OK. It is an analogy. Next question: Is it true? Is it false?
Who knows?
I don’t know. You don’t know. We don’t know. The reporter doesn’t know. All we have to go on is the assertion of the lecturer. Chances are the lecturer doesn’t know, either, because it sounds like the lecturer just made up the bladder analogy to try to explain the evidence that the surgeon could at least for a time control himself. But the lecturer is the one who is on the spot. Under the circumstances, how much can we trust his assertion?
When such a thing is asserted, we must have proof that it is true, that it really does reflect the real situation. When confronted with such comparisons, such analogies, we can test their truthfulness by thinking p. 156 of ways in which the comparison breaks down. In this case, the analogy encourages us to think about urine and a full bladder. Let’s do that.
If my bladder is full, I empty it. The surgeon does the same with his bladder. But I empty my bladder in the bathroom, not any old place around the office and the home. And I empty my bladder at specific times, not any old time when I feel like emptying it.
When the surgeon comes out of the operating room, he is, according to the analogy, obliged to spew his barks and foul language anywhere and with anyone around who happens to be in that location. He is permitted to do so any old time he feels he has to. Why can’t he save the bad vocalizations for a soundproof room or the bathroom, if need be? Why can’t he get it over with in the three minutes it takes the normal person to pee?
No sensible person would let this surgeon pee in public. Why let him shout obscenities in public? Thus, the analogy breaks down. Even if the bad behavior were a physiological necessity (a case in point not yet established by evidence), it still would not be excusable. Bad behavior is not excused by physiologic necessity. Since even if the analogy were reasonable, it doesn’t work, the premise of the analogy must be wrong.
If you don’t get those points, here’s something easier to grasp: If Tourette’s and a full bladder are both physiologic necessities, why can’t the surgeon empty his Tourette waste under the same societal controls that he empties his bladder wastes? Well, you might say, perhaps he can’t control his tics the way he can control his bladder.
Right! That’s my point. It wasn’t I who put forth the bladder analogy. It was the lecturer. If the bladder analogy is breaking down, it is the lecturer’s problem, not mine. Perhaps the surgeon can’t control his Tourette’s the way he can control his bladder? Yes, perhaps he can’t. But the evidence is that he can. He can control his bladder and his tics in the operating room. He doesn’t pee there, and he doesn’t curse there.
Man and machine analogies are often false.
My car and I both can be found in Clear Lake, Texas. Because my car and I share that common property, that doesn’t necessarily mean we share other properties. In fact, some properties we don’t share at all. My car needs gasoline to go. Gasoline for the car is a fuel. If I drank it, I would die.
On the other hand, it would be reasonable to say that just as my Lincoln’s engine will stop when it runs out of fuel, that is, when it is starved, I also will stop if I don’t eat. Provided the analogy is pressed no p. 157 further, the comparison holds. Cars and humans need fuel. The fuel for the car is gas; the fuel for humans is food. Both cars and humans need a source of energy to keep going. It both instances, function stops if an energy source is not supplied.
It would not be reasonable, though, to assert that just as an engine that has been stopped for months can restart when given fuel, a corpse can be revived after death by being fed. Pause here and think why that is so. Think how a machine and a dead body differ. Yep, the analogy breaks down because a machine is not dead when it stops. In fact, the machine was never alive in the first place. If the machine were dead, it could not be restarted, death being irreversible.
Insofar as my car and my body are similar, what is true of one is true of the other. Insofar as my car and my body are different, what is true of one is not true of the other.
So watch out for machine analogies. The machines are often compared to life, to health, to the human body, and to all sorts of things for which there is no real connection. The differences between machines and anything else on this planet are far more numerous, more important, and more striking than their resemblances. What applies to machines often does not apply to anything but machines.
The government is not a ship, and the president is not a sea captain.
One such machine analogy that bugs me lots, and should bug you, is comparing government to a ship. Consider the following fragment of a poem. Try to decide what the analogy is and how it relates to the real world, if at all.
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won.
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
(Walt Whitman, “O Captain, My Captain,” 1-8)
Discussion: Poetry is one thing. Exact thought is another. Poetry aims to express feelings and emotion. When it achieves that aim, it is wonderful. The above lines from Walt Whitman’s book Leaves of Grass p. 158 are such good poetry that many school children are required to memorize the poem. In grade school, I memorized it. Perhaps you did, too.
The poem expresses Walt Whitman’s feelings about the assassination of President Lincoln. Whitman loved Lincoln and felt that Lincoln’s death was a great loss to the nation. But, in a larger sense, Whitman compares Lincoln to a licensed sea captain, which Lincoln wasn’t. Whitman compares the government of the United States to a ship, that of state, one might say, the proverbial ship of state. What’s wrong with that?
As poetry, nothing is wrong with that. But as fact, it just ain’t true. It is a false analogy. It leads us away from the real to the fake. It obscures the reality and concentrates our attention on the bogus.
The poem’s breezy line of thinking, though sincere and genuine, lacks clearness of vision that is imperative for truth. This is a flaw inherent in the poetic mind, and we may do well to tend to it, considering all that the poetic mind has done for us. But when the concept gets exploited for political purposes, we must pause and protest.
President Nixon often told the press that he was the skipper steering the ship of state. He told the media that they and the public need not know about his secret plan for ending the war in Vietnam because he, as captain of the ship, knew where we were going and why. The implication was that we should just shut up—just acquiesce and obey his orders—that we should not question his judgment. We should just trust him. We should obey him as if he were our captain.
But should we? Should we obey a president as if he were a licensed sea captain? Is the analogy false? Does it lead to behavior that has adverse consequences?
Nixon was pretty good at secret plans, as we subsequently learned. In 1969, he had authorized the secret bombing of Cambodia, which continued for four years. The total number of bombs dropped there was 539,129 (information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act). Almost half those bombs fell in the last six months. Much of the ancient irrigation system of Cambodia was destroyed. A lot of the rice-growing areas fell to ruins. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed. What was the point of doing that? What’s my point in telling you about it?
I use this to illustrate the possible consequences of secret government action. I use it to show that blindly obeying a president as if he were a licensed sea captain can be wrong. Nixon’s secret plan to end the Vietnam War, it turned out, was simply to get the hell out of there. What p. 159 secret plan was in the erased tapes? We’ll probably never know. But you can bet it was nothing too nice, else why would Nixon erase the tapes?
The point is that conside
ring the president a captain and the government some sort of ship is wrong. It is a false analogy that can lead to serious, and sometimes dire, consequences.
Why is it a false analogy? Think of several reasons why the captain-ship of state analogy just doesn’t work. Write these down in outline form so you can check your answers against mine.
By now, you should have started your objections with the statements that the comparison of government to a ship assumes facts not (yet put) in evidence. It is a mere assertion that would require piles and piles of evidence for us to believe it. It is also too simple, so simple it has to be wrong. Running a country is more complicated than commanding a ship. The reverse is true, too: Commanding a ship is a lot simpler and more direct than running a country as vast as the United States. The false analogy breaks down because government is not a ship; it does not float; and it doesn’t transport its people someplace on the high seas. In addition, a ship doesn’t do a lot of things a government does. It doesn’t tax people; it doesn’t go to war; and so forth. If the government is not a ship, then it doesn’t really matter whether a president is a captain. If he were a captain, it would not relate to his office as president because the government is not a ship. The truth is that a president and a captain are two different positions of power. A president’s power is checked by Congress, the Supreme Court, and, to a limited extent, by the press and by public opinion. On the high seas, the captain is master of the ship and in full command. His word is law. He is not checked by anyone. He is, of course, checked by natural forces such as wind and weather, as are we all.
In fact, the main reason elected officials want to be considered captains is so that they can co-opt the absolute powers of command that captains enjoy at sea. That’s what Nixon wanted. That’s what he got. That’s what he got for a time until reality caught up with him and his abuses of power were uncovered. These abuses were so egregious that Nixon had to resign his office. Nixon became the first president to resign the presidency.
Since Lincoln was a reasonable man, he would have thought “O Captain! My Captain,” flattering but a little odd. He probably would have said wryly, “My license covers the practice of law, not seamanship. Besides, I have been on a boat only once and got terribly sick.”
p. 160 Principle: What applies to ships, cars, planes, and other machines often applies only to machines.
From which follows:
Lesson: Watch out for machine analogies. They are likely to be deceptive. Many of them are wrong.
Now that we know to watch out for machine analogies, let’s work out on a common analogy that I have heard repeatedly:
Classic false analogy: The brain is a computer. Or (expressed slightly differently) the brain is like a computer.
Think about it. The brain is a computer. Is that analogy true? Is that analogy helpful? Does it lead us to a better understanding of the reality situation, the truth? Does it help us better understand the brain? Does it help us better understand computers? What, if any, good is it to compare a brain to a computer and vice versa?
Aside from the usual objections (unproved assertion, assumption of facts not in evidence, overgeneralization, and simplistic thinking), how can we break down this argument?
Don’t pause to think about this. You have done too much thinking in this chapter already. Give yourself a rest. Just glance over my exposition.
The brain is not a computer, and it is not like a computer. The brain is part of a living organism. The computer is not. The brain uses glucose and oxygen for its metabolism. The computer uses electricity to work. When deprived of glucose or oxygen for more than four minutes, the brain dies and can’t be restarted. When deprived of electrons even for months, the computer will restart if you turn it on again. No irreversible damage occurred when the computer was shut off. A brain is made of 100 billion nerve cells called neurons. A computer is made of silicon chips. The brain is over 90 percent water. The computer has practically no water at all. Deprived of its aqueous environment, the brain will stop functioning. Put in a water environment, the computer will short out and become completely functionless, probably forever. Finally, the brain can think. Computers so far cannot think. Conclusion: The brain and the computer are two different things.
Is the analogy helpful?
Another way of attacking a false analogy is thinking about where p. 161 the analogy leads. In a practical sense, can we learn anything about how computers work by studying the brain? What is the consequence? Where does this analogy lead? Does considering the brain a computer help us in any way, shape, or form? Can the analogy tell us how computers work?
Highly unlikely.
To learn about how computers work, we would do much better studying computers per se and not the brain. To learn about computers, we should go to computer school and not to medical school. How about the reverse? Can we learn anything about the brain by studying computers?
Highly unlikely.
To learn about how the brain works, we would do much better by studying the brain per se and not computers. To learn about the brain, we should go to medical school and not to computer school. Recent spectacular advances in neuroscience are based on just that, the detailed and relentless study of the brain, its structure and function. No advance in neuroscience arose from the study of computers.
Principle: The brain is not a computer, nor is it like a computer.
From which follows:
Lesson: Use your computer for the purpose for which it was intended. Use your brain for thinking.
The brain-computer analogy is so bad it is considered in neuroscience circles a conceit. A conceit is a fanciful, witty notion that is often a striking but strained and arbitrary metaphor. A conceit is a false analogy gone further awry.
Throughout history, conceits have derailed our understanding of the brain. The usual idea was to compare the brain to the highest technological achievement of the age. Thus, the ancient Greeks, who had just learned hydraulics, considered the brain a hydraulic machine. The fluid-filled ventricles at the center of the brain were thought to contract, thus sending fluid through the nerves, causing the nerves to expand slightly and making the muscles contract. Even Descartes, the great mathematician, thought this was the way nerves worked.
Descartes could have proven himself wrong if he had taken the p. 162 trouble to dissect the optic nerves of just one animal. Optic nerves have no fluid-filled cavities. In fact, no normal nerve has a fluid-filled cavity. If nerves have no cavities, they can’t work by contraction or expansion of what is not there. Thus, the hydraulic analogy is refuted.
When mechanical clocks were the rage in Germany, the brain was considered a form of mechanical clock. When the telegraph was prominent, the brain was likened to that device. When I was a boy, I learned in grade school that the brain was like a telephone operator with multiple switches on a switchboard deep inside my head. For a long time, I went around thinking there was some kind of telephone operator inside my skull. That image had to be revised when the adding machines came into prominence. My mental image of my brain then became an adding machine. You can imagine how I felt when I learned in medical school that the eye was not a camera, that lungs were not air-filled balloons, that the kidney doesn’t make urine (anymore than a steel mill makes slag), and that the brain was not anything but itself.
Sing along to the tune of Oscar Hammerstein’s “There Is Nothing Like a Dame”:
There is nothing like a brain
Nothing in the world
There is nothing you can name
That is anything like a brain.
There is nothing that talks like a brain
Walks like a brain
Thinks like a brain
There is nothing you can name
That is anything like a brain.
All those ideas about the brain—the hydraulics, the clocks, the telephone, the adding machine—were all conceits, analogies so bad they were egregious, remarkably bad. They led mankind away from the truth toward er
ror.
And what is worse, all those ideas about the brain were wrong. They were errors in thinking. They delayed human progress and understanding. And by way of lesson, note that the original ground for accepting those arguments was scanty. Nevertheless, such arguments caught on and were held with conviction by the majority of people, scholars included, sometimes for centuries. In the case of hydraulics, the erroneous conviction held sway for over 1,500 years. Isn’t that puzzling? p. 163 Isn’t that stupid? How the devil can we explain the ready acceptance and retention of such drivel, poppycock, and nonsense?
Most people will accept such arguments by analogy as these because they don’t question the alleged similarity between the things compared. Moreover, many analogies have no intellectual force whatsoever and depend for effectiveness upon stimulating the imagination into the wishful thinking that something is understood when, in fact, it is not understood at all. Secretly we want to deceive ourselves into thinking that we know more about something than we really do. Secretly we want to think that comparing the computer to the brain was not a bad idea. The brain? Oh, sure, I know about it. I know all about it. It’s simple. Really. It’s really, really very simple: The brain is just a computer. I use my computer every day. Since I know about computers, I must know about the brain. See how smart I am!
What’s wrong? Such a comparison has adverse consequences. It is better to admit ignorance than labor under false perceptions of knowledge. At least you know that you don’t know and cannot be misled by all those things you think that you know that are wrong.
In the political arena, false analogies and conceits emerge in abbreviated form as slogans. These slogans short-circuit serious discussions of the topic they announce. In many cases, the slogans are self-contradictions that mean nothing or contradict themselves: “genuine facsimile,” meaning (I guess) a highly realistic imitation; “nonviolent force,” meaning (I guess) force accompanied by the rhetoric of nonviolence; “white nigger,” meaning a white person sympatric to blacks. Other terms are not quite slogans but euphemisms designed to obscure meaning rather than promote it: “social extraction,” meaning, when used by the CIA, a form of murder justified by political considerations; “terminate with extreme prejudice,” meaning kill by official order; “Symbolic speech,” meaning an act other than speaking that is justified on the grounds that it is symbolic of speech and therefore protected by the First Amendment. Flag burning and cross burning are two such acts said by proponents to be “symbolic speech.”
Truth, Knowledge, or Just Plain Bull: How to tell the difference Page 19
