It's very hard for someone whose thinking is centered in orange to visually imagine or metaphorically structure the concept of both/and. This makes sense given orange's favorite metaphors: category as container and variation of quality as a spectrum with two ends. These metaphors are centrally characterized by an asymmetry that makes them logically inconsistent with their inverses.
Something can not logically be both inside of a container and outside of it, and can therefore not be metaphorically understood as being both a member of a category and not a member of the category. Nor can one travel both directions on a spectrum at the same time, and a thing can therefore not be metaphorically understood as fully possessing two opposite qualities at the same time. It can be understood as balancing the two qualities, or having some of each, but not having both fully.
Thus, both/and is very difficult for orange to handle. It simply doesn't have the metaphorical tools to provide a structure for the concept. As a result, both/and appears to be blending when (mis)translated into orange thinking, in a fashion analogous to its appearance as paradox to blue thinking.
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Wednesday, June 10, 2009
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This reminds me of speaking about how reading GEB, SES, and Lakoff and Johnson might be best in that order--
ReplyDeleteWhat fascinated me about GEB was its exploration of exactly this type of "paradox", the both/and relationship of a myriad of things that arises in the context of self-referential systems. It was exactly that which made it mind-category stretching and fabulous at the time.
Indeed. Hofstadter goes to the very limits of what orange can conceive of, and sometimes even a little farther. His obsession with Godel and the strangeness of logical systems that can refer to themselves leads to a rather bizarre theory of consciousness in his book 'I Am A Strange Loop.' It's non-reductionist, in a sense, but it still fails to really answer the problems that orange theories of consciousness always run into.
ReplyDeleteHaving read more widely and developed my thinking farther than I had when I read GEB, I found it much less exciting and somewhat predictable or even stale. He does seem to start using contextuality in his thought, which is neat, but not substantially enough to keep me reading.
Agreed. GEB was amazing and mind-stretching in adolescence, but is now a lovely but more understandable book (and I don't care for Hofstadter's conclusions so much). I think when the lens through which he interpreted the contents of his book becomes clear, the presentation loses some of its lustre.
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