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The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities

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The Age of Form and the Age of Imagination

  • Core Themes:
    • Identity - the recognition of sameness, which is often taken for granted is in fact a spectacular product of complex, imaginative, unconscious work. Identity and opposition are finished products provided to consciousness after elaborate work; they are not primitive starting points.
    • Integration - finding identities and oppositions is part of a much more complicated process of conceptual integration, which typically goes entirely unnoticed since it works fast in the backstage of cognition.
    • Imagination - imaginative processes we detect in seemingly exceptional cases are in fact always at work in even the simplest construction of meaning.
  • The Eliza effect leads us to see forms as carrying far more meaning than they actually do.
  • How we apprehend one thing as one thing has come to be regarded as a central problem of cognitive neuroscience, called the “binding problem”. We assume that the unity comes from the thing itself, not from our mental work, just as we assume that the meaning of a picture is in the picture rather than in our interpretation of its form. The generalized Eliza effect leads us to think the form is causing our perception of unity, but it is not.
  • We see the coffee cup as one thing because our brains and bodies work to give it that status. We divide the world up into entities at human scale so that we can manipulate them in human lives, and this division of the world is an imaginative achievement.
  • All As are B, C is an A, therefore C is B. Aristotle’s observation and systematisation are the seed for all the approaches that we have been referring to as form approaches.
  • Understanding the room you are in by comparing it with rooms you already know is an everyday analogy.
  • The lumping together of points as the “same” is a mental achievement that creates an integrated object.
  • In form approaches, identity is taken for granted; analogy, by contrast, is typically not even recognized. In form approaches, analogies are replaced by structural identities at hidden levels.
  • Toward the end of the 1970s, analogy and its disreputable companions - metonymy, mental images, narrative thinking, affect and metaphor made a roaring comeback.

The Tip of the Iceberg

  • Conceptual framing has been shown to arise very early in the infant and to operate in every social and conceptual domain. Metaphoric thinking, regarded in the commonsense view as a special instrument of art and rhetoric, operates at every level of cognition and shows uniform structural and dynamic principles, regardless of whether it is spectacular and noticeable or conventional and unremarkable.
  • Even after training, the mind seems to have only feeble abilities to represent to itself consciously what the unconscious mind does easily. These operations occur at lightning speed, presumably because they involve distributed spreading activation in the nervous system, and conscious attention would interrupt that flow.
  • Framing, analogy, metaphor, grammar, and commonsense reasoning all play a role in this unconscious production of apparently simple recognitions, and they cut across divisions of discipline, age, social level, and degree of expertise.
  • After a blend has been constructed, the correspondences - the identities, the similarities, the analogies - seem to be objectively part of what we are considering, not something we have constructed mentally.
  • To set up and use this blend, we need to do much more than match two analogues, which is already an awesome task. Somehow we have to invent a scenario that draws from the two analogues but ends up containing more. We have to be able to run that scenario as an integrated unit, even though it corresponds to no prior reality or experience. Somehow, the dynamics of this imaginary scenario are automatic, even though it has never been run before.
  • A little matching helps the blend run, and running the blend helps us find matches.
  • Activation makes certain patterns available for use at certain times, but it does not come for free. What counts as a “natural” match will depend absolutely on what is currently activated in the brain. Some of these activations come from real-world forces that impinge upon us, others from what people say to us, others from our purposes, others from bodily states like weariness or arousal, and many others from internal configurations of our brains acquired through personal biography, culture, and, ultimately, from biological evolution. But much of the shifting activation is the work of the imagination striving to find appropriate integrations.
  • Not just any discordant combination can be projected to the blend.
  • Inputs to blends are themselves often blends, often with an elaborate conceptual history.
  • Conceptual structure contains many entrenched products of previous conceptual integration.
  • The conceptual work of integration can take years or even centuries. This is often the case in scientific discovery.
  • Complex blending is always at work in any human thought or action but is often hard to see.
  • “Safe” does not assign a property but, rather, prompts us to evoke scenarios of danger appropriate for the noun and the context.
  • Mental spaces can exist routinely alongside incompatible mental spaces. When we look in the fridge and see that there is no milk to be had, we must simultaneously have the mental space with no milk and the counterfactual mental space with the milk .
  • Often the point of the blend is not to obscure incompatibilities but, in a fashion, to have at once something and its opposite.
  • These oppositions are not suppressed; on the contrary, activating them all simultaneously is part of the purpose of the network of spaces, and the participants must keep these spaces distinct. The human capacity to construct an connect strikingly different mental spaces is what makes such sexual fantasies and practices possible to begin with. Needles to say, the capacity is much more general. The raison d’etre of mental spaces is to juggle representations that, in the real world are incompatible with each other.

The Elements of Blending

  • The network model of conceptual integration:
    • Mental spaces - are smal conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk for the purposes of local understanding and action. They are connected to long-term schematic knowledge called “frames”, and to long-term specific knowledge such as a personal memory. They are very partial. They contain elements and are typically structured by frames. They are interconnected, and can be modified as thought and discourse unfold. They can be used generally to model dynamic mappings in thought and language. They are sets of activated neuronal assemblies, and the lines between elements correspond to coactivation-bindings of a certain kind.
    • Input spaces - the input concepts that will be blended.
    • Cross-space mapping - connects counterparts in the input mental spaces.
    • Generic space - maps onto each input space and contains what they have in common.
    • Blend - fourth mental space that contains an emergent structure
    • Emergent structure - developed in the blend and not in the inputs. Made of composition, completion. The running of the blend is called elaboration. What comes into consciousness is the flash of comprehension. And it seems magical precisly because the elaborate imaginative work is all unconscious.
  • Building an integration network involves setting up mental spaces, matching across spaces, projecting selectively to a blend, locating shared structures, projecting backwards to inputs, recruiting new structure to the inputs or the blend, and running various operation in the blend itself.
  • Any and all of these operations can run simultaneously. The integration network is trying to achieve equilibrium, a place where it is happy
  • Networks can have several input spaces and even multiple blended spaces.
  • Not all elements and relation from the inputs are projected to the blend.
  • Composition - blending can compose elements from the inputs spaces to provide relations that do not exist in the separate inputs in a kind of fusion.
  • Completion - we rarely realize the extent of background knowledge and structure that we bring into a blend unconsciously. Blends recruit great ranges of such background meaning.
  • Elaboration - We elaborate blends by treating them as simulations and running them imaginatively according to the principles that have been established for the blend. There are always many different possible lines of elaboration and elaboration can go on indefinitely. The creative possibilities of blending stem from the open-ended nature of completion and elaboration. They recruit and develop new structure for the blend in ways that are principled but effectively unlimited. Blending operates over the entire richness of our physical and mental worlds.
  • Modification - Any space can be modified at any moment in the construction of the integration network.
  • Entrenchment - blends recruit entrenched mappings and frames. Blends themselves can also become entrenched.
  • Event integration - comparing events
  • Wide application - Used for all sorts of thoughts
  • Unnoticed blends are much more common than noticeable or fantastic ones.

On the Way to Deeper Matters

  • Many feats we find easy - categorization, memory, framing, recursion, analogy, metaphor, vision, hearing - are very resistant to scientific analysis.
  • Blends provide a space in which ranges of structure can be manipulated uniformly.
  • Frames include "having a debate", "being in a race"
  • We may make many parallel attempts to find suitable projections, with only the accepted ones appearing in the final network.
  • Brains always do a lot of work that gets thrown away.
  • Cultures work hard to develop integration resources that can then be handed on with relative ease.
  • History is rife with curiosities (frames that have not yet become entrenched) that later become culturally important.
  • Although it can be hard to come up with good projections, once the culture has them they are easily learned, precisely because cultures have invented systems of form, such as language, whose purpose is to prompt for various kinds of imaginative work like selective projection. Finding a blend for which the culture has no previous recipe can involve considerable amounts of unconscious cognitive exploration, but using the formal prompts provided by culture to reconstruct such a blend once it has been found is much easier.

Cause and Effect

  • It is evolutionarily advantageous to be able to unite cause and effect in our understanding. It's good to see potential effects in a cause, and it's good to see potential causes in an effect - it's probably a tiger behind that roar.
  • It is very common to blend cause and effect.
  • Each step of a proof is the effect of the previous steps. All of these causes and effects can be followed as a sequence, but achieving a global understanding requires blending them all into one space.
  • Presenting the effect directly in the cause is a matter of finding the right representation, which in itself is highly creative.
  • The integration of cause and effect is the central feature of perception. The perception available to consciousness is the effect of complicated interactions between the brain and its environment. But we integrate that effect with its causes to create emergent meaning: the existence of a cause that directly presents its effect. At the level of consciousness we usually apprehend only the blend of cause and effect. We cannot fail to perform this blend, and we cannot see beyond it - it seems to us to be bedrock reality.
  • In the case of sensation and perception, our conscious experience comes entirely from the blend - we "live in the blend". In other activities, conscious apprehension has more leeway to go back and forth, to 'live in the full integration network".
  • We evolved to be conscious of only the blend for basic maths and physical reasoning, eg running to catch a fly ball. In contrast, the development of sciences leads consciousness to live in the entire network. Global and creative insights require the blended space. Proofs, analysis, and verification and communication of theories require explicit unpacking of cause and effect.
  • The acquisition of experience is in many respects the achievement of successful integration networks in which living in the blend gives you the desired effects with no conscious attention to the other spaces. Expert performance consists in having acquired the blended pattern in such a way that it is felt consciously as primitive. The child learning letters maintains a forceful distinction between seeing a shape and seeing a letter. But very soon the child cannot distinguish the cause from the effect: She can no longer see the shape without seeing the letter.
  • Having the integration network does not require belief in its efficacy, but having it is sufficient to activate emotions in the blend.
  • Conceptualization always has counterfactuality available and typically uses it as a basic resource.

Vital Relations and Their Compressions

  • Many phenomena for which we had partial descriptions - categorization, mathematical invention, metaphor, analogy, grammar, counterfactual thinking, event integration, various kinds of learning and artistic creation, global insight integrating vital relations like cause and effect - are products of the same well-defined imaginative operation.
  • Links between the input mental spaces ("outer-space links") - can be compressed into relations inside the blend ("inner-space relations")
  • Important conceptual relations are "vital relations":
    • Cause-Effect - Two inputs can contain objects, one of which has caused the other
    • Time Link - related to memory, change, continuity, simultaneity and nonsimultaneity and to causation. Two inputs can occur at the same or different times and they can be blended into the same time. Time can be compressed to become intelligible
    • Space Link - Two inputs can occur in the same or different spaces and they can be blended into a single space
    • Identity Link - the most basic vital relation - allows us to identify two objects as being the same. Blending is a powerful and supple instrument for creating and disintegrating identity
    • Change Link - People and objects change over time.
    • Part-whole - where one object is seen as a part of another
    • Representaion - where one object is seen as representing the other, eg pictures.
    • Role - Lincoln was president, Charles is king, president is head of state
    • Analogy - depends on role-value compression. Analogy is routinely and conventionally susceptible to compression into uniqueness and change.
    • Disanology - coupled to analogy. Experiments show that people are stymied when asked to say what is different between two things that are extremely different, but answer immediately when the two things are already tightly analogous. Disanalogy is often compressed into change.
    • Property - a blue cup has the property blue. Cause-Effect links can be compressed into property relations in the blend
    • Similarity - links elements with shared properties. outer-space analogy can be compressed into direct similarity in the blend.
    • Category - outer-space vital relations like analogy can be compressed into category in the blend.
    • Intentionality - to do with hope, desire, want, fear, belief, memory, and other mental attitudes and dispositions directed at content.
    • Uniqueness - many vital relations compress into uniqueness in the blend.
  • Compression can scale time, space, cause-effect, and intentionality. Analogy can be compressed into identity or uniqueness. Cause-effect can be compressed into part-whole. Identity is routinely compressed into uniqueness.
  • Vital relations are what we live by, but they are much less static and unitary than we imagine. Conceptual integration is continually compressing and decompressing them, developing emergent meaning as it goes.
  • The basic structures are:
    • Mental spaces - small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action. They operate in working memory but are built up partly by activating structures available from long-term memory. They are interconnected in working memory, can be modified dynamically as thought and discourse unfold, and can be used generally to model dynamic mappings in thought and language.
    • Frames - are entrenched combinations of elements and relations such as go to a café, commercial transaction, drink coffee. A single metal space can be built up out of knowledge from many separate domains.
    • Immediate experience - can build mental spaces - I see Julie purchasing coffee at Peet's and so build a mental space of Julie at Peet's or someone says something to him. In the unfolding of a full discourse, a rich array of mental spaces is typically set up with mutual connections and shifts of viewpoint and focus from one space to another.
    • Entrenchment - mental spaces are built up dynamically in working memory, but they can become entrenched in long-term memory. Frames are entrenched mental spaces that we can activate all at once. An entrenched mental space typically has other mental spaces attached to it, in an entrenched way, and they quickly come along with the activation. Much of our thinking consists of activating entrenched integration networks for dealing with present subjects.
    • Specificity and familiarity of an input space - Can contain objects of any level of specificity - physical object - human being - woman - daughter - Allison.
    • Mapping spaces - we can look at what is inside spaces and build correspondences between one space and another based on similar topologies or on the level of their vital relations.
    • Blending depends for its very operation on extremely large numbers of mappings and all the richness of the physical and conceptual worlds in place during blending.

Compressions and Clashes

  • The human mind constructs intelligible meanings by continually compressing over vital relations.
  • Blending is a compression tool par excellence.
  • Strings and syncopation - Time, space, cause-effect, change, part-whole, and intentionality bring with them an interval, expanse, or chain that we call a string. This partial activation of points on a string we call syncopation.
  • Human mental life is unthinkable without continual compression and decompression involving identity.
  • What gives us a global insight into an evolutionary truth is a massive compression of identity over species, individuals, and time.
  • A vital relation between spaces is compressed into structure inside the blend.
  • Compressions and decompressions are activated and connected simultaneously in the entire network.
  • Four kinds of integration network stand out:
    • Simplex - does not look intuitively like a blend at all. It is more a frame-to-values compression, like father and kenneth or brother and neil. It is for the most part compositional and truth-functional.
    • Mirror - all spaces (inputs, generic, and blend) share an organizing frame.
    • Single-scope - has two input spaces with different organizing frames, one of which is projected to organize the blend. They give us the feeling that one thing is giving us insight into another thing, with a strong assymetry between them.
    • Double-scope - has inputs with different (and often clashing) organizing frames as well as an organizing frame for the blend that includes parts of each of those frames and has emergent structure of its own. In such networks, both organizing frames make central contributions to the blend, and their sharp differences offer the possibility of rich clashes. Building a rich emergent structure out of a tenuous connection between inputs is a deep principle of science.

Continuity Behind Diversity

  • The meanings of "father" are not properties of the word "father" but byproducts of the operation of conceptual integration and of the fact that words, like anything else attached to inputs, can be projected to blends. When we notice this distance, we call it by one of many names: extension, bleaching, analogy, metaphor, displacement. Polysemy - the fact that a single word seems to have many meanings - is a very common phenomenon, a standard by-product of conceptual blending, but noticed in only a fraction of cases.
  • We may think of language as a system of prompts for integration.
  • In order to do justice to a word like "safe", we must regard it not as applying a particular property but, instead, as prompting for a particular kind of blend.
  • The XYZ construction in English is a general prompt to construct an XYZ integration network.
  • Words and the patterns into which words fit are triggers to the imagination. They are prompts we use to try to get one another to call up some of what we know and to work on it creatively to arrive at a meaning. Blending is a crucial part of this imaginative work, and, as we have seen, blending is not the mere addition of one existing meaning to another to get their sum. Words by themselves give very little information about the meaning they prompt us to construct.
  • Blending is a constant mental activity. We blend again and again, building blends out of earlier blends, blends all the way down.
  • Grammatical constructions in general are pre-compressed integration networks with open-ended connectors available to be attached.
  • In any theory of meaning, activation does not come for free. The existence of frames, knowledge, experience, scenarios, and memories does not come for free. Ease of activation and degree of entrenchment by themselves impose very strong constraints on the imagination and the use of language. Linguists, logicians, and, for the most part, even psychologists tend to focus on the entrenched cases, which are already built and usually easy to activate.

The Origin of Language

  • Nativist theories, such as Chomsky, believe there is minimal learning involved in acquiring a language. Most of the language module is already in place
  • Some associative theories emphasize the role of evolution in developing powerful learning mechanisms that perform statistical inferences on experiences. The brain evolved learning abilities with some bias for learning things like language, but did not evolve “language” as a neural “language module”.
  • Co-evolutionary proposal see language as not an instinct and there is no genetically installed linguistic black bo in our brains; language arose slowly through cognitive and cultural inventiveness. Crude and difficult language imposed the persistent cognitive burden of erecting and maintaining a relational network of symbols and this demanding environment favored genetic variations that rendered brains more adept at language.
  • Art, religion, and science appear to begin explosively around the same moment about 30,000 years ago.
  • Our exceptional cognitive abilities are based on our capacity to put two things together.
  • The power of language comes from its amazing ability to be put to use in any situation - equipotentiality. For any situation, real or imaginary, there is always a way to use language to express thoughts about it. This is based on double-scope conceptual integration.
  • The origin of language:
    • Double-scope conceptual integration is characteristic of human beings but not other species and is indispensable across art, religion, reasoning, science, and other singular mental feats that are characteristic of human beings.
    • Basic blending is evident as far back as the evolution of mammals.
    • From very simple simplex blends to very creative double-scopes, each step of the capacity would have been adaptive because each step gives increasing cognitive ability to compress, remember, reason, categorize, and analogize.
    • The indispensable capacity needed for language is the capacity to do double-scope blending.
    • Language is like flight: an all-or-nothing behavior.
    • To say something new, we do not need to invent new grammar. Rather we need to conceive of a blend that lets eisting grammar come into play.
  • Conceptual blending, far from being limited to language, extends to action, reasoning, social interaction, and so on. The emergence of conceptual blending would have been favored by preadaptations. We propose that evolution delivered an ability for conceptual blending which, once it reached the stage of double-scope integration, had grammar as a product.
  • The anatomically modern human beings, date from about 200,000 years ago, while behaviorally modern human beings originated much more recently - about 50,000 years ago - and dispersed eastward from Africa, ultimately supplanting all other human beings.
  • The rapid cultural invention of a coordinated suite of modern human performances are the common consequence of the human mind’s having reached a critical level of blending capacity - namely double-scope conceptual integration.
  • Double-scope blending was a cause that was gradual, continuous, and cognitive, while the effects were singular, quick, and social.
  • To have the capacity of language means to have an inventory of grammatical constructions that, although small relative to the richness of the world, are equipotential, ie they must be double-scope conceptual integrations.
  • To have any degree of command of an apparently simple word like “father” requires sophisticated double-scope blending.
  • Kanzi the chimp’s vocabulary relates to a finite number of frames of limited application and that because there is no higher-level blending capacity, those frames cannot be integrated fluidly, which is the power of blending and the sine qua non of language.
  • A child must have the capacity to do double-scope blending even at the very beginning of his use of language, and this capacity will in the normal course of development carry him to fully complex language very quickly.
  • Language originated in a social community of human beings that already had symbols, elaborate social practices, and communication. It was the evolution to cognitive modernity that gave this community the ability to do double-scope blending. That change was dramatically adaptive because it brought powers for succeeding in natural and social situations. Cognitively modern human beings flourished. They than used their common ability for double-scope blending to express and evoke double-scope integration networks, not merely to represent individual frames in restricted ways. This was the birth of language.
  • The achievement of the bicycle came at one fell swoop. Learning to ride a bicycle is similar to inventing the bicycle itself. It is a singularity that can arise only because we reach a crucial stage on very smooth, intersecting continua.
  • Language needs the cognitive capacity for double-scope blending and a social community that can support an effort to develop and disseminate grammatical constructions. Once these prerequisites were fulfilled, we could learn language as easily as we can learn to ride a bicycle.

Things

  • We make things, carry and consult them, teach each other to use them, adorn ourselves with them, make gifts of them. Why?
  • The wristwatch is a material anchor for a fascinating conceptual blend. Our work to understand time is a significant achievement. From the cyclic day network down into (or up out to) hours and other units of time, we have a compression of outer-space analogy relations bringing them into human scale
  • Our modern understanding of time as consisting of a repetition of a periodic day is emergent in the blend for the cyclic day network. Our more specific understanding of time as consisting of a repeating day divided into hours, minutes, and seconds of equal duration is emergent in the Timepiece blend.
  • The deep conception of time that emerges is so compelling that we take it to be part of the fabric of time itself. The watches that we have today are historically the product of many successive blends, beginning with sundials, and there is an obvious link between compasses, clocks, and dials in general, which all integrate frames of time with frames of direction.
  • Flight instruments allow pilots to “live in the blend”, modifying the real world so that they do not have to activate all the connections of the underlying networks.
  • Money is a material anchor that depends on an elaborate conceptual network, but one that can only be supported socially. The elementary structure of buying and selling emerges from it.
  • The word “dead” prompts for a complex network.
  • Enormous amounts of human time, energy, and talent go into building material anchors for spiritual and personal integration networks - like cathedrals.
  • We grow so used to interacting with material anchors like money and watches that the compressions they provide seem almost as complete and obvious as the compressions provided by biology.
  • Writing is physical marks on stone or paper or a computer screen, and these marks are circulated through the community.
  • A proficient reader ends up with a general competence for constructing integration networks for writing and reading - the marks and the speech are fused in impressive ways. The writing and reading blend is of immense cultural importance to us, and cannot exist without the material anchors of distinctive marks on material substances. It includes complex projections and social conventions that we take for granted.
  • Speech may seem immaterial, but it is a material anchor.
  • The child learns very quickly what often took the culture centuries or thousands of years to develop - how to write or use money or use clocks. Infants have developed complex conceptual systems long before they start talking. The child comes into a world already populated with material anchors for the culture’s conceptual blends.

The Construction of the Unreal

  • People pretend, imitate, lie, fantasize, deceive, delude, consider alternatives, simulate, make models, and propose hypotheses. We have an extraordinary ability to operate mentally on the unreal, and this ability depends on our capacity for advanced conceptual integration.
  • Cognitively modern humans can run off-line cognitive simulations, and as a result, evolution does not have to unertake the tedious process of natural selection every time a choice is to be made.
  • Human beings can run several scenarios, mentally check the outcomes, and make choices, all in minutes rather than generations. Conceiving complicated new scenarios in nearly any domain while making complicated new inferences and choices is now something that can be run as part of mental and cultural life. Individuals now have a far greater power of conception and choice, and cultures can transmit choices that have been made and tested by entire communities.
  • In English, a combination of tenses, moods, and time reference in two clauses separated by an if either suggests of forces counterfactuality.
  • It is common to imagine that reality is simply opposed to unreality, and that counterfactual spaces are those that do not refer to reality, but one cannot overstate the importance of counterfactuals in human life.
  • Reality is profoundly affected by cognitive work in the unreal.
  • The victims of lottery depression are running multiple conceptions simultaneously, some of them conflicting with each other, and it seems that the brain is very well designed to run such multiple and potentially conflicting conceptions.
  • When we want to establish, understand, of manipulate actual outer-space connections over various spaces, it is good to compress them into a blend, which often means compressing them into powerful inner-space relations in the blend. The “literal falsity” of those relations is irrelevant to the reasoning process.
  • Language is rife with forms that prompt for the construction of a counterfactual relation between one space and another.
  • Nonevents and nonactions are nearly everywhere in our cognition. Physical reality is a material anchor for conceptual blends that typically carry many projections from counterfactual spaces.
  • It seems that cultures find it efficient to evolve compressions that can be easily transmitted.

Identity and Character

  • A central aspect of human understanding is to think that people have characters that manifest themselves as circumstances change. Character transports over frames and remains recognizable in all of them, to the extent that we can ask "What would Odysseus do in these circumstances?"
  • A character can stay essentially the same over widely different frames, and a frame can stay essentially the same when populated by widely different characters.
  • Characters, like frames, are basic cognitive cultural instruments.
  • Frames and characters are not always distinct, since some characters seem to be attached to their frames. Sherlock Holmes brings his detective frame with him and causes a frame-blend just by appearing.
  • We use character to converge on an understanding of frames and we use frames to converge on an understanding of characters.
  • Outer-space vital relations, often connecting a person in one space to himself in another, can be compressed into inner-space character traits understood to be part of the essence of the person. But culture sets up general models of just this type and makes them into cultural categories like redemption, restoring honor, vengeance, vendetta, curse.
  • In redemption, curse, and revenge, we see cross-space vital relations compressed into inner-space cultural elements in the blend:
    • All these cases do essential compressions on identity and time.
    • Curse also does compression on identity of the outcomes, while redemption and revenge do compression on disanalogy on the outcomes.
    • Overarching compressions create cultural elements like honor.
    • Like absence or gap, honor is a word that calls up an implicit counterfactual, specifically a mental space in which something dishonorable has happened, such as cowardice, an unanswered insult, or an attack on friends or family. But once honor has been lost in such a mental space, it can be regained or restored by later action.
  • Knowing someone means knowing what that person will do in the most diverse situations, including novel or impossible ones, and knowing that depends on knowing what the person has done in the past, and being able to apply frames to the old and new situations. Similarly, knowing a frame is knowing specific instances and how various characters operate inside it. There is no limit to the amount of detail in frames or identities, and at the neurocognitive level of activations, frames and characters are always intertwined. Naive metaphysics and folk theories supported by language and conscious apprehension keep frames and identities neatly apart, masking their more intricate backstage involvements.
  • Our worlds are full of nonpeople. We can hear our dead grandmother talking about our daughter even though the living grandmother died before the daughter was born. Psychologically, there is nothing mysterious about this once we recognize how blending works. Selective projection from long-term memory on the one hand and from present circumstances on the other is available for constructing such blends, which like all blends can have their own elaborate emergent structure and material anchors.
  • Dramatic performances are deliberate blends of a living person with an identity.
  • The importance and power of living in the blend would be hard to overestimate. In some cases, biology has arranged for us to live in the blend, as when we perceive a blue cup as obviously blue, and its blueness as the cause of our seeing it as blue. We also live in the blend when we use watches and gauges and complex numbers, but in these cases the blend is a product of cultural evolution, and the inputs and their outer-space relations are much more accessible. In drama, the ability to live in the blend provides the motive for the entire activity.

Category Metamorphosis

  • We frequently organize new material by extending a conventional category. Usually, these category extensions are provisional.

Multiple Blends

  • Conceptual integration always involves at least four spaces: two inputs, a generic, and a blended space.
  • There need not be a single generic space for a multiple blend network. Either several inputs are projected in parallel, or they are projected successively into intermediate blends, which themselves serve as inputs to further blends.
  • Multiple blends reveal the possibility of elaborate generic space organization, and of pressures between generic spaces, within a single complex conceptual integration network.
  • The representation of "death" as "the Grim Reaper", a sinister, skeleton-like character holding a scythe and wearing a cowl, is an integration involving complex interactions of metaphor and metonymy. The Grim Reaper arises from many spaces:
    • An individual human dying
    • An abstract pattern of causal tautology - death causes dying, sleep causes sleeping, etc
    • A stereotypical human killer
    • Reapers in the scenario of harvest, etc
  • No matter how elaborate the multiple blend, people have no difficulty in constructing it. Most of everyday communication involves multiple blends, and the most striking multiple blends of entertainers and advertisers arise from basic operations of conceptual integration that we use every day.

Multiple-Scope Creativity

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Constitutive and Governing Principles

  • Many, many, many new integrations are attempted and explored in an individual's backstage cognition, and in interchange by members of a culture, and most of them never go anywhere.
  • The cultural development of the game of football concerns finding the best ways to achieve certain goals within the rules. The emergent structure that actually develops for the game of football is far richer than the rules, and further constrains the game.
  • Two levels of constraint - the constitutive principles and the emergent governing principles - still do not determine the product.
  • Similarly, for language, the grammatical patterns and vocabulary are constitutive, but speakers of the language have also developed a vast additional set of principles governing what to say when and to whom and under what circumstances. Even a complete knowledge of constitutive and governing principles does not predict what you will hear at your next lunch conversation.
  • These governing principles are strategies for optimizing emergent structure, or "optimality principles". Often satisfying one goes part way toward satisfying another, but governing principles also frequently compete with each other.
  • One relation may be compressed into a tighter version of itself or one or more relations may be compressed into another relation. And new compressed relations may be created from scratch in the blend

Achieve human scale is the overarching goal driving all the principles:

  • Compress what is diffuse:
    • Analogy, disanalogy, change, identity, uniqueness -
    • Cause-effect is compressed into uniqueness/categories
    • Representation, part-whole, uniqueness
    • Time, space, identity, memory
    • The human brain does not for the most part organize events according to the sequence in which hey happened or were recorded. Human memory is not a tape that we must rewind to get back to the desired spot. Simple introspection shows that people cannot predict what thought will come to them a minute from now. At any time a memory from childhood may come. Our brains give us imaginative compressions of things that we know are far apart in time or space.
    • Memory and conceptual integration may have evolved to support each other. To do CI, we need the ability to integrate and compress over inputs that are often very different and highly separated in time and space. We cannot predict which inputs will turn out to be useful, but we do know that useful inputs from many sources need to be activated simultaneously and linked by vital relations. Human memory seems to be superb both at providing simultaneous activation of quite different inputs and at offering good provisional connections between them. Apparently running on autopilot, it often delivers up inputs and connections that have no apparent reason for being activated simultaneously or being connected at all, except that they lead us to quite useful blends.
    • The highlights compression transforms the temporal and causal chain into a part-whole structure where everything is simultaneous.
  • Obtain global insight
  • Strengthen vital relations
  • Come up with a story
  • Go from many to one
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