The Metaphors of Science and the Science of Metaphors
Intimating a Metatypological Worldview with Complex Systems Theories
This essay builds on the theories presented in an essay on complex systems.
It has long been wondered how and why the universe can be comprehended at all, why our evolved ability to survive and reproduce lends itself to apprehending the great diversity of microcosmic and macrocosmic phenomena we have discovered.
Early scientists saw our intellect as God-given tool for grasping His great works. Even in our secular times, Einstein called this capacity miraculous.1
Before science, nature’s cyclical processes of birth, growth, and decay often defined our understanding the cosmos, emphasizing formal essences and final teleologies. With the systematizing of natural philosophy, technological advancements like clocks and engines became the representative symbols of the universe, demonstrations of our mastery of physics that reflected the apparent mechanistic nature of reality. This led to the privileging of the physical and causal explanations that dominate modern worldviews today.
These metaphorical frameworks of nature and machines often went unexamined; classical science was mostly viewed as a disinterested accumulation of objective data. In the 1960s, historian Thomas Kuhn influentially argued science is better understood as paradigmatic, an interrelation of scientific facts in implicit, holistic frameworks, centered around key images or insights. Following Kuhn,2 many now recognize metaphor and analogy as the organizing principles of scientific paradigms; physicist Robert Shaw went as far as suggesting “you don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to perceive it.” (Gleick, p. 262).3 Physicist Roger Jones went even farther: "metaphor is the heart of the apparent dichotomy between reality and consciousness" (Jones, ix).
Accepting Kuhn’s premise, it is easy to see why the right metaphor is so essential; it not only organizes scientific facts, but also defines the direction of scientific inquiry, our relationship with the universe as a whole. Viewing nature as robotic automatons allows for its exploitation as a passive and determined aggregate of physical forces. Analogizing the universe as an entropy-creating engine leads to a pessimistic prediction for its heat death and lifeless uniformity. Both put us in an adversarial relationship with the world, seeking better forms of control against an inevitable tide towards oblivion.
With the rise of modern physics, new metaphors are called for, both for framing these nascent sciences around its representative symbols, and for reconceptualizing facts and theories into a coherent whole.
Following the insights of complex system theories, many see a return to the perennial ecological view of the world4 as a living, creative system,5 now reconciling its physical constituents and causal forces with its irreducible, essential patterns and unpredictable, purposive processes.
In turn, I propose that complex system theories of fractals and chaotic attractors may help explain why we can comprehend general principles of reality at all, offering a bridge between physical properties and consciousness through profound correspondances of the literal and the metaphorical.
But first, why metaphors?
The Psychology of Metaphors
Metaphor is most commonly understood as “a device of the poetic imagination and rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than orderinary language,” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 3) They are viewed as outside of their proper meaning, abstracted from their correct context (1999, p. 119, p. 134) and therefore “we can get along perfectly well without metaphor” (1980, p. 3). In contrast, modern thought sees true reasoning as a disinterested and literalistic appraisal of the world, reflecting the Cartesian duality of a disembodied mind discerning matter’s fixed significations (1999, p. 76).
By the mid- to late 1970s, a body of empirical research began to emerge that called in question these tenets (p. 77). It suggests metaphor is the basis upon which our conceptual systems arise, preceding any literal or discrete ideas, from everyday folk wisdom to scientific knowledge. Metaphor broadens our understanding by finding insightful correlations between distinct phenomena — starting from our basic embodied experience and extending it out onto the world.6
For example, let’s consider containers. As psychologists Lakoff and Johnson describe it (p. 36):
Our bodies are containers that take in air and nutrients and emit wastes. We constantly orient our bodies with respect to containers—rooms, beds, buildings. We spend an inordinate amount of time putting things in and taking things out of containers.
From these basic experiences, a general schema is unconsciously formed, including “an inside, a boundary, and an outside. This is a gestalt structure, in the sense that the parts make no sense without the whole” (p. 32). This schema isn’t limited to how we perceive containers, but is entangled with the affective responses and sensorimotor interactions we have with them, our feelings and behaviors towards them: home-containers protect inhabitants; jar-containers conceal their contents; cage-containers restrict and hinder movement.
In sum, from the diversity of physical structures that we call containers, an intuition of their shared pattern and function arises — their meaning and purpose.
Despite the universality and stability of basic metaphors across cultures and time, psychologists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue they a product of experiential conflation and projections that are learned, not due to something innate about us7 or reality. This is why some metaphors are more ‘apt’ than others, providing richer and wider-ranging inferences for discerning the intricacies of the novel in terms of what is familiar.
Applying Metaphor Theory to Complex Systems
In a previous essay, I review how ‘dissipative systems’ emerge and self-organize, reversing the entropic flow of energy and fluids towards states far from equilbrium.
In contrast to ‘mechanical’ dissipative systems like whirlpools, life can be understood as ‘chemical’ dissipative systems.8 While whirlpools collapse once chaos grows too uniform or turbulent, life may continue to perpetuate itself beyond its local constraints, a process termed autopoiesis, ‘self-making.’ To do so, living systems requires definite boundaries that separate interior conditions from the external world, and a flow of components that are incorporated, transformed, replaced, and expelled. It’s physical constituents may change, but it’s identity, it’s pattern, persists.9 Put briefly, living dissipative systems are both structurally open and organizationally closed, combining “the stability of structure with the fluidity of change” (Capra, p. 177).
In other words, life requires containment, but not too much.
To illustrate this, let’s compare our embodied experience of our skin-containers with the container of a cell, it’s membrane. Our skins, like those of other multicellular organisms, are containers that closes us off from the environment.10 Our mouths, anuses, and sensory organs are the means by which resources and stimuli enter and waste is expelled. Similarly, a cell membrane encloses, protects, and restricts inner processes. These membranes are structured by phospholipid bilayers that are studded with proteins, selectively allowing molecules in and out.11
Uni- and multicellular boundaries both enclose their living systems, providing orderly stability for the organization within, and remain open and response to exchanges of energy and matter. They share a process of balancing perpetuation and protection, the “double imperative of flexibility and security” (Prigogine, p. 172).
Lakoff and Johnson's container schema make an exceptionally apt metaphor for autopoetic complex systems. Minding these parallels, complex systems theory can help deepen the container schema and identify other complex systems.
Consider scientific paradigms. As containers, they protect their organization of facts and theories as its tradition. Some new data and hypotheses are accepted and incorporated; others are modified or replaced; others are expelled or denied as ‘anomalies,’ nonsensical and metaphorically entropic. Revolutions may drastically re-organize science into higher states of complexity, which necessarily produces a new containing paradigm.
Perhaps these are more than intriguing analogues, but reflect a deep truth. In the last section, we will consider if metaphors like the container may be more than a conflationary projection of experience onto the world, but instead correspond to an essential principle of existence.
Applying Complex System Theories as Metaphors
Lakoff and Johnson see our embodied reasoning as “why it is possible our concepts fit so well with the way we function in the world,” (p. 43) but this just deepens the question asked of scientific knowledge: why would so many aspects of reality be commensurate with our bodies, feelings, and behaviors in the first place?
I find fractals and chaotic attractors provide answers, evidenced throughout life. Fractals are the iteration of similar patterns across scales, found in galactic clusterings and the branching of blood vessels and bronchi. Attractors are a range of behavior that systems tend towards; chaotic attractors are unpredictably complex but trace general paths, like weather systems. Just as they appear to be literal properties of living and non-living complex systems, they may be metaphorical ones, too.
The boundary analogies of living systems appear fractal; not in the literal, structural self-similar sense as fractals are conceptualized, but in a metaphorical, pattern- and process-oriented sense. The boundary metaphor is fractal-like in its scale-invariance, applicable to vastly different nested systems, from cells to organisms to communities. Across scales, it demonstrates a universalistic dialectic between “stability and change, order and freedom, tradition and innovation” (Capra, p. 303).
These dual principles are metaphorical chaotic attractors, basins of attraction that are common to complex systems. They demonstrate the structure, stability, and tradition-like nature of order in tension with the change, innovation, and freedom found on the edge of chaos. An over-emphasis of either leads to excess rigidity or fluidity, leading to destruction; a dynamic ‘middle ground’ must be struck between them.12 This balance, like chaotic attractors, trace an infinite path, but still exhibit a general, discernable pattern.
They are, in my language, metatypal.13
All these ideas are tentative. Complex systems theories have yet to cohere into a cogent whole, which isn’t inevitable.
Nonetheless, fractals, chaotic attractors, and metaphor theory suggest a deep parallel between conscious meaningmaking and the physical emergence and evolution of living complexity, all things greater than its parts and aiming for goals.
Future research will consider other metaphors that may be as apt as containers for expressing core ideas of existence. It’s also worth considering if and how reality’s properties outside of complex systems could be incorporated in this framework.14
In a poetical way, these theories suggest humans may be the measure of all things because we are made in the image of all things. Returning to Roger Jones’ belief in metaphor reconciling physics and consciousness, the physics of fractals and chaotic attractors may correspond to the metaphors and metatypology of consciousness, each implicating and reaching out to each other.
References
Capra, Fritjof. (1997). The Web of Life. Anchor Books.
Einstein, Albert. (1954). Ideas and Opinions. Crown Publishers Inc.
Jones, Roger. (1982). Physics as Metaphor. University of Minnesota Press.
Kauffman, Stuart. (2008). Reinventing the Sacred. Basic Books.
Kuhn, Thomas. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh. Basic Books.
Prigogine, Ilya & Isabelle Strengers. (1984). Order Out of Chaos. Bantan Books.
Van Eenwyk, John. (1997). Archetypes & Strange Attractors. Inner City Books.
Einstein, p. 292: "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility... The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle."
Kuhn, p. 184: “I would describe such [paradigmatic] commitments as beliefs in particular models, and I would expand the category models to include also the relatively heuristic variety. …They supply the group with preferred or permissible analogies and metaphors.”
Or as psychologists Lakoff & Johnson put it, 1999, p. 117: “Conceptual metaphors that are constitutive of a philosophical theory have the causal effect of constraining how you can reason within that philosophical framework.”
Capra, p. 7: “The emerging new vision of reality based on deep ecological awareness is consistent with the so-called perennial philosophy of spiritual traditions.”
See Fritoj Capra’s The Web of Life or Stuart Kauffman’s Reinventing the Sacred.
Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 6: “Our conceptual systems draw largely upon the commonalities of our bodies and of the environments we live in.”
Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 57: “Universal conceptual metaphors are learned; they are universals that are not innate.”
Capra, p. 161: “Although the structure of a living system is always a dissipative structure, not all dissipative structures are autopoietic networks;” Capra, p. 171: “The origin of the whirlpool’s instability is mechanical … in a cell there are different kinds of instabilities, and their nature is chemical”
Capra, p. 218: “Every living organism continually renews itself, cells breaking down and building up structures, tissues and organs replacing their cells in continually cycles. In spit of this ongoing change, the organism maintains its overall identity, or pattern of organization.”
Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 29: “We are physical beings, bounded and set off from the rest of the world by the surface of our skins.”
Capra, p. 167: “The case of the cell membrane is especially interesting. It is a boundary of the cell, formed by some of the cell’s components, which encloses the network of metabolic processes and thus limits their extension … The entirely system is organizationally closed, even though it is open with regard to the flow of energy and matter.”
Capra, p. 9: “What is good, or health, is a dynamic balance; what is bad, or unhealthy, is imbalance—overemphasis of one tendency and neglect of the other.”
Psychologist John R. Van Eenwyk similarly sees chaos theory underpining Carl Jung’s archetype and symbol theories (1997). I am sympathetic to his argument, but see this connection from a less mythopoetic, symbol-centered perspective.
Perhaps the the energy-matter, wave-particle, momentum-position, time-space dialectics of fundamental physics correspond to the chaos and order of complexity as metaphorical chaotic attractors. The former tend towards change and entropy; the latter are rigid and static. This is highly speculative and beyond the scope of this project for now.
"Complex Systems Theories have yet to cohere into a cogent whole, which isn't inevitable."
Let's go meta on this. Now that humans have "discovered" Complex Systems Theories, there has opened a permeable barrier between Human Consciousness and the "laws" of Complex Systems Theories. We are now aware of these Theories and in turn, this knowledge can affect our behavior (both individually and collectively). Perhaps this is like a robot learning how to re-write its own source code.