The Poetic Imagination and the Brain

I want to return to an old subject, one that is a bit of a fixation for me.  It is the difficulty of reconciling a physicalist account of the mind with the power and the origin of metaphor, in poetry and in everyday life.

But we know now, you say, that computers can hold linguistic structures and connections within them that already rival our own and, it goes without saying, these are held in physical form, in complex binaries that, even if they are said to reside in the cloud, actually reside in a server somewhere.  So this physical "anchor" for such structures proves that our physical brains can do the same.

Yes, whatever resides in a computer resides there physically, but the "semantic component" of our language, as Chomsky described it, isn't really replicated in computers; rather, they use pattern recognition to mimic what the human mind has created through other means.  If, for example, you ask ChatGPT to explain the anatomical differences between a leopard and a jaguar, the program will search hundreds of millions of texts and spit back at you the consensus view that has been expressed by others, others with brains!

But, in humans, the semantic component must reside in the brain, you say.  Where else could it be?!

In examining our poetic capacities that militate against the physicalist paradigm (according to me at least), we can walk along a spectrum, from less impressive to more so.  Let's do it.

The Russian word for "work" is «работа» -- "rabota."  I would say that the two words occupy the same conceptual space; I can't think of any significant way in which the meaning of one departs from the meaning of the other.  And so, if you, an English speaker, decide to study Russian and encounter the Russian word, you can just map it onto something you already know -- "work," and the job is done.  This is easy to conceptualize in computer terms.  Whatever the meaning of "work" is, it is replicated, with a little superscript "r" attached to distinguish it as the Russian equivalent.  And so it is, you say, in our brains.

Now consider the word "license."  Its primary meaning is something like "permission."  You can't fish for small-mouthed bass in Maine without permission from the authorities, without a "license to fish."  But, once having secured permission, via the local tackle shop in Grand Lake Stream, how do you ensure that you can prove that you have such permission?  The store owner gives you a piece of paper which is headed, in bold letters, "Maine License to Fish."  The piece of paper is not the permission; it is the physical proof that you have secured permission.  The first person to call this piece of paper a "license" made a conceptual jump from the abstract to the tangible (usually it seems to operate in reverse!).  But this strikes us as a minor jump and one easy to imagine somehow replicated in the brain.

"Rank and file."  The original meaning of the expression comes from a military formation that looks like a box of men, ten across, say, and ten deep.  When we view the formation from slightly above and in front of it, each horizontal line of men is a "rank," and each vertical line is a "file."  (If the command drill sergeant gives the command "Right Face!," the rank will become the file and vice versa.)  But, through someone's poetic imagination, "rank and file" came to mean the common, lowest order of things as opposed to those in charge -- "The Republican leadership may not be able to establish order among the rank and file."  This is a bigger conceptual leap.  Who was the first to make it, and how is it that he was understood?  What does it look like in the mapping of the brain?

At a critical moment in the movie "A Complete Unknown," Johnny Cash leans in to his friend Bob Dylan and says "Track some mud on the carpet Big D!"  What was this carpet, and what was this mud?  What filaments within the brains of our heroes allowed one to invent it, and the other to "grok" it?

The writer and editor David Samuels, spurred on by the same film, said this week that Dylan's music revealed "a bullet-proof intelligence that twists and turns like a fish in order to avoid being caught."  How is a wriggling fish mapped onto the concept of "intelligence?"  And yet the metaphor is a very fine one.

You may call it magical thinking, but what I might propose is the possibility that our whole conceptual structure lies outside of ourselves, with the "tapping in" facilitated by our brains.  This model looks more like the visions of Carl Jung, and it may be more compatible with various "spooky" phenomena, including the fact, or theory, that, all things being equal, people doing the New York Times crossword puzzle at 3PM do better than people who do the puzzle at 5AM (coffee or no coffee), because the first cohort will benefit somehow from the learning of everyone else in the collective unconsciousness who has already done it that day.

So I don't think that our physicalist models have really come to terms with the elasticity, the fluidity, that is inherent in our thinking.  And, by the way, how did we come to stretch the very concrete and tangible concepts represented by an "elastic" band and a molten, "fluid" metal, so far into the realm of the abstract? 

The "roar" of the Napoleons at Waterloo.  The "bleating" of the trumpet of Miles Davis.  The "murmuring" pines and the hemlocks in the forest primeval!

Metaphors are everywhere.