AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

However – life is not a competitive game; that's just a metaphor. It might be a really great and productive metaphor in certain ways. It highlights the competitive aspects of existence, which to be sure are extremely important and also somewhat repressed (in the sense that in some versions of polite society, one doesn't want to appear to be too competitive, to be trying to hard, because that loses points!).

The great archetypal activities of human society are all permeated with play from the start. Take language, for instance that first and supreme instrument which man shapes in order to communicate, to teach, to command. Language allows him to distinguish, to establish, to state things; in short, to name them and by naming them to raise them into the domain of the spirit. In the making of speech and language the spirit is continually "sparking" between matter and mind, as it were, playing with this wondrous nominative faculty. Behind every abstract expression there lie the boldest of metaphors, and every metaphor is a play upon words. Thus in giving expression to life man creates a second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.

metaphor

30 Oct 2021 - 13 Sep 2025

Something I wrote about in my dissertation, as something of a preliminary to animacy and agency. I was heavily influenced by Lakoff and Johnson's well-known metaphor theory, which blew my mind in such a way that I can't quite remember what it was like to not have a constant reminder in my head that our most abstract concepts are built out of useful culturally evolved mappings to and from the physical embodied world.

This is one reason I don't believe much in representational objectivism. Knowledge when looked through the lens of metaphor theory seems much more like a set of pragmatic tools for imposing meaning on a complex world than objective facts. Rationalists are aware of Lakoff but don't seem to have drawn quite the same lessons from him that I have. Which is that all of our concepts have an essential fictionality to them; and are never, despite our best efforts at science, simple objective facts.

This is pretty much a trite truism in most places in this postmodern age; rationalists are out of tune with the times, which is not necessarily a mark against them.

Links to "Genetics and Human agency Project of The Sir John Templeton Foundation" https://www.geneticshumanagency.org/

Also from them: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42048-019-00037-4 Behavior Genetics and Agent Responsibility, Joachim Wündisch, Rüdiger Bittner Wendy Johnson

[T]he greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars. ~Aristotle, Poetics