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amirbey's picture

Metaphors

I have been a little bit confused this week with the reading since there were a lot of words that I did not really understand. However, during Thursday’s lecture, we gave the definitions of some key words that Daniel C. Dennett uses quite a lot in his book, which helped me understand his ideas a lot better.  I was glad to learn about skyhooks and cranes.  As I have understood, cranes are used in this book as the image of something that has a strong base, and skyhooks, on the contrary, come from nowhere, without anything to be based on.  But my favorite metaphor that Dennett employs is of the library of Babel and the one of Mendel.  Indeed, the library of Babel is a library that possesses every possible book, and therefore, in this same idea, the library of Mendel contains all of the possible genetic combinations.  The library of Babel might be more related to religion since in the book of Genesis, the tower of Babel was a gigantesque tower in which people lived in a unity, but God decided to spread these populations apart, and so there were different cultures and languages around the world.  This library of Babel might be a skyhook since it seems to be invented and the story doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.  The library of Mendel on the other side could be considered as a crane, because it is based on facts, observations and calculations to have all of the possible combinations for genes.

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