For those of you interested in Ray Kurzweil's new Pattern Recognition Theory of the Mind, and metaphors:

In "How to Create a Mind", Ray says:

“The third and most powerful method is the ability to combine two lists. One list can have a set of transformations that we have learned may apply to a certain category of pattern; the cortex will apply this same list of possible changes to another pattern. That is how we understand such language phenomena as metaphors and similes.”

How are these transformations encoded, how do they process other patterns?

One of Kurzweil's examples on this model of combining two lists follows:

“[...] certain phonemes may be missing in spoken speech (for example, “goin”). If we then learn a new spoken word (for example, “driving”), we will be able to recognize that word if one of its phonemes is missing even if we have never experienced that word in that form before."

How does this help us understand metaphors and similes? Here is my own example: “The guitar was made of air”. Here is a possible interpretation using Ray's model:

- list1 is a pattern encoding a transformation which converts a pattern into one of its defining characteristics, ie. list1(air) = lightness, list1(whale)=big, etc. - list2 here is a pattern representing air

list1(list2) = lightness

In other words, the source of the metaphor is air and the target is X in “The guitar was made of X”. Through this metaphor, information is transferred from the source to the target.

All of this is hand-waving without an understanding of exactly how, in the examples given by Kurzweil, list1 makes its transformations in list2, within the PRTM.

Your thoughts are welcome! Javier