 In the previous video, the conclusion of the War of the Ghost, I talked about schemas or schemata, the concepts that we have in our heads that help us categorize things in the world and figure out how they operate and how they relate to each other and how they relate to us. Some things we interact with so often, they become so familiar that we have well-developed schemas that we can rely on to understand them. Some things are less familiar and they may be very abstract. So we don't have very well-developed schemas that we can use to understand them. And in these cases, we often combine different schemas. We borrow from a familiar schema in order to fill in the gaps of an unfamiliar schema. And this blending of different schemas is what we call a metaphor. Now you're probably familiar with the word metaphor. This is something you probably learned in a high school English class. A metaphor, the literary definition, is it's a figure of speech in which a comparison is made or identity is asserted between two unrelated things or action without the use of the words like or as. The primary subject is known as the tenor. That's the thing you're talking directly about. But to illuminate its nature, the writer links it to a wholly different image, idea, or action. And those things are referred to as the vehicle. Unlike a simile, which is a direct comparison that uses like or as, a metaphor fuses the separate qualities of two things and creates a new idea. Now, again, I said this is the literary definition of a metaphor and it's one we want to remember. We want to remember that a metaphor does not use like or as. It does not make a direct comparison. It refers to one thing as if it was the other. It doesn't say this is like the other. So that's relevant. But before I get into the specifics, let me use an example. This is something we spend a lot of our time doing, shopping. Shopping is something we all know how to do. You can go to the store where you can choose from a selection of items and exchange your money for the item you want. You will not be able to buy everything in the store because you don't have an unlimited supply of money. So you have to decide how badly you need or want the item, what it's relative worth is to you, how much money you're willing to give up in order to get that item. So because this activity is such a deeply familiar part of our interaction in the world, our minds have honed the ability to carry out this exchange calculation very quickly and easily decide if something is worth the money we have. Once we're able to conceive of economic exchange easily, it becomes a middle tool that we can then use to describe other things in the world. For instance, when I first introduced that slide, I said, quote, this is something we spend a lot of our time doing, end quote. And in that sentence, I use the word time as the object of the verb spend, spend time. That sounds something like we use every day, it doesn't sound unfamiliar. But by saying that time is something we can spend, I'm comparing it to other things we can spend, namely money. So I'm introducing a metaphor in which the tenor, the thing I'm talking directly about, is time. But I'm describing it as if it was something else, the vehicle, which is money. And our language is filled with metaphors like these that we don't even notice or comparisons, but they are comparisons. If we talked about time the way that physicists do, we wouldn't be able to say it's something that we spend. In fact, we have to seriously rethink the usual definitions about what we mean by time. Time is a very abstract concept. It's not an object, it's not even an activity. So we have to understand it in terms of more concrete things, more familiar things, things we have schemas for. In this case, we're understanding time as a limited resource like money, that we can exchange for something else. We have a length of time in front of us and we think of ourselves as exchanging that length of time for whatever we produce during that length of time. Time spent doing one thing is time that cannot be spent doing another. If you spend a dollar on one commodity, that same dollar cannot be spent on another commodity. This is a good place to discuss and come back to that difference between the simile and the metaphor. In that literary definition, a simile is a comparison that uses the words like or as and a metaphor is a comparison that does not use like or as. And that's probably the heuristic, the rule of thumb you remember from high school, if nothing else. So the sentence time is money would be a metaphor, it doesn't use like or as. And the sentence time is like money, that would be a simile. Wishing a simile from a metaphor based on whether it uses the words like or as is easy, but it's a little misleading. What's important is whether the comparison between two things is an explicit comparison or an implicit comparison, implicit meaning that it may not be noticeable. It might be a comparison that we forgot was just a comparison. We didn't intend it to be a comparison, but it's still a comparison. A metaphor is not consciously comparing one thing to another, but automatically understanding one thing as if it was another. Your definition says that metaphor fuses the two separate qualities of the two things. And so the sentence time is money is pretty explicit. It doesn't use like or as, so it's not technically a simile, but if somebody says this to you because they want you to be aware of the comparison, the two ideas aren't quite fused. You're still aware that it's a comparison even without saying time is like money. So we'll call this kind of metaphor an explicit metaphor. It doesn't use like or as, but you use the two ideas and they're not so fused together that you wouldn't notice a new comparison is being made, is being inserted into this conception of time. However, that first sentence when I said this is something we spend a lot of our time doing doesn't state that time is money. It presumes that time is money or that they operate the same way. You already have to conceive of time as if it was a limited resource that can be exchanged for commodity in order to even understand the sentence that I said. And because it is such a familiar metaphor, we don't even notice that we are relying on this comparison to hold the concept of time in mind. Here's another example. In the 19th century steam engines powered ships and locomotives and factory machines by using heat to build up air pressure inside the engine. The heated air would try to expand and then need to escape the confined space of the engine, but to escape it had to push past the gears and thereby turning the gears. The gears would then turn the wheels of the locomotive or the propellers of the ship. So pressure steam was required to power the engine, but if the engine overheated and the pressure built up faster than it could escape, the engine could explode. To keep that from happening there had to be a valve that could be closed when there was too little internal pressure, but could be open to let out excess pressure to let off steam and prevent an explosion. So using this as a metaphor for human emotions now seems so familiar that we may have forgotten that it is a metaphor. When we get angry or feel frustrated, we describe ourselves as heating up. If we don't cool down, we feel like we're going to burst or explode. We say that we need to vent or let off steam. All these ways of thinking about emotion come from the steam engine metaphor. Even if you've never directly interacted with a steam engine and never consciously compared your emotional state to one, the phrases you inherit as an English speaker contain the metaphor and make no sense without it. This turns out to be an unproductive metaphor, by the way, because the mind doesn't work like a steam engine. When you vent or let off steam, and if by that you mean that you take out your frustrations on other people or otherwise act on your negative emotions, you actually nurture the habit that becomes a more natural activity every time you do it. So you cultivate these negative emotions rather than learning to control them. We might need to take an alternative metaphor. We might think of patience as a plant that needs to be protected from the hostile natural elements like cold or wind. It's still a metaphor saying that patience is a plant that needs to be nurtured. That's still a metaphor, but it might be a better metaphor, might be a better fit to the tenor, which is the way the brain actually works. As technology advances, we find new metaphors for the brain or for the way we think. Throughout history, we've typically borrowed from whatever the most advanced technology was. Plato describes the mind as a chariot pulled by two horses. One horse stands for reason and the other stands for the passions, the emotions. And the horse of reason would always follow the charioteer's instructions, but the horse representing the passions would try to pull away and do its own thing. Today, we tend to think of the mind as a computer. It is either connected to the outside world or it needs to unplug due to information overload. Even commonly used metaphors like these are too numerous to list, but they're everywhere. You'll notice them in sentences now. You'll notice them in conversations with friends and even in sentences that you come up with, even without thinking of that metaphor. But when you stop and go back over the sentence you just said, you might say, hey, there was a metaphor in there. But let me return to the shopping metaphor and address another unproductive comparison that people have come to assume is natural. And that is students pay tuition to attend a university. You're paying tuition to take this class right now. The fact that a person pays for something triggers that consumer metaphor. If I pay for one thing, it can be conceived of just like other things that I pay for. I pay for commodities at the store. I pay for my education. So education is like a commodity that I buy at the store. And what do I mean by the word education? Well, things I buy at the store physical objects. What physical object do I get for all my tuition? Well, I get my certificate or my diploma, a piece of paper that certifies that I completed all the requirements for a university degree. And this focus on the physical object leads many people to describe the degree as just a piece of paper as if rather than education, it's the piece of paper that's the goal of your college tuition. Confusing diploma for the degree is just one negative side effect of misapplying a shopping metaphor to university education. Your tuition is your payment and your diploma is the commodity you buy. Then your class attendance and your study become a trip to the store. What about the faculty or the staff and the administrators of the university? They become conceived of as salespeople or store clerks. We know a sales person's goal. The goal is to get your money so that they can get paid. A salesperson's goal is not to test you to see if you're ready for the commodity that you want to buy. So a store wants to make your basic economic exchange as easy as possible. So they try to have everything you could possibly want all laid out for you. So all you have to do is make your selection and pay your money. So we tend to get lulled into a sense of entitlement with phrases like the customer is always right. And if you've worked on the other side of the cash register, you know from experience that the customer can be very wrong and can be very obnoxious about it. But when you're in customer mode, you kind of expect everything to be done for you. And we don't expect anything to be demanded of us other than payment as customers. So acting like a customer or a consumer is something we do frequently and it's familiar. And it's also empowering. When you have the money, you have the power. So we're tempted to try to impose that metaphor on other situations, especially when there's money involved. Now money is the thing that ties one schema to the other. And it's not just students who fall into this metaphor. It's university administrators, especially when they have no experience teaching, and have experience in the consumer economy tend to take that consumer economy metaphor and import it into the educational system. But let's try that metaphor on a third domain. Let's say you joined a commercial gym, a gym you have to pay regular fees to go to, which you don't have to do because we have a great gym here. Actually, you're already paying for as part of your tuition. But if you join a commercial gym, you'll be charged a monthly rate for membership. So you pay your money so that you get stronger and healthier. Money is exchanged for health. But well, you have to actually go to the gym, you have to lift, you have to run or you have to work out. You can't just do whatever you're in the mood to do. You have to work out three or four times per week in order to make any noticeable progress. And when you go, you have to actually work. You can't just show up and go into the building. You can't just hang out around the gym talking to your bros. You know who you are. You have to push yourself. The money you pay only buys access to the resources. You have to actually use those resources. So think of the university like a gym. Tuition is your membership fee. It doesn't buy you a degree just like a membership to a gym doesn't buy you health. Your tuition isn't just money for a piece of paper. It buys you access to the resources you can use in order to improve your knowledge and your skill using that knowledge. In this metaphor, your professors are your trainers. We can show you how to use the resources available. We can direct your training. We can test your development to see whether or not you're making the gains that you need to make. And if you're not, we can point out areas where you need to improve. Even when you fail, fail a test or even fail a class, it's not the ends if we use this metaphor. Pushing yourself to failure and then starting again is how physical exercise works. If you don't push yourself and if your trainer doesn't push you to your limits, then you don't make much progress. Replacing the student as consumer or student as customer metaphor changes a whole list of assumptions that we project onto the university education. As customers, very little effort is expected of us, very little responsibility. The professor's salesperson is expected to do all the work and make our trip to graduation, the checkout counter, as easily as possible. If we fail a test or fail a class, something has gone terribly wrong and somebody is to blame. We either blame the professors or we blame ourselves. But if we think of training the mind the same way we think of training the body, we recognize that much more is demanded of the student than just tuition. You have to show up, you have to do the work. Hard work pays off more than easy work. And failure isn't the end. You don't need to blame anybody for it, not the professor and not yourself. Failure just means it's time to take a rest and get ready to start again. So changing the vehicle of a metaphor changes how we see the tenor, the thing we're actually thinking about. A new metaphor changes the way we understand the world and we use lots of metaphors, most of them implicit. In other words, we use metaphors to understand the world without realizing that the world doesn't really work the way we think of it. Sometimes the only way to figure out something is just a metaphor is to see that someone else is using a different metaphor. Linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson have written a lot about how metaphors change the way we think, usually unconsciously. And they say that, quote, because the metaphorical concept is systematic and because the language we used to talk about that aspect is of the concept is systematic, the same systematicity that allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another will necessarily hide other aspects of that concept. And allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept, the metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor. That's why when we compare the university to a store, we tend to forget that the work, the responsibility is on us and that failure isn't the end of the world. Whereas when we switch metaphors, new things are revealed about the university that were there the whole time, we just forgot about them because we were using the wrong metaphor. So because metaphors are so automatic, they tend to work when we don't realize it and they tend to hide things from us in the thing that we're trying to think about. So it's good to actually defamiliarize ourselves from our own metaphors. When we are confronted with new metaphors, or in the case of Atrahasas, with very old metaphors, we're prompted to try to understand not only what's being described, which is the tenor, but what it's being compared with, which is the vehicle. So written on the other side of the globe, 3600 years ago, the text of Atrahasas probably contains some very unfamiliar concepts, unfamiliar schemas. But it will also describe things that we think we know in terms that don't fit our schemas. You'll find metaphors for which you know the tenor, but you don't understand the vehicle that's described in the text. There may be metaphors that are so implicit you don't realize that you're supposed to read them metaphorically. Some of those metaphors were so implicit to the people who created the narrative that they don't know that they were using metaphors. We know how diseases work, we know how droughts work, and we know how floods work scientifically. We're going to see diseases, droughts, and floods in Atrahasas, and we know how these work from a scientific sample. But to understand the text of Atrahasas, the narrative of Atrahasas, and the world that produced it, we have to imagine their metaphorical conception. And that doesn't mean that their conception is better than ours. In fact, ours is going to be scientifically more provable. But it does remind us that our metaphors, the way we conceive of the world, the schemas that we use that may or may not be borrowing from other schemas, they may not be the ultimate final conception. These two might be improved. So if we, if you haven't completed Atrahasas, go ahead and do that and then the next video, video 2D, I'll finish up with Atrahasas.