Excerpt: ‘An Internet in Your Head’ by Daniel Graham
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Highlights
- Scientific theory is not identical to the world it describes. If it were, it would be useless.
- Metaphors are unfamiliar in the physical sciences because the reigning metaphors are precise enough to be couched in terms of mathematics. But metaphors—and especially technological metaphors—have been critical in the history of science, and they will continue to be so as we get closer to understanding the brain.
- If an animal is a complicated mechanism that runs on its own, the divine is less salient.
- Even a flawed analogy can spur new questions and lead to better scientific understanding, compared to an approach that supposes only an assemblage of specialized phenomena.
- We still need metaphors for the brain because we are so far away from understanding the brain.