.
dredmorbius 3y ago
Prior to the scientific age, most theory of mind was religious and/or philosophical, and models typically ran to mind/body duality (Descartes), ideals and essences (Plato & Aristotle, generally), or "spirit" which had numerous associations, many of them textual, which was itself the great technology of the Axial Age in which that concept emerged. Otherwise, in the scientific and technical era, you have the brain as computer, as AI, as homonculus (which really doesn't explain much), as mechanism or clockwork, as a composed of parts (much as a factory or assembly-line, I suppose), and the like.

detourdog 3y ago

I think it is more that as technology grows it spreads its terms and contexts to the point of entering pop culture. I'm not sure if the populous uses terms simply becuase they have heard them before in the same context or due to an understanding. I have to point out that P.G. Wodehouse is often used as an example of this style in recent "literature". I can't even figure out the words to describe the sources of his terms. Wodehouse use terms from anywhere in English language culture (including French I think). The odd part about it is that Wodehouse's writings are so old I find it easy to miss the references. I don't doubt we do this but do expect that is no different than my love being as deep as the ocean.

seabass-labrax 3y ago
This really has piqued my interest. Would you care to share an example or two, please?
- detourdog 3y ago
  It's hard to think of any concrete examples but I will set the scene as best I can and recommend listen to some of the 6 or 7 hour audiobooks narrated by Jonathan Cecil. I just went searching through a bunch of quote lists to try to find examples. I grabbed some just to show the breadth of metaphors and analogs used. What I think I realized is that some of the best examples are probably descriptions of the scenes. I'm too young to know but apparently he was pioneering. I certainly find him funny with old world elocution. I hope you feel satisfied. His most famous character is Jeeves the personal gentlemen's gentlemen of Bertie Wooster. Askjeeves.com was named for Jeeves. They are set in the post Great War England/The continent and Bertie is young and part of the leisure class. Bertie is over educated and deep into night life, pop culture, and sporting. The settings are always over-privileged people trying to work out there issues while Jeeves is the observer and advisor. <snip> this I thought was good because the use of props, underpinnings, bird, orphanage, payoff. Bertie Wooster: I was standing on Eden-Roc in Antibes last month, and a girl I know slightly pointed to this fellow diving into the water and asked me if I didn't think that his legs were about the silliest-looking pair of props ever issued to a human being. Well, I agreed that indeed they were and, for perhaps a couple of minutes, I was extraordinarily witty and satirical about this bird's underpinnings. And guess what happened next. Jeeves: I am agog to learn, sir. Bertie Wooster: A cyclone is what happened next, Jeeves, emanating from this girl. She started on my own legs, saying that they weren't much to write home about, and then she moved on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique and method of eating asparagus. By the time she'd finished, the best that could be said about poor old Bertram was that, so far as was known, he hadn't actually burnt down an orphanage. Jeeves: A most illuminating story, sir. Bertie Wooster: No, no, no, no, no, Jeeves, Jeeves, you haven't had the payoff yet! Jeeves: Oh, I'm so sorry, sir! The structure of your tale deceived me, for a moment, into thinking that it was over. Bertie Wooster: No, no, no, the point is that she was actually engaged to this fellow with the legs. They'd had some minor disagreement the night before, but there they were the following night, dining together, their differences made up and the love light once more in their eyes. And I expect much the same results with my cousin Angela. Jeeves: I look forward to it with lively anticipation, sir. <snip> Jeeves: I hope you won't take it amiss, sir, but I've been giving some attention to what might be called the "amatory entanglements" at Brinkley. It seems to me that drastic measures may be called for. Bertie Wooster: [sighs audibly] Drastic away, Jeeves. The prospect of being united for life with a woman who talks about "little baby bunnies" fills me with an unnamed dread. <snip> gaming the use of chip-in Bertie Wooster: Oh, very well, then. If you're not going to chip in and save a fellow creature, I suppose I can't make you. You're going to look pretty silly, though, when I get old Biffy out of the soup without your assistance. <snip> <snip> this has a few but is a good example of using the reaction of a character in movie to describe ones self. “I felt most awfully braced. I felt as if the clouds had rolled away and all was as it used to be. I felt like one of those chappies in the novels who calls off the fight with his wife in the last chapter and decides to forget and forgive. I felt I wanted to do all sorts of other things to show Jeeves that I appreciated him.” ― P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves <snip> this is good becuase he uses Shakespeare Bertie Wooster: Well, let me tell you, Mr. Mangelhoffer, that the man that hath no music in himself is fit for... hang on a minute. [goes into the other room, where Jeeves is peeling potatoes] Jeeves, what was it Shakespeare said the man that hadn't music in himself was fit for? Jeeves: Treasons, stratagems, and spoils, sir. Bertie Wooster: [returning] Treasons, stratagems, and spoils. Mr. Mangelhoffer: What? Bertie Wooster: That's what he's fit for, the man that hath no music in himself. <snip> Aunt Dahlia: Oh, Bertie, if magazines had ears, Milady's Boudoir would be up to them in debt. I've got nasty little men in bowler hats knocking at my door.

jeepers6 3y ago

When my legs give out from below me, I don’t shout “loss of hydraulic pressure!” like some kind of arthropod. Yet we’re obsessed with framing ourselves as chains of matmul.

wpietri 3y ago

Ooh, that's very interesting. How would I find the metaphors used before, say, the industrial revolution?

kurtoid 3y ago

> cache miss Ooh, I like that one. Stealing it