Can we compare physics and psychology?

[coberst]

Can we compare physics and psychology?

 

Libido is an energy source—Heat is an energy source—there is potential and kinetic energy

 

Emotion aka instinct is an energy source—

 

Narcissism is a force—gravity is a force—electromagnetism is a force—within the atom there are the strong and weak forces—there are four physical forces within nature. Narcissism is a force that displays itself in--self-absorption—self-love—sense of immortality—self-esteem—cosmic significance—self-importance—feeds on symbols, on abstract ideas of my own worth

 

Guilt is a feeling caused by outside resistance

 

Feeling—the mental experience of an emotion after the body has reacted to the emotion

 

Neurosis is the control of anxiety by restricting experience—the humanization process is neurosis in action

 

Anxiety is a feeling, the penalty for becoming human, i.e. for becoming self-conscious; it is not based on instinct but is based upon individual sense of helplessness.

 

Ego controls responses by delaying action

 

Hero—the world is a stage for heroism—our main task on this earth—man’s natural yearning for organismic activity, the pleasure of incorporation and expansion, fed limitlessly in the domain of symbols—we compare one another symbolically—we are ignorant of what we want and need, we disguise it in consumption as our badges—desire to be hero is natural and to admit it is healthy—need to make me, man, nation, etc, meaningful—our need for freedom is our need to be a hero—it becomes a blind-drivenness that burns us up—we must feel that what we do is heroic—crises is when youth does not feel heroic, we have a crisis of heroism—religion is no longer a stage for heroism—heroics is a central theme of human action

 

Culture is a symbolic action system for heroism—to give death its due is perhaps a step back that will permit a step forward—death is reality, when we repress it what happens?—

 

This is how our brain works. We think with the aid of past experiences. We use linguistic metaphors to give others a direction for understanding. Our brain uses conceptual metaphors this same way; automatically using conceptual metaphors. LIFE IS A JOURNEY. Automatically our brain “copies” what we already know about journeys that help us to better comprehend the task of living.

 

Abstract ideas are largely metaphorical.

 

An infant is born and when embraced for the first time by its mother the infant experiences the sensation of warmth. In succeeding experiences the warmth is felt along with other sensations.

 

Empirical data verifies that there often happens a conflation of this sensation experience together with the development of a subjective (abstract) concept we can call affection. With each similar experience the infant fortifies both the sensation experience and the affection experience and a little later this conflation aspect ends and the child has these two concepts in different mental spaces.

 

This conflation leads us to readily recognize the metaphor ‘affection is warmth’.

 

Cognitive science uses metaphor in the standard usage as we are all accustomed to but it also uses a new concept that you are unfamiliar with unless you have been reading this book. This new concept is called ‘conceptual metaphor’. Conceptual metaphor is the heart of this new cognitive science and represents what will be in my opinion the new paradigm of cognitive science.

 

In my example I speak of two separate mental spaces; one being the experience of being held and the other is the subjective experience of affection. The theory behind the ‘conceptual metaphor’ is that the structure of the sense experience can and is often automatically without conscious intention mapped into a new mental space.

 

The experience structure can be mapped into a new mental space and thereby becomes part of the structure of that new mental space. In this fashion these conceptual metaphors can act somewhat like atoms that join together to make a molecule.

 

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) has developed new and revolutionary theories regarding how cognition works. One way that it works is through metaphor, not just linguistic but also through conceptual metaphor. You ought to give it a study. You might be surprised how many things will become clearer.

 

I am a retired engineer; that is why I think using physics as an aid in comprehending the world I live in.

[CraigD]

Can we compare physics and psychology?

One can refer metaphorically to nearly any subject in terms of another subject, so we can clearly use physics to metaphorically describe psychological ideas – and vice versa: how often have you heard someone describe an inanimate physical system with sentences like “the particle wants to find it’s lowest energy state”, or encountered conventional terms like “hydrophobic molecule”?

 

A drawback when using metaphors is that some readers fail to recognize them as metaphors, but take them literally. The silly claims forum thread 18217 is, I think, a outstanding example of this cognitive malfunction, in which someone has dedicated a great deal of effort to argue that computers literally feel “happy” or “painful”.

 

In psychology, a common instance of a metaphor taken literally involve the idea that complex cognitive and musculoskeletal processes are exactly the same as “energy” in classical physics, with many people believing that unusually trained and/or talented people can focus “chi” or similarly named alleged phenomena to accelerate distant objects or generate powerful electric currents. This, which I believe to be a cognitive malfunction, is practically a dogma of the pseudoscientific discipline of parapsychology.

 

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) has developed new and revolutionary theories regarding how cognition works.

…

You ought to give it a study.

I agree, and appreciate your writing about it at hypography, coberst. :cocktail: I’ve made a superficial study of SGCS since being introduced to it here, and hope to have an opportunity to make a deeper study in the next few years, hopefully in a traditional academic setting.

 

In my last quarter century as a computer professional, I’ve witnessed an unexpected trend away from cross-discipline psychology-computer science. In the 1980s and early ‘90s, I could get considerable traction in design discussions throwing around ideas such as those in Minsky’s “Society of Mind”, proposing software development based on idealized neuropsychological models. By the late ‘90s, my best traction seemed to come from describing about the same software solution as “just a big state machine”. Employing another metaphor, I might call this period “the decline and fall of the empire of the Emperor in Penrose’s ‘The Emperor's New Mind’”. :eek2:

[coberst]

One can refer metaphorically to nearly any subject in terms of another subject, so we can clearly use physics to metaphorically describe psychological ideas – Mind’”. :)

 

 

“Abstract ideas, for the most part, arise via conceptual metaphor—a cognitive mechanism that derives abstract thinking from the way we function in the everyday physical world. Conceptual metaphor plays a central and defining role in the formation of mathematical ideas within the cognitive unconscious—from arithmetic and algebra to sets and logic to infinity in all of its forms.”

 

An example of the abstract concept ‘A purposeful life is a journey’ is constructed from several primary metaphors. These primary metaphors are concepts developed from living experience.

 

We are acculturated to recognize that a useful life is a life with purpose. The complex metaphor ‘A Purposeful Life Is a Journey’ is constructed from primary metaphors: ‘purpose is destination’ and ‘action is motion’; and a cultural belief that ‘people should have a purpose’.

 

 

’A Purposeful Life Is A Journey’ Metaphor

A purposeful life is a journey.

A person living a life is a traveler.

Life goals are destinations

A life plan is an itinerary.

 

This metaphor has strong influence on how we conduct our lives. This influence arises from the complex metaphor’s entailments: A journey, with its accompanying complications, requires planning, and the necessary means.

 

Primary metaphors ‘ground’ concepts to sensorimotor experience. Is this grounding lost in a complex metaphor? “Not at all.” Complex metaphors are composed of primary metaphors and the whole is grounded by its parts. “The grounding of A Purposeful Life Is A Journey is given by individual groundings of each component primary metaphor.”

 

 

 

The ideas for this post come from “Philosophy in the Flesh”. The quotes are from “Where Mathematics Comes From”