The Physical Core: Analogies
Analogies are said by Hofstadter and Sander in Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking to be the elemental basis for thinking. Analogies, long considered essential to what we mean by intelligence, have been incorporated into many I.Q. tests because of this. The Miller Analogies Test, used for many years in judging college applicants, takes this association to the extreme with an examination comprised solely of analogies. In conversations and debates, an apt analogy can establish a point more clearly and emphatically than a logical rationale.
There is something about analogies, however, that challenges traditional ways of understanding brain functioning. Analogies link, at a deep level, entities that superficially appear to have nothing to do with each other in our daily life experiences. When we liken money in the bank to tools in a shed, we focus solely on a dynamic similarity while ignoring substantial concrete differences. How do we make the deep, often remote connections between such distinctly different pairs? The analogies we create are often original, unlike anything we have previously heard or even imagined, and they seem to occur naturally to us. We are seldom searching for an analogy when one spontaneously arises in our thoughts.
Analogies are something we are able to do as naturally as following a rule. The two tiers of consciousness provide the necessary substrate for both phenomena. We develop the conscious version of the world we know from the continuous physical core established at the first tier. Our physical core of experience informs the thoughts we express at the verbal-symbolic tier. This continuous, undifferentiated flow of physical experience provides the “essence” that informs the “surface” particulars of the analogies we create. The two tiers of consciousness provide a physiological substrate for the two levels of thinking that Hofstadter and Sander identify in the title of their book.
We continuously encounter reality on two levels: an ongoing, undifferentiated physical flow at the first tier and the entities and events described at the second tier. These correspond to the essence and surface respectively for thinking and thought. We are able to follow a rule and apply it across a variety of never previously encountered situations because we have incorporated its essential meaning at the physical core. We are unable to explain our ability to do this in response to skeptical questions because the functioning of the pre-empirical core is inexpressible in terms of the conscious descriptions we create. Wittgenstein, after exploring the problem of following a rule, declared that “obeying a rule is a practice.” The essence of following a rule resides in the core of experience at the first tier, and we demonstrate “knowing how” to follow the rule by physically carrying it out in practice.
When Wittgenstein said that there must be an “end to enquiry” when our “spade is turned,” he was describing the impasse that occurs at the interface between the two tiers. Descriptive level questions posed at the second tier cannot penetrate the continuous physical flow at the first-tier core of experience. Following a rule is a form of thinking by analogy. The essential dynamic source of thinking resides in the continuous physical core of experience. This undifferentiated source of behavioral wisdom can be expressed in a seemingly unlimited variety of ways at the verbal-symbolic tier that I characterize as plurabilities (see Of Two Minds #10). The various articulations we express are all surface variations on an underlying dynamic essence and thus similar by analogy.
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