¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 I wish everyone could take the time to stop and read SURFACES AND ESSENCES by Hofstadter & Sander. It may slowly shift your context for the deep and fundamental role of analogy in human cognition – far beyond what has previously been explored.

To counter the many arguments that would rise up in objection, the book is truly overloaded with examples, which takes time and patience to process. In two years of intermittent reading on my Kindle version I am almost finished. I am much more mindful of my own use of analogy at many different levels. No model can be fully comprehensive, and analogy itself is but an analogy.

The video at the start of this url triggered Foucault’s THE ORDER OF THINGS, a seminal book in my development many decades ago. Foucault traces the contextual shift from similarities to systems thinking. Pattern recognition involves analogy, mostly unconscious. To me, it is the spatial-temporal relationships between component patterns within larger “patterns” that moves us towards comprehending our activity as languaging.

Although I explore our need for a new digital visual language system, I also recognize the limitations – which can be destructive and dangerous if not acknowledged and accounted for.

Human limitations to a few dimensions biases our model of reality as being based on a few fundamentals. 3 dimensional space limits our ability to visualize multi-dimensional structures. Miller’s Law limits the number of independent variables in working minds to 7+/-2 (since improved upon and even more limiting). How does humankind approach a reality that has hundreds, if not more, fundamentals? What about a reality with no fundamentals? A corollary from this thinking is our belief that “meaning” can be embedded in a single text or pattern, such as this comment or the blog post + comments, or all the sems (semiotic structures) around PLAST.

This comment has emerged as another Associative Walk within “nuet”, the name I give to my inner, woven world/context, hosted by Larry’s body/brain/mind. It should be linked to many other sems.

What attention is given to patterns that can’t be visualized? What attention is given to patterns that can’t be comprehended by an individual person but might be collectively comprehended by a team or crew?

As I have been composing this comment, in spurts, I am repeatedly being “reminded” of a sem composed long ago about about Structuring-Process / Processing-Structure as an essential complementarity:
OUCH: My decades old website archive of old docs now gives me that fatal 404 error message. A new challenge.

I will post this comment in my blog: http://nuet.us/ .