🪷On Mind: On Analysis

"Former ages thought in terms of images of the imagination, whereas we moderns have concepts. Formerly the guiding ideas of life presented themselves in concrete visual form as divinities, whereas today they are conceptualized. The ancients excelled in creation; our own strength lies rather in destruction, in analysis." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1806)

"The history of thought should warn us against concluding that because the scientific theory of the world is the best that has yet to be formulated, it is necessarily complete and final. We must remember that at bottom the generalizations of science, or, in common parlance, the laws of nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the world and the universe. In the last analysis, magic, religion, and science are nothing but theories of thought." (Sir James G Frazer, "The Golden Bough", 1890)

"It is by abstraction that one can separate movements, knowledge, and affectivity. And the analysis is, here, so far from being a real dismemberment that it is given only as probable. One can never effectively reduce an [mental] image to its elements, for the reason that an image, like all other psychic syntheses, is something more and different from the sum of its elements. […] We will always go from image to image. Comprehension is a movement which is never-ending, it is the reaction of the mind to an image by another image, to this one by another image and so on, in principle to infinity." (Jean-Paul Sartre,"The Imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination", 1940)

"The brain has been compared to a digital computer because the neuron, like a switch or valve, either does or does not complete a circuit. But at that point the similarity ends. The switch in the digital computer is constant in its effect, and its effect is large in proportion to the total output of the machine. The effect produced by the neuron varies with its recovery from [the] refractory phase and with its metabolic state. The number of neurons involved in any action runs into millions so that the influence of any one is negligible. [...] Any cell in the system can be dispensed with. [...] The brain is an analogical machine, not digital. Analysis of the integrative activities will probably have to be in statistical terms." (Karl S Lashley, The problem of serial order in behavior", 1951)

"But metaphor is an indispensable tool of thought and expression - a characteristic of all human communication, even of that of the scientist. The conceptual models of cybernetics and the energy theories of psycho-analysis are, after all, only labeled metaphors." (Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", 1972)