I replied to Tom Cordle’s very interesting blog God, Man and Singularity by telling him that I’d respond later in a blog. This is not that later blog. I still owe him that. But he sounded almost apologetic in response to my IOU when he said “I’m afraid I’ve loosed more doubt than anything else -- but I don’t believe I did much to untie the Gordian Knot that is God.” That reminded me of yet another thing I wanted to write about. But rather than leave a second IOU, I’ll start with that second topic first today.

And this is a matter of personal perception, so I’ll dispense with any pretense that I’m speaking for other than myself. Others can either join the remarks or write their own. I mostly wanted to say something introspective about how I perceive the world, so I’ll just frame this directly as a continuation of that other discussion with Tom.

Tom, I guess people seek enlightenment in different ways. Some people may want to reduce it to a simple statement of truth. God exists. God doesn’t exist. I guess one of these would be enlightening if true, but I doubt that any really useful truth comes from such remarks. For me, the essence of enlightenment is connection.

My brain, I allege, is organized as what I think of as a big “analogy web.” I connect things up that seem similar, even things that most other people seem not to think are similar. I’ve found analogies are a useful way to reason about the unknown—by mapping to the known.

If you don’t know how your upcoming birthday party is going to work, but you’ve been to an office Christmas party, that might give you some insight. Analogies are not perfect predictors. You have to figure out whether the dominant elements are consistent, and you have to ignore the irrelevant parts. An analogy is not a statement of literal equivalence. But analogies are often better than nothing. An office Christmas party might not be what you aspire to in a birthday party, but it may still be a way of creating a checklist for things to do or problems to avoid. It gives leverage. It means you’re not starting from scratch in how to organize your thinking.

A lot of people when faced with a new situation are left helpless in their understanding of that situation. “I’ve never done that,” they might say. But the trick is not to have done things before. Every day in life is a new adventure, after all. The question is how to best use what you’ve done before. Some people are daunted by new situations, but I prefer to just go groping around for related situations and try to see what they’ll tell me. What pops to mind is not always obvious, and sometimes people think I’m just babbling. But that’s OK if I feel it gives me leverage. What, after all, is the alternative? Just blind guessing?

I had some issues with a certain programming course I took at MIT, years ago. Some things we were taught made good sense on technical merit alone. Other things seemed harder to appreciate. And then came a question on my midterm exam: “Goto statements are (a) good (b) bad.” Suddenly I understood I was in a religion class, not a technical class, and things made so much more sense. It didn’t make the problem simpler, but it did make it suddenly less alien. The analogy framework offered by viewing the class as a course in religion allowed me suddenly to smoothly navigate those previously-mysterious aspects. Religious dogma is not my favorite thing to slog through, but at least I could call upon prior social training to help me know which conversations were going to succeed and fail.

That’s not to say I understood religion either, but I had long ago come to be at peace with it, and that peace was now able to span this new domain. It was all connected up, and I was enlightened.

And so, Tom, I think one can improve understanding even as one asks more questions than answers. Because the issue of enlightenment isn’t always making a about making a problem smaller, it’s often just about putting a problem into its proper context. And such connections can sometimes be made as easily by asking the right questions as by offering the right answers.

Adventurous readers may enjoy a worked example of the power of leaning heavily on analogy in a formal way. Years ago, I used to write weekly parodies of The Young and the Restless (soap opera). One of my episodes was a gripe about plot recycling. In it, I demonstrated how by just mechanical substitution, one could construct a new episode (Episode 47) from an old one (Episode 41). An explanation of the technique is in the author’s notes for Episode 47. Yeah, a little nerdy. And if it doesn’t seem totally related to what I wrote about above? Well, them’s the breaks when it comes to analogies. In my mind it’s all filed under “illustrations of the power of structural connection.”

In part, this reasoning by analogy is a trick I learned—or perhaps just came to properly appreciate—from researchers like Bill Martin, Pat Winston, and others at the MIT AI Lab. For example, see MIT AI Memo 678 to get a flavor of what that research was like. If the text makes your eyes glaze over, skim for the diagrams, which will give you the flavor of it. They were trying to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence, but I often think that much overlooked in all that were the lessons for ordinary people like you and me about how to understand and use own own brains in more interesting ways.

It perhaps helped me that my major in college was interdisciplinary, studying minds and machines from the point of view of artificial intelligence, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy. Though I’d often mention to people in one department what was going on in another department and like that picture of Escher’s with the staircase that goes upward in a circle they would always reply smugly “Yes, I always knew they’d start to catch up with us at some point.” It was never an issue of catching up, it was an issue of connecting. The insistence on viewing it as an issue of being ahead or behind rather than a mere issue of being related caused people often not to make important connections, I think.