dr_mabeuse
seduce the mind
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2002
- Posts
- 11,528
Conceptual Metaphor Theory comes out of the science of Neurolinguistics, which itself is a product mostly of AI and looks at how language shapes and is shaped by the mind. It now seems that language is not a product of intelligence but is an integral part of intelligence. (In this case, language is defined as the assignment of symbols to objects, not the vocalized reproduction of these symbols. If you want to get an idea of the kind of raw language the brain uses, consider your dreams. We don't have words for everything that happens in our dreams, but dreams occur in the mind's native language.)
It seems now that the hard part in building machines that think isn't a hardware problem, a case of putting the machinery together, but a software problem, a way of getting that machinery to do what we call "thiinking". The best ideas so far come out of psycholinguistics and involve manipulation of symbols according to some pretty simple basic rules.
According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, all thinking happens in metaphors. In other words, a thought or a discovery is the creation of a metaphor. "A Man's Home is his Castle." is a metaphor. "Life is a journey" is a metaphor. "Every woman is a queen" is a metaphor, and what happens in those metaphors is an object (Home, Life, Woman,) is given new meaning through its redefinition in the metaphor. The metaphor gives us a new range of meanings for them, new consequences and references that spreads out like the limbs of a tree into an infinity of new possibilities.
The technique is amazingly powerful and robust. Just play with it and it';s not to score hits. "Every woman is a ...Castle...Journey...Hamburger...Goodbye...Thursday,,,Whatever" Our minds seem designed to work in this way and automatically seek out meanings like our eyes seek out meanings in jumbles of letters, and businesses are already using Metaphor Storming to generate ideas. Try it for coming up with plots. Put names, activities places, etc on slips of papers and pick them from a hat and see if you can't come up with stories. They already sell these kind of plot generators for authors and I think there's a free on available on the web somewhere, but it's not very good.
Metaphors aren't trivial either. Definitions are metaphors. Unless some sort of empirical scientific distinctions can be found, both "homosexuality is a vice" and "homosexuality is a disease" are basically metaphors Which one we choose to go with will determine how we look at homosexuality and the consequences homosexuality.
For writers, metaphors are our bread and butter. They're the stuff we build with. CMT has a special name for the one-word "metaphor", the effect of the connotations achieved depending on whether he "slides" his cock into her or "shoves" his cock into her but all writers (and readers) are aware of it. These basic one-word metaphors are how we describe the world in our stories, and they build into larger phrased metaphors, where our characters make love like wind through pines or two colliding locomotives and we feel the sweet sensuality of the pine needles or the hot iron spinning through the air. These metaphors build into larger metaphors—the scenes in our stories set in dingy apartments or flashy nightclubs where the lights and the sparkle say something about the human spirit as we see it at that moment, and even large till we have the entire piece as metaphor, the story from beginning to end, all the words, images, speech, flavor, our vision of the world and humanity at the point in time.
And it happens whether you intend it to or not. You might think I'm talking English Major stuff here, but everytime you write you're writing with content and style and theme, no matter how crude or asscrack-awful the piece is, it's something you're giving the world, something as yours as your fingerprint, a flavor that could only have come from your brain.
When I talk about writers and poets being the most important people in the world, that's what I mean. Without us, there's just raw experience. It''s through the weight of our work that people come to decide whether, say, erotic whipping is an expression of a man's contempt for a woman or his attempt to communicate the depth of his own desire for her, or both, or neither. We give people the words and the concepts they use to describe the world they live in, which means we give them the means to think about it.
For the people who visit Literotica, God have mercy on their poor minds.
"I kiked in the dor and camed rite in hur facse!"
It seems now that the hard part in building machines that think isn't a hardware problem, a case of putting the machinery together, but a software problem, a way of getting that machinery to do what we call "thiinking". The best ideas so far come out of psycholinguistics and involve manipulation of symbols according to some pretty simple basic rules.
According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, all thinking happens in metaphors. In other words, a thought or a discovery is the creation of a metaphor. "A Man's Home is his Castle." is a metaphor. "Life is a journey" is a metaphor. "Every woman is a queen" is a metaphor, and what happens in those metaphors is an object (Home, Life, Woman,) is given new meaning through its redefinition in the metaphor. The metaphor gives us a new range of meanings for them, new consequences and references that spreads out like the limbs of a tree into an infinity of new possibilities.
The technique is amazingly powerful and robust. Just play with it and it';s not to score hits. "Every woman is a ...Castle...Journey...Hamburger...Goodbye...Thursday,,,Whatever" Our minds seem designed to work in this way and automatically seek out meanings like our eyes seek out meanings in jumbles of letters, and businesses are already using Metaphor Storming to generate ideas. Try it for coming up with plots. Put names, activities places, etc on slips of papers and pick them from a hat and see if you can't come up with stories. They already sell these kind of plot generators for authors and I think there's a free on available on the web somewhere, but it's not very good.
Metaphors aren't trivial either. Definitions are metaphors. Unless some sort of empirical scientific distinctions can be found, both "homosexuality is a vice" and "homosexuality is a disease" are basically metaphors Which one we choose to go with will determine how we look at homosexuality and the consequences homosexuality.
For writers, metaphors are our bread and butter. They're the stuff we build with. CMT has a special name for the one-word "metaphor", the effect of the connotations achieved depending on whether he "slides" his cock into her or "shoves" his cock into her but all writers (and readers) are aware of it. These basic one-word metaphors are how we describe the world in our stories, and they build into larger phrased metaphors, where our characters make love like wind through pines or two colliding locomotives and we feel the sweet sensuality of the pine needles or the hot iron spinning through the air. These metaphors build into larger metaphors—the scenes in our stories set in dingy apartments or flashy nightclubs where the lights and the sparkle say something about the human spirit as we see it at that moment, and even large till we have the entire piece as metaphor, the story from beginning to end, all the words, images, speech, flavor, our vision of the world and humanity at the point in time.
And it happens whether you intend it to or not. You might think I'm talking English Major stuff here, but everytime you write you're writing with content and style and theme, no matter how crude or asscrack-awful the piece is, it's something you're giving the world, something as yours as your fingerprint, a flavor that could only have come from your brain.
When I talk about writers and poets being the most important people in the world, that's what I mean. Without us, there's just raw experience. It''s through the weight of our work that people come to decide whether, say, erotic whipping is an expression of a man's contempt for a woman or his attempt to communicate the depth of his own desire for her, or both, or neither. We give people the words and the concepts they use to describe the world they live in, which means we give them the means to think about it.
For the people who visit Literotica, God have mercy on their poor minds.
"I kiked in the dor and camed rite in hur facse!"
