We again see how a thing or idea can be viewed as having multiple meanings. We sometimes call these ‘ambiguities’ and regard them as defects in how we express or communicate. However, when these are linked into panalogies, then when situations don’t seem to make sense, we can think about them in alternative realms—without the need to start over again. Shortly, we’ll outline a similar scheme to explain how our vision could work so speedily.
Student: You’re suggesting that we use the same techniques to represent transportation in space, for transferring an ownership, and for transmitting knowledge to other brains. But what could have led our minds to treat such different ideas in such similar ways?
It surely is no accident that our language uses the same prefix ‘trans’ in transfer, transport, transmit, translate, transpose, etc., —because that common word-part ‘trans’ induces us to make many widely useful analogies.[94] Each of us knows thousands of words, and as each time we learn how others use one of them, we inherit another panalogy.
Student: How many different realms can a person use for any particular concept or object? How many of them can we handle at once? How does one know when it’s time to switch? To what extent do different persons partition their worlds into similar realms?
More research on semantics will eventually clarify questions like these, but the following sections will only discuss a handful of realms that are familiar to everyone.
Sub-Realms of the Telephone World
We’ve mentioned only a few of the things that every telephone user knows. However, to use what you know about telephones, you also have to know how to speak, and to understand some of what you may hear. You also need a good deal of knowledge about what people are and how they think, so that you can turn their interests toward the subjects that you want to discuss. Consider how many different knowledge-realms we engage to understand the story about Joan’s telephone call.
The Spatial Realm: Joan is close to her telephone, but Charles must be in some more distant place.
The Dominion Realm: Both Joan and Charles have telephones, and Charles has dominion over that book. But we can’t be quite certain of which ones they own.
The Procedural Realm: How does one make a telephone call? We could represent this in terms of a script in which certain actions are specified, but others require you to improvise.
First, you must find the phone and dial a number. Then, once the connection has been established, you’re supposed to begin with some pleasantries. Eventually, you should say why you called—and then depart from the typical script. At the end you’ll close the conversation by saying “goodbye” and ‘hanging up’. Generally, such behavioral scripts begin and end with conventional steps, with improvisations in between. However, you’ll have to depart from the script if something goes wrong—and know how to deal with a wrong connection, or what to do if there is no answer, or if you hear the whine of a modem—or if there is too much noise on the line.
The Social Realm: When that telephone rings from across the room, Joan will have to walk over to get it; she knows it will do no good to ask, “Telephone, would you please come here!” To make an inanimate object move, you have to push, pull, or carry it. But if you want a person to move, those actions would be considered rude; instead you’re expected to make a request. It takes our children quite a few years to learn enough such social rules.
The Economic Realm: Every action incurs some cost—not only in materials, time, and energy, but also by closing off alternatives that might bring different benefits. This raises questions about how much effort and time one should spend at comparing the costs of those options. I suspect that there’s no simple answer to that, because it depends so much on the present state of the rest of one’s mind. [See §§Free Will.]
The Conversational Language Realm: Most people are experts at dialog, but consider how complex are the skills involved in a typical verbal exchange. You must constantly keep track of the topic, your goal, and your social role. To maintain the respect of your listeners, you must guess what they already know and remember what has already been said—so that you won’t be too repetitive. It is annoying to be told things one already knows, like “People can’t see the backs of their heads,” so your conversation must partly be based on your models of what your listeners know about the subjects that are being discussed.
You can communicate your apprehensions and hopes—or try to disguise your intentions; you know that every expressive selection can strengthen or weaken social bonds; each phrase can persuade or intimidate, conciliate or irritate, or ingratiate or drive away. You also need to keep searching for clues about how well they have understood about what you’ve said—and why you were trying to tell them those things.
Humanist: Speaking over a telephone is a poor substitute for a face-to-face exchange. The telephone lacks the ‘personal touch’ through which your gestures can put the others at ease, or express the strength of your feelings.
One always loses some nuances when conversing with a person at some other location. On the other side, we’re not always aware of the misconceptions that result from what we call ‘face-to-face’ interactions. What if the stranger that you have just met should resemble (in manner or facial appearance) some trusted friend or some enemy? If that person reminds you of some old Imprimer, this can arouse a misplaced affection or unjustified sense of intimidation. You may think you can later correct such mistakes—but one can never completely erase the ‘first impression’ that one makes.
We also all share many abilities that we don’t usually call ‘commonsensical”—such as the kinds of physical skills that Joan uses to answer that telephone calclass="underline"
The Sensory and Motor Realms: It takes less than a single second for you to reach out your arm and “Pick up the phone” —yet consider how many sub-goals this involves:
Determine the telephone’s location.
Determine its shape and orientation.
Plan to move your hand to its place.
Plan how your hand will grasp its shape.
Plan to transport it toward your face.
Each step of that script raises questions about how we do those things so quickly. We can program computers to do such things, but we do not know how we do them ourselves. It is often supposed that such actions are done under continuous ‘feedback control’—by processes that keep working to reduce your distance from your goal. However, that cannot be generally true because human reactions are so slow that it takes about one-fifth of a second to react to events that one did not expect. This means that you cannot change what you are doing right now; all you can do is revise the plan that you’ve made for what you will do after that. Thus when Joan reaches out to answer that call, she must plan to reduce the speed of her hand—and to already have reshaped her hand—before it collides with that telephone. Without good plans for what will happen next, she’d be constantly having accidents.
94
I got some of these ideas about ‘trans’ from the early theories of Roger C. Schank, described in