Old Book: Chapter 5
Ex-planation
She is moving to describe the world.
She has messages for everyone. Talking Heads
Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move. Satchel Paige
It is time for a quick rehash. Contemplating the special relationship between maps and territories has led me to abandon the idea of a simple correspondence and adopt a modified form of what might be termed explanatory relativism. I maintain my faith in the existence of an outside world, but I have lost faith, at an intellectual level, that the outside world looks anything like it does in my head. The relationships that my mind interprets as space, distance, and separation, for example, may be something completely other, perhaps nothing but information with no material substrate. The MT relationship is completely mysterious. Something is going on there, but nobody seems to be able to say what.
In the first few chapters I've tried to indicate that our theories about how things work are always at least implicitly axiomatic, but that the world our theories are trying to epitomize is not based on assumptions or on mathematics. It simply is. To think otherwise is to confuse the map with the territory, to settle for a simple and unrealistic MT perspective. Thus while assumptions are necessary for arguments, it is a mistake to take any of them very seriously. Various reversals of assumptions, such as from the naturalness of stasis to the naturalness of change, can lead to valid insights about how the world fits together. My own most basic assumption, paradoxically, is that we can assume nothing. Everything is worthy of explanation (Shall I try to reverse that one!). If we want to explain everything then we are going to have to do without fixed assumptions, at least in the long run. Both and neither will be the rule.
This point of view leads in many directions, but the next path we must take goes into the nature and purposes of explanation itself. In offering my explanation for the nature of explanation, I will be treading on the shifting sands that always results from the application of an idea to itself, but we should be getting used to the subtlety by now.
What is an explanation that it may meaningfully connect with the real world? Is explanation an action or a computation (physical or symbolic)? Is it fundamentally functional and instrumental or truth-seeking? Do explanations create knowledge or summarize it? In short, what are explanations and why do we create them? The answers to these questions depend to a large extent on your MT orientation. A One-Way view might see explanations as the verbal or symbolic counterparts of physical causes. Thus far I have used many capitalized catch phrases — Both-and-Neither, Assumption Switching, Explanatory Relativism, Many Truths — to convey my various attitudes toward the MT question. I am seeking a view of explanation which can occupy a middle ground. It must have the potential to be intimately tied to underlying reality like naïve one-to-one MT orientations so that explanations can really reflect what is happening.
The most pervasive sense we have as we explain is that we are trying to understand and communicate why something happens and/or what is really going on. We are trying to get below the surface level. We seek explanations in order to know the truth (or at least an approximation thereof). The understanding that we get offers varying degrees of utility, from satisfying our curiosity to helping us build a television. Explaining is not an activity reserved for scientists, philosophers and intellectuals. All humans are explaining machines. We seem to do it spontaneously, without even trying. I would like to suggest that there is a degree of explaining, taken in a sufficiently broad sense, in virtually our every thought. It seems that we are forever either engaged in the process of explaining or applying an explanation, metaphor or model arrived at earlier, often to explain what is going on in our minds or in the world. Our every action implies a stance, an attitude based on some assumption of what is happening to us, and each such assumption constitutes an explanation or at least predisposes us to certain explanations. Even in dreaming, we are trying to make sense of, account for, and explain the feelings we are experiencing, from confusion and fear to frustration and lust.
I'm going to concentrate for now on how we explain things to ourselves, ignoring those aspects tied up with communication per se.
*We explain why the car is making a funny noise so that we can find and repair the problem or give reassurance that the old heap isn't about to die.
*We explain why we lost the baseball game so that we can absolve ourselves of blame, figure out what we need to practice, square our expectations with the results or work through disappointment.
*We explain to ourselves why a friend is angry with us so we can smooth over the difficulties, make ourselves better people or convince ourselves that it was really all their fault.
*We explain why there is injustice in our society so we can bring about change, alert or convince others, give our anger expression or justify our preferred, self-serving position.
*We explain how the universe came to be so that we can define ourselves in a greater context and give meaning to our lives or to contemplate the mystery of existence.
This is a wide range of motivations. Can we put them under a single umbrella? You can see that in writing down these motivations I am not making much of a distinction between intellectual theories and emotional rationalizations. I am convinced there is a strong association between, for instance, the structures of theories about how objects fall to Earth and about my defenses against hurtful words. They both offer satisfaction of a kind. The following pseudo-etymology of the word explain gives the essence of my approach. "To explain" means literally "to smooth out." What, then, are we trying to smooth out as we explain things to ourselves and to each other? Ruffled feathers? Bumps? One reasonable possibility is that smoothing out refers to metaphorically clearing a path or building a road to ease travel through a bumpy world. As such our explanations are designed to get us somewhere but not necessarily to help us see the bumpy world in all its complexity. Explaining means simplifying.
In my version of things, smoothing out refers to smoothing out disturbances to the stability of the self. Picture a self as a balloon or a bubble. Its internal pressure and the nature of its skin produces its shape, which we will equate with its state, until an outside influence disturbs that condition—a finger pokes it, maybe. When the finger withdraws, the balloon pushes back to smooth out the disturbance—imperfectly and excessively, at first, and then better and better as the vibration is quickly damped out.
I see the process of explanation, in its most general sense, as analogous to the snapping-back response of the balloon. An explanation's role is to smooth out a disturbance to the self. Explaining therefore is like the psychological analog of physical healing. Right away we can see a relationship of this idea of explanation to some the other ideas of the book. Ex-plaining, taken in a sufficiently broad sense, is involved in the process of dynamically holding things as they are. This image says that explanation is tied up with stability. It is the cause of stasis from the inside looking out.
It is probably troubling for most readers to see the mental (explaining) and the physical (stability) mixed in such a direct and general way. When a plucked string or a balloon damps out disturbances there is no mental aspect, and likewise, when we feel offended it's not because some neuron is out of kilter. However, when mental processes are assumed to come from brain structures and activity, it is hard to see how the physical and the mental hook up. Nowadays it is often assumed the gap can be filled by computation. That is, it is assumed that brains are to minds as computers are to computer programs in operation. Our feeling of offense takes place at a symbol-processing level or in the positions of electrons in our microchips, the level of pure information rather than physical or material imbalance. I find the computation metaphor to be far from compelling. My own view is that brains are somewhat more like radios than like computers. If there is some doubt that neurons do give rise to mind, then there is plenty of reason to explore alternative formulations like this Smoothing Out Metaphor. We will leave aside for now, however, the degree of physical reality to impute to this smoothing out process and will treat it strictly metaphorically.
A case can be made that, for each item in the list of motivations given a few paragraphs back, the explanation is subsumed under the desire to smooth out. The fact of social injustice, for example, impinges on our picture of how the world should be, it disturbs our world-view, wounds us, throws us out of balance, bends us out of shape. We can choose to rid ourselves of the disturbance by incorporating injustice into our picture of reality (thus changing our balloon) or finding a scapegoat that lets us blow off steam or finding a cause that will ultimately give us a pathway to change the situation (voting for a particular candidate, for example, or boycotting a product). In any case, we can say that the resulting explanation of the injustice has the effect of reducing the disturbance like the pressure of the balloon reduces its disequilibrium. There may be differing degrees of instrumentality and efficiency in these many explanations but they all make things smoother.
Besides the word explain, the words describe and express also have pseudo-etymologies of my own design that fit nicely with the balloon metaphor. To de-scribe is to remove what has been written (upon the self or upon the senses), and to ex-press has the sense of ridding what has been pressed upon the self. We conceive of all three of these actions as doings, but the prefixes mark them as undoings, responses to disturbances, ways of canceling out a problem. Whether or not my humble attempts are true etymologies, it is my intention to look at explaining, describing and expressing as a kind of complex of associated processes which encompass a large part of mental activity and which have an essentially homeostatic role, at least in the simplest version of the model. Later this reactive scheme for explanation will be supplemented with a proactive one through an Assumption Switch, and the Beacon metaphor will take its place beside the Bubble -- and The Bubble & Beacon meta-metaphor will predominate. (Ultimately, this pair can be replaced with a quartet, octet, etc though both-and-neither thinking. See the spheroid model.)
One thing that the Smoothing Out Metaphor for explanation has going for it is its simplicity. What it lacks in completeness it makes up for in comprehensibility. Isn't it generally true that we explain what throws us out of equilibrium? Isn't there an extent to which any human thought or answer to a question is a response to a disturbance (either externally or internally generated) and thus an explanation in the smoothing out sense?
How does this idea differ from the idea of explaining as laying out the truth? To what extent does this perspective do damage to our normal attitude that our explanations are attempts to understand the world as it really is? The two versions feel very different, and there's no doubt they are not entirely compatible, but there is a closer than expected relationship. Although the metaphor says nothing about right answers and only speaks about the effects explanations have on the explainer, to the extent that explanations will smooth out better the more precisely they match (or actually invert) the original incoming influence (or deformation), good explanations still, by definition, represent the world well. What works best will necessarily correspond in some sense to the underlying reality. But the smoothing out version clearly leaves more room for the validity of multiple explanations that may each undo influence in their own way. We end up with a certain relativity to our explanations that does not fit our usual One-Way View of things. That is, it wouldn't be surprising if a rich person's explanation of unequal wealth in society will work as well for her as a poor person's perspective will work for him.
There are many ways that I can imagine to undo a disturbance. Picture the disturbed self as a dented fender that needs to be fixed. The ideal and never-realized solution would be to somehow "reverse the direction of the film." Molecule by molecule, instant by instant, we could micro-engineer the deformation back to its original shape along the identical but reversed path followed during the accident. In that case, we would have exactly the original fender without so much as any metal fatigue—no side effects at all. This is the perfect ex-planation in that we have smoothed out the disturbance in such a way as to precisely mirror (and invert) what really happened. If such a perfect reversal were accomplished, we would have reason to say the ex-planation made a perfect fit with the underlying reality. Unfortunately, such a reversal of the arrow of time is a practical impossibility. What is more likely to actually happen, however, is that we will either buy a new fender or hammer out the dent. In either case our process of smoothing will not mirror the path of the original event/influence, but neither will it be independent of the event. A good hammering out job will have to follow the path of the accident to some extent in order to do the job efficiently with minimal metal fatigue. The ex-planation or de-scription will contain some aspects of the underlying reality without epitomizing it or reversing it perfectly.
As with our hammering-out job on the fender, the balloon's response to the poking finger is imperfect from the point of view of undoing what has been done. Its reaction reflects the energy the finger put into it and rebounds beyond its original shape. The deformation now spreads across the entire balloon and sets up a vibration which continues until friction damps it out of the system. This is far from the ideal ex-planation if the ideal involves no side-effects.
In the stasis chapter, we talked about how odd it is that pervasive characteristics of reality like friction and damping were seen as ancillary epiphenomena from the point of view of classical dynamics. Every set of assumptions will produce descriptions that give the status of side-effects to certain phenomena. Complementary explanations produced by Assumption Switching, on the other hand, will tend to put those phenomena at center stage. We have just seen how the side-effects of the explanation process can be interpreted as having a very important role in creating the whole world.
It is probably true that a perfect reversal of what I have been calling the ideal explanation is contrary to the laws of physics. As far as the laws of physics are concerned, time is reversible at the level of particles but this is not the case in the friction-filled macroscopic world. It is theoretically possible to "unbreak" the shards of what was a drinking glass; it could even happen all by itself, but the odds against that are astronomical. In the case of the balloon, if we tried to reverse time and replaced the poking finger with an equal and opposite withdrawing finger, it would be difficult to get back the heat lost to friction, etc. Friction (qua entropy) gives a direction to the arrow of time. As the finger lost contact with the balloon, the surface of the balloon would not suddenly go smooth but would go into vibration as before.
In the last chapter I described an earphone system designed to cancel sounds. These devices, like balloons, offer a good image of my version of ex-planation and demonstrate an important side effect. As they "experience" changes in their environment, they respond by trying to undo those changes. One distinction is that homeostatic systems like people respond automatically or at the level of being rather than at the level of programs. They are analog objects rather than digital devices. Like the balloon example though, the earphones fail to achieve the ideal situation of perfect cancellation. They can only do the job locally and with a slight time lag (unless using the speed of an electric signal to outrun the sound). Outside the local region, the phones are producing a new sound which is spreading out into space.
From the point of view of the smoothing out process, these sounds are the side effects of explanations. All ex-planations must have such side-effects. We might call it Explanatory Spillage. Such spillage is necessitated by the energy of the disturbances lost to friction and by the approximate nature of the explanations. The One-Way Model which says there are monolithic true explanations for phenomena implies a kind of perfect matching that leaves no side-effects or inaccuracies. I hope it is clear by now that I reject the idea of such monolithic true explanations.
Consider for a moment what would happen if we were to put several of these noise reduction systems together, each separated by a small distance. When we introduce a small sound in the midst of these devices, each system will produce waves that will tend to cancel this sound in the local area of the devices but will cancel imperfectly outside that region. The actual sound energy is increased but the actual noise in the vicinity of the devices might be small. If the region we are considering is large enough, because all of the systems are responding at slightly different times, there may be places where the waves actually augment each other rather than canceling out. The secondary sounds produced by each device will in turn generate responses or de-scriptions in the other devices. We eventually get a cascade of side-effects producing diverse conversations among the machines. The sound energy may fall into an orbit or pattern or may damp down to nothing, explode in a loud screech of feedback or become chaotic.
If each machine is working well, all of this buzzing will have little influence on the tiny islands of silence near the devices amidst the cacophony. Now, if we take this set up and replace "sound" with "disturbance" and "silence" with "changelessness", we get an idea of the implications of the Smoothing Out Metaphor for explanation. This is meant as the beginning of an abstract description of how the world can come into existence and sustain itself. We have a World of Describers sustaining their own individual identities by de-scribing or imperfectly reflecting the influence of all others, this influence being itself derived from their imperfect descriptions of disturbances.
When, inevitably, the ex-planations fail to achieve perfect cancellation, we get a slow evolution of the identity of each describer under the influence of the de-scriptions of the others. In the beginning is the word, and there is nothing but chatter thereafter! Repeatedly I have asked why language might fit reality. One answer is that reality is language-like; the World is the net effect of myriad describers de-scribing. This again looks a lot like the monadology of Leibnitz with its infinitesimal monads doing nothing but reflecting the images of the other monads. Reflection is perhaps the ultimate de-scription. The sensible world is a host of beings describing each other and in so doing maintaining themselves.
It was an image very much like this World of Describers Model that got me started during my senior year in college along the strange path that has led to my current beliefs. As I recall, I was doodling on the back of a math problem-set, drawing concentric ring wave patterns. I pictured myself as the central wave source of one such pattern. What am I sending out, I thought. I am exemplifying myself for all the world. I am sending out the message "me, me, me. BE LIKE ME" I jotted down the caption "Being Waves." I was amused by the jargony sound of it. This was around the time that EST was very popular. A roommate and I were thinking about how to achieve easy riches, and we had come up with the idea of creating The Brain Passage Clearing Institute, for which we invented several catchy terms. Being Waves fit in nicely with this feeling of charlatanism and at the same time seemed to correspond in some rough way with something true about the world. Almost immediately I realized that the spillage from this message was to create a kind of identity inertia like the resistance or self-mass an electron experiences as it moves through its own field. The monad best able to receive the BE LIKE ME message was the sender. Thus Being Waves produced stasis; they explained why things stayed the same. Before that time it had never occurred to me that being required a cause. Being waves gave us anti-change muscles. I continued to toy with the notion for some time. Slowly I have reformed the initial idea in accord with things I've learned. In the next chapter I will try to show how BE LIKE ME and Smoothing Out are related, how beacons are also bubbles.
These radical images can hardly be taken seriously as yet, but I hope that further switches and complementary descriptions will make that task easier. We have to imagine, for example, that a molecule of water is a describer, as are you, your pet cat and a cell from the lining of your stomach. Furthermore, the model asks us to take seriously the notion that consciousness of a sort is a simple phenomenon (assuming that explaining requires consciousness), and that the material universe is purely a construction of these "minds" based on the exchange of mere information with the rest of the world. I use the word influence as opposed to information. Influence is the vector form of scalar information -- information in a direction or on a mission. I'm thinking metaphorically about how physical force is in a sense the vector form of scalar energy.
Sledgehammer explanations
The Smoothing Out Metaphor is so general it would seem it could be stretched (like a balloon?) to fit almost any circumstances. This flexibility has good and bad aspects. Clearly there is an appeal in explaining a lot with a little. Simplicity is a fundamental aspect of my intuitive notion of a good explanation. The downside from a scientific perspective is that it lacks the quality of falsifiability. What value does a theory offer in understanding the world and discriminating between true and false statements if it can account for absolutely anything, even those things that do not happen? We'd like it to account for facts but exclude impossibilities. Something must count as evidence against an ideal explanation. But the Smoothing Out Metaphor can be manipulated to get around any counter-example with sufficiently convoluted arguments.
However, several of the most powerful images of science and everyday thought are similarly unfalsifiable. It has been said, for example, that the old summation of Darwinian selection, "survival of the fittest," is a mere tautology rather than an explanation at all. We can always take "fittest" to be synonymous with "most apt to survive." Thus, the most apt to survive will survive. on average. If one were to say that the proliferation of near-sightedness in the population showed that in some cases the less fit survive, an evolutionist could say that near-sightedness must be associated with some other characteristic which confers fitness (perhaps people with glasses are more sexually attractive). There are several examples of prevalent behaviors and features of the world which seem contrary to what you'd expect from a world ruled by Darwinian selection. Current theory holds, for example, that altruistic behavior, the gamut of emotions we deem virtuous, have arisen in humanity and various other species through the essentially selfish motivations of natural selection. We do someone a good turn only because such behavior was likely to elicit reciprocation that added to the perpetuation of our genes in the ancestral habitat. In fact, the elegant and convincing theory goes on, it is often a better strategy to be thoroughly duplicitous, feigning a favor for someone but then stabbing them in the back; thus we receive a double benefit. In one fell swoop we reduce many human characteristics to a single cause which sounds like it would imply the opposite characteristic.
Another example that, on the face of it, might seem to deal a death blow to natural selection is the pervasiveness of self-destructive, risk taking behavior and also of homosexuality. The desire to jump out of airplanes or a propensity toward addiction to alcohol ought to decrease the likelihood of that characteristic remaining in the gene pool, but that doesn't and shouldn't prevent an evolutionist from trying to accommodate these facts within Darwinism.... In other words, any possible counter-examples merely serve to change the concept of fitness rather than disprove the concept of natural selection. Still, few would abandon the insights offered by the pithy phrase just because of this peculiar drawback.
I call such elastic and general notions as Darwinian selection or the Smoothing Out Metaphor, ones that can't really be disproved, sledge-hammer explanations. They ex-plain broadly, in the manner that a sledge-hammer knocks out dents. The sledge-hammer will work on any dent but not in the subtlest or most sophisticated way. This name reflects my belief in the intrinsic trade-off between generality and completeness. If an explanation packs a wallop, it may leave the finer detail work a mess of smaller dents and fatigued material. We would prefer an explanation that undoes disturbances in a way that most directly merely reverses the arrow of time and reduces the "side effects" of the undoing treatment. Sledgehammers leave major side effects and that is the main problem with them from the point of view of the Smoothing Out Metaphor for explanation. The greater the side effects, the worse the match between the explanation and that being explained. Perfect matches are impossible, just as the reversed film scenario is physically impossible without added energy, but presumably it is the goal of a "good" explanation to match as closely as possible. Again, we will see that side effects of undoing are a key component of the phenomenal world.
Other examples of prevalent sledgehammer explanations are:
1. The workings of the physical universe are mechanical.
2. The brain is a computer.
3. Sex drives are the key to understanding human psychology.
4. All human actions, even the seemingly altruistic, are motivated by self-interest and the pursuit of rewards.
5. The cream will rise to the top.
Each of these has tremendous power and can really hardly be argued against, but each is also a gross reduction of a world of infinite variety and apparent subtlety.
As far as the Smoothing Out Metaphor is concerned, the part that flexes to fit the occasion, as fitness did in the case of Darwinian evolution, is disturbance. Any action can be considered to be a response to a disturbance. All explanations are certainly reactions in the sense that we would never use them if there were no phenomena impinging on our consciousnesses. We explain nothing if we experience nothing. The Smoothing Out Metaphor says that explanations are the equal and opposite reactions to actions taken against the state of the perceiver.
In defining sledgehammer explanations in terms of the Smoothing Out Metaphor and then citing the Smoothing Out Metaphor as an example of a sledgehammer explanation, we have once again encountered the problem of self-reference. Again we have to be aware of the paradoxical situation that comes up when we apply a concept to itself. In this case particularly, we have an especially troubling sort of self-reference, one that declares its own inadequacy. The scenario goes something like this:
a) The Smoothing Out Metaphor implies that irrefutable sledgehammer explanations mess up the details and have extreme side-effects.
b) The Smoothing Out Metaphor is a sledgehammer explanation for the nature of explanation.
c) Thus the Smoothing Out Metaphor messes up the details.
d) Therefore we cannot trust it.
We end up with a version of the Epimenides' Paradox: The Cretan says, "All Cretans are liars."
Can we believe a theory that points out its own weakness? This is only a problem if we accept the exalted status of true explanations implicit in a One-Way View of truth. If there are no monolithic truths but only relative ones, such a self-limiting quality may actually be a sign of consistency. Shouldn't we seek theories which immunize themselves against the destructive effects of the self-serving quality of explanation? It may seem that we should prefer a self-exemplifying theory of explanation. If, for example, I have a theory which says that all explanations are rationalizations of power relations, then belief in my theory ought, I suppose, to rationalize power relations or else there must be some limitation on the applicability of my theory.
But suppose, for example, we had a choice between these two competing theories:
1. All phenomena have reductionistic explanations.
2. There is no way to express absolute truths in words.
The latter may seem to be an argument against itself since its truth would contradict its content, while the former, in a sense, seems to argue for itself since it is a reductionistic explanation. I, for one, however, tend to find more (relative) truth in the latter. If we start from an assumption that our ability to explain is limited by the profoundly complex nature of the MT relationship, then we may want explanations which point out the problem by criticizing themselves. This Inverted Self-Reference Problem, as I call it, is very important, I think, and will be discussed (without resolution) in another chapter. In any event, the Both-and-Neither Model and Assumption Switching are creations designed to deal with the issue so that we don't have to choose between the two generalities offered above.
Self Preservation
It is often powerfully brought to our attention that people's explanations for the states of their lives, their positions in the world, and their responsibility for those states and positions are very often self-serving in the extreme (present company excepted, of course). Rich people, for example, are apt to believe in the necessity of unequal wealth which serves to motivate the entrepreneurship that fuels prosperity for all. They are also more likely than poor people to believe that we live in a meritocracy where the cream will naturally rise to the top. The poor, on the contrary, are far more likely to portray themselves as victims of greed, bigotry and a rigid socio-economic structure. We've all had coworkers and friends who seem sincerely to believe that they are responsible for everything that goes well at their workplace and bear no relationship to all of the screw ups. This book even, presents evidence that I seem determined to rationalize my tendency toward lethargy and inaction/stasis. I would like to believe that "just being" is a legitimate kind of "doing." I would rather think of myself as a fantastically creative person whose creativity is severely blocked than to think of myself as intrinsically uncreative. All of this leads naturally to a feeling that stasis is caused and all that is required is for me to remove impediments to my natural creative tendency. I want to believe my anti-jump muscles are flexed rather than admit I can't jump.
The Smoothing Out Metaphor clearly places this self-preserving/self-validating role at center stage since it says that explanations undo what has been done to us. It would be easy therefore to equate this homeostatic role for explanation with the above stated Hobbesian, Darwinian, Marxian views which imply that all human actions, even ostensibly noble ones, are performed in the pursuit of a form of self-interest. A connection between Smoothing Out and these theories clearly exists, but we will see there are many distinctions as well. Darwinism, for one, would have this self-serving, self-preserving behavior arising from the blind process of natural selection where the Smoothing Out Metaphor pushes back the source to the nature of consciousness and being itself. We will also see that the Both-and-Neither scenario and Assumption Switching will broaden this explanation concept to go beyond these more mechanistic theories of self-interest to a scheme which pictures selfishness and selflessness as related and complementary.
There is an intriguing fit between the Smoothing Out Metaphor of explanation-description-expression and some aspects of many psychotherapies. The idea of a talking cure -- where one alleviates emotional problems and re-integrates oneself essentially by talking about the problems with an analyst and placing them in a theoretical scheme -- sounds just like Smoothing Out. We undo traumatic disturbances by reliving and explaining them. To some extent the remedy consists merely in identifying the cause and allowing that knowledge to dissipate the problem. In this context, to explain is to exorcise the stresses which we cannot accommodate (make a part of the steady-state of the bubble), things we can't square with our self-image or our understanding of the world.
We can see the unconscious as a storehouse for disturbances which have not been smoothed out. To repress is to cover up but fail to smooth out, and the more dented we become, the more fragmented our behavior and the more confused our thought. Good explanations, one's that smooth out well, are seen as a necessity here.
The Smoothing Out Metaphor seems to imply a very non-standard view of perception. "The brain is a computer" is the metaphor that holds sway in current cognitive research. Thus the standard model sees perceptions as the processed end-products of inputs. Photons enter through the eye, stimulate sensors which send signals as if over wires to the CPU which processes the data and turns them into, for example, the Mona Lisa or whatever image is being observed. The missing link in this explanation is the moment where data becomes meaningful and coherent.
In my version of these events, where admittedly the role of neurons is obscure, we see the mind or self as a coherence or a whole to begin with. It is a homeostatic system like that which maintains body temperature. The mind possesses a steady-state which gets disturbed by influences that it actively and automatically seeks to damp out. Perception presumably takes place with the ex-planation, the smoothing out. Perhaps perception is the ex-planation.
The Smoothing Out and computer metaphors of perception are partially compatible. The fundamental difference comes in their respective treatments of wholeness. In one, wholeness is barely relevant and is manufactured by the brain and in the other wholeness is inherent and essential. We might say that the Smoothing Out Metaphor treats consciousness as fundamental in so far as explaining implies consciousness where the standard approach treats it as a product of computation (if it acknowledges consciousness at all.)
Artificial intelligence researchers and science fiction writers have frequently observed that, in their model of thought, consciousness is completely unnecessary. We can theoretically reproduce human thought and behavior without it. If consciousness exists, and all but a lunatic fringe agree it does, it is an add on, an epiphenomenon that probably serves no purpose.