A decade+ later I randomly picked up a Sunday paper and they were explaining the circulatory system "as if it was a computer network, but instead of moving data around, it moves blood around".
I thought it was funny that going from 95 to 2005, the expectation for innate understanding of biology vs digital technology had flipped.
nobody is suggesting the brain runs an instruction set or a compiler - but it does compute in a general sense.
This seems to be saying "mitochondria aren't only the powerhouse of the cell - they also do computation." What's to be wary of in this case?
One mans analogy is another mans model.
Do you have some solution to this age old conundrum? How are we to use language to describe new things without using any existing words?
Of course, just make up new words is one solution. But for a lot of things, that gets to also be confusing, and not help communicate an idea.
Well, as it happens, the person you are replying to did have at least an outline of a solution in this case, which could be stated thus: analogies may be regarded as models to the extent that they are useful for making predictions or testing hypotheses. it probably needs some refinement (for example, analogies carefully-crafted to "predict" the outcome in very narrow cases, but which diverge significantly with modest changes, probably don't count), but it is about as good as you can get in pinning down the semantics of ordinary language.
For example, a hydraulic analogy to electric circuits may be useful in simple cases, but once reactive elements are introduced, it is probably time to abandon it. Similarly, the 'bowling-ball on a mattress' analogy for general relativity cannot even predict the precession of Mercury, while some hydraulic and acoustic models have, apparently, been useful for better understanding black holes (even though they also spawned ridiculous headlines like "Scientists Close in on Creating Black Hole in Lab."[1])
In the case of TFA, I personally feel that the analogy being pushed is at best useless and probably misleading for any purpose.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-close-...
Especially like bringing up the hydraulic example.
I was reacting to a common trope on HN to react harshly to any type of metaphor about the brain.
When, where is the outrage when describing 'voltage' as a type of 'water pressure in a hose'. As you say, it is only accurate to a degree.
Like giving a presentation on 'cloud' computing, and the power point has clouds, and some cohort of IT people are seething in the back of the room, "those aren't really clouds, they are servers".
Guess that is the problem, all analogies are only accurate to some degree, or else they would be the original. Nothing can be fully explained by something else, without both models being the same. So at some point, analogies are just helpful to communicate some concepts, but are not complete.
Yet, having something 'similar' can help get over some hump in understanding the 'new thing'.
That link is pay walled, do you have another copy?
Whether it is actually much use in understanding black holes is a matter of opinion.
This is pretty extreme case. I was just saying generally, that metaphors and analogies can help explain concepts. This is finding actual real correspondence between different 'model's.
Were you saying earlier that there was a way to model this correspondence between models generally, for other cases? Maybe there is a category theory or something, to relate different models, so they can be analogies of each other, but both real so can have experiments?
Metaphors, analogies and models often help us understand things, but they can mislead unless they are, to a reasonable degree, models of the thing we we are trying to understand. The physicist Matt Strassler calls the latter 'phibs', and has written a recently-published book motivated by one in particular, an attempt to explain the relevance of the Higgs field. https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/04/16/why-the-higgs-field...
Interesting that while critiquing the common analogy, it did suggest another one. I wonder if the problem isn't analogies, it is just finding 'good ones'.
"As an analogue, consider air pressure (which is itself an example of an ordinary field.) Air is a substance; it is made of molecules, and has density and weight. But air’s pressure is not a thing; it is a property of air, , and is not itself a substance. Pressure has no density or weight, and is not made from anything. It just tells you what the molecules of air are doing.
The Higgs field is much more like air pressure than it is like air itself. It simply is not a substance, despite what the phib suggests."
I was a bit sloppy in distinguishing model and analogy. I guess I meant physical analogy like pressure/voltage (which does outrage me!) vs model being an abstract description of the phenomenon built from the ground up, and was thinking in the context of physics or engineering.
The problem with the "bad" kind of analogies/models is they come with a list of conditions under which they don't apply, which is huge and usually not specified at all. For the "good" kind (Ohm's law/etc.), they come with a list of conditions under which they do apply which is finite and explicitly stated along with the equations so you can actually know if the model correctly describes a particular case.
On other hand, scientist/philosophers that attempt to makeup 'new' words just to avoid this, sometimes make it worse and their ideas become even more obfuscated.
Many people in tech still think this. It will take a while to dislodge the idea that if you squint enough, cells, brains, etc. are all basically computers, because it flatters the egos of computer programmers.
There are genuine connections between specific biological systems and certain ideas in computer science, but most of the casual analogies you hear from tech people only serve to inflate their own perceived authority ("I know a lot about computers, and cells/brains are like computers, so here is my take about cells/brains...")
And here you are thinking tech people are all basically egomaniacs. I wonder why.