{"id":49328,"date":"2016-03-22T23:57:02","date_gmt":"2016-03-22T23:57:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=49328"},"modified":"2016-03-22T23:57:02","modified_gmt":"2016-03-22T23:57:02","slug":"semblance-as-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=49328","title":{"rendered":"Semblance as translation"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> — an MIT physica professor works in language games on biology ]
\n.<\/p>\n

\"two<\/a>
\nBoth a tree and a solar panel absorb and transform solar energy, and dump heat into their environment. How would a physicist explain why only the tree is alive?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

**<\/p>\n

I’m posting this because of one sentence:<\/p>\n

When you refuse to let go of two things that are divergent in the way they cause you to talk,\u201d he says, \u201cit forces you in the direction of translation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I found it in an intriguing article, How Do You Say \u201cLife\u201d in Physics?<\/strong><\/a> <\/p>\n

After a brief intro to MIT physicist Jeremy England<\/strong>, the article touches on interdisciplinary translation — which, when you think about it, is a very Koestlerian<\/strong> sort of bisociative process<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Different fields of science, too, are languages unto themselves, and scientific explanations are sometimes just translations. \u201cRed,\u201d for instance, is a translation of the phrase \u201c620-750 nanometer wavelength.\u201d \u201cTemperature\u201d is a translation of \u201cthe average speed of a group of particles.\u201d The more complex a translation, the more meaning it imparts. \u201cGravity\u201d means \u201cthe geometry of spacetime.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then we get theological<\/strong>, with a twist:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth …\u201d Here, the Hebrew word for \u201ccreate\u201d is bara, the word for \u201cheavens\u201d is shamayim, and the word for \u201cearth\u201d is aretz; but their true meanings, England says, only come into view through their context in the following verses. For instance, it becomes clear that bara, creation, entails a process of giving names to things; the creation of the world is the creation of a language game. \u201cGod said, \u2018Let there be light,\u2019 and there was light.\u201d God created light by speaking its name. \u201cWe have heard this phrase so many times that by the time we are old enough to ponder it, we easily miss its simplest point,\u201d England says. \u201cThe light by which we see the world comes from the way we talk about it.\u201d That might be important, thought England, if you\u2019re trying to use the language of physics to describe biology.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Finally, we get the basic bisociation<\/strong> laid out in plain words:<\/p>\n

As a young faculty member at MIT, he neither wanted to stop doing biology, nor thinking about theoretical physics. \u201cWhen you refuse to let go of two things that are divergent in the way they cause you to talk,\u201d he says, \u201cit forces you in the direction of translation.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

**<\/p>\n

I hadn’t thought much about translation as a form of semblance<\/strong> until now, but it opens vistas..<\/p>\n

An interesting article.<\/p>\n

The tree and the solar panel — there’s much food there for analogical thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron — an MIT physica professor works in language games on biology ] . Both a tree and a solar panel absorb and transform solar energy, and dump heat into their environment. How would a physicist explain why only the tree is alive? ** I’m posting this because of one sentence: When […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[526,624,1173,32,678,523,720,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charles-cameron","category-hipbone-games","category-koestler","category-science","category-sembl","category-theology","category-translation","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49328"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49349,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49328\/revisions\/49349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}