Explications
http://www.stats.uwaterloo.ca/~cgsmall/conscious5.html
Metaphor, Metaphier, Metaphrand
This has been extracted from a web page on Julian Jaynes' The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It examines the components of metaphor and shows how this reflects the manner in which our minds process perceptions. I am offering this as a background for a description of my poetic process.
Another explanation for
consciousness has been proposed by Julian Jaynes (1920-1997). According to
Jaynes, consciousness is anything but ontologically fundamental. Indeed, said
Jaynes, for most of human history people did not even have any consciousness.
This seems like an outrageous statement to make. However, Jaynes provided vigorous support for this idea in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Rather than being essential to mental activity, Jaynes argued that consciousness is often peripheral. For example, he wrote:
If a bird bursts up from a copse nearby and flies crying to the horizon, I may turn and watch it and hear it, and then turn back to this page without being conscious that I have done so.
If many of our mental activities do not involve consciousness, why do we have a feeling that consciousness pervades our mental life? Jaynes claimed that consciousness is a much smaller part of our minds than we are conscious of because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. He drew a metaphor to illustrate the point. Imagine someone using a flashlight in a very dark room to search for something that doesn't have any light on it. The dark room is analogous to the totality of our mental activities and the flashlight is analogous to consciousness.
The effect of this argument is to marginalize the role of consciousness in mental activity. Learning can occur without consciousness. Thinking can occur without consciousness. Logical reasoning can occur without consciousness. Indeed, Jaynes questioned whether consciousness was necessary at all.
Having challenged common sense notions of consciousness, Jaynes went on to inquire into the linguistic basis of consciousness. The idea that we are conscious because we use language is related to the Whorf Hypothesis that language acquisition is necessary to thought. However, it is a distinct theory which must be examined on its own merits. The key feature of language that Jaynes identified as being the origin of consciousness is its ability to generate metaphors.
Now this thesis seems very compatible with our arguments up to now. After all, formal thinking, as exemplified by an Aristotlean syllogism, is a very different kind of thing from metaphorical thinking, as exemplified by a piece of poetry. Jaynes' theory could be helpful to us in understanding why it is that self referential systems are not formalizable, and why consciousness cannot be identified with a particular set of brain processes.
A metaphor, said Jaynes involves two components:
The metaphor is the known metaphier operating on the less well known metaphrand. The intention of the metaphor is to illuminate the metaphrand by giving it some of the features of the metaphier. For example, if I speak of the "face of a clock," the word "face" is a metaphier and the word clock is the metaphrand. The effect of the metaphor is to tell us that the display part of a clock has some of the properties that we associate with the human face. Like the human face, which we can examine for information about an individual, the clock face can be examined for information about the time. Indeed, we tend to use the verb "to face" to indicate an openness to a flow of information. We "face the press" or we can "face the facts." When we are "face to face," the flow of information is two-way. As Jaynes points out, metaphors are not anomalies in language. Many of the standard words in our vocabulary have been built out of metaphors. For example, the word "cloud" derives from an Indo-European root which means mound. The word "clump" also derives from the same root. So the word we use for a cloud originally arose from a metaphor in which a cloud was the metaphrand and a mound was the metaphier. Presumably, the latter was much better known to the ancients than the former, and could be used to illuminate the some of the properties of the latter.
Describing a cloud as like a mound of earth, is in some sense a theory of clouds. It helped to explain what a cloud is to Indo-Europeans. Although clouds were inaccessible, they could be brought down to earth, so to speak, by comparisons with mounds of earth. Similarly, Bohr's model for the atom was vaguely similar in form to a solar system. In science fiction and popular science of the first half of the twentieth century, this metaphor was strained beyond credibility. However, it was useful to a generation that was coming to terms with the facts of nuclear power. The solar system was a metaphier and the atom a metaphrand. The former was much more familiar and accessible in the imagination of the public and thereby helped (somewhat incorrectly) to illuminate the latter. More generally, scientific models can be thought of a metaphors. When we speak of a scientific model, we understand the model as a metaphier for the underlying physical reality. Within a model, a formal language can be developed. But between models, the language is metaphorical and incapable of formalization.
How does this make for a theory of consciousness? Jaynes argued that most theories of consciousness are attempted metaphors. As such, they fail because "it should be immediately apparent that there is not and connot be anything in our immediate experience that is like immediate experience itself." There is no model for consciousness, because no conceivable metaphier could be more immediate to us that consciousness itself. As such, no model is able to illuminate consciousness the way clouds can be illuminated by comparison with mounds of earth. Rather than thinking of consciousness as a particular metaphor, we should understand it as derived from the metaphor-generating ability of the human mind.
What this means is that when we speak of consciousness, the metaphier-metaphrand relationship works the other way around. The physical world and its behaviours become the metaphier, and consciousness becomes the metaphrand. For example, when I say that I have an idea "in the back of my mind" I am using a closet metaphor to help illuminate the workings of my mind. Just as a closet can be filled with various items, some of which fall out when the door is opened and some of which are hard to dig out, so my mind is a clutter of ideas, some of which are on the front burner (another metaphor) and some on the back burner. To talk about consciousness then we have to use metaphors of this kind. Moreover, a single metaphor cannot be an all-encompassing description of consciousness. As the mind generates metaphors of increasing variety, it needs a variety of metaphors to illuminate its activities.
So far so good. I suspect that many people would find Jaynes' analysis of the role of metaphors in our understanding of consciousness quite insightful up to this point. However, Jaynes' theory of consciousness took him further than this in some intuitive leaps that many researchers have found difficult to swallow. These conclusions are
While I give Jaynes credit for some important insights into the understanding of consciousness, these additional claims do not, in my opinion, follow inevitably from the earlier reasoning. That we need metaphorical language to talk about consciousness does not imply that consciousness is a type of metaphorical language. Jaynes is also guilty, in my opinion, of taking certain forms of religious language too literally, and, in contrast to writers such as Northrop Fry for example, downplaying the metaphorical and allegorical aspects of mythopoetic forces in religious literature.
Despite these criticisms of mine, the dynamic aspects of metaphoric language cannot be overestimated in our understanding of consciousness. While a computer program can simulate or model reality, its fundamental features are fixed by the original programming. In contrast, the metaphors that we use to model our world and our understanding of ourselves are constantly in a state of flux. Metaphors do not just come fully fledged into being but grow in our language and thinking as we need them.
Let us consider an example to illustrate this last point. We can suppose that cultures in previous age grappled with the idea of life and death and struggled to make some philosophical sense of the distinction between animate objects, inanimate objects and the transitions from one to the other. In trying to understand the cessation of bodily function that accompanies death, early cultures could not draw apon the biological understanding that is available to us today. They used metaphors that made sense to them. The metaphrand that they sought to communicate was the metabolic activity of an organism. Knowing no biochemistry and limited physiology, they drew upon a superficial metaphier to help talk about life and death. When a higher organism dies it stops breathing. So the breath was used as a metaphier for the metaphrand of metabolic activity and conscious awareness. The English language reflects this ancient metaphor. The world "spirit" is derived from a root meaning of breath in the same way as the word "respiration." This metaphor is not particular to English, but can be found in classical Hebrew, where the word "ruach" means "breath," "wind" and "spirit." For example, in Genesis 1:2 of the Old Testament, it says in the King James Version that the "Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." However, the word "Spirit" could also be translated as "wind." We need the context to help us with the choice of word in translation. The New Testament written in classical Greek also has this metaphor. For example, John 3:5 has "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." While the word "Spirit" is certainly the correct translation, the English language cannot render the beauty of the Greek original which conjures up images of a baptism of water and wind -- two elements of nature that are often described together in the context of sailing. The image of a wind blowing across the water and moving the water is present in the original text, but obscured in translation. The metaphor of moving water as a symbol for life is also present in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, where the words "fresh water" (NIV), "springing water" (KJV) in Genesis 26:19 can also be translated as "living water."
Readers who might be inclined to disparage such language as pre-scientific should remember that science relies as heavily on metaphors as the Biblical texts. For example, when we speak of "curved space-time" in general relativity, we use our ordinary words and concepts of curved surfaces as metaphiers for the metaphrand of Einstein's space-time geometry.
Once a metaphier has become established through a particular metaphor, it can eventually become synonymous with the metaphrand. It's original meaning may even disappear. However the metaphrand, invoked by the original metaphier, may eventually become the metaphier for a new metaphrand which needs to be invoked in the language. It is this dynamic aspect which is important. In particular, it is this dynamic aspect which allows us to build concepts in language. As we considered above, concepts are universals and not particulars. A dynamic metaphor is an essential tool for building and communicating concepts. For example, if we want to explain the concept of death to a child we are likely to try to do so by means of metaphors. We may say that the person is "sleeping" or has "departed." As the child grows in sophistication the dynamic metaphors keep pace. We need a new metaphor to explain a concept when the old metaphor no longer does the job. When metaphors become frozen, they are no longer useful to explain concepts.