structure of the Dialogue. This final touch dramatically heightened the
self-reference, and gave the Dialogue a density of meaning which I had
never anticipated.
Conceptual Skeletons and Conceptual Mapping
That more or less summarizes the epigen~sis of the Crab Canon. The whole
process can be seen as a succession of mappings of ideas onto each other, at
varying levels of abstraction. This is what I call conceptual mapping, and the
abstract structures which connect up two different ideas are conceptual
skeletons. Thus, one conceptual skeleton is that of the abstract notion of a
crab canon:a structure having two parts which do the same thing,
only moving in opposite directions.This is a concrete geometrical image which can be manipulated by the mind
almost as a Bongard pattern. In fact, when I think of the Crab Canon today,
I visualize it as two strands which cross in the middle, where they are joined
by a "knot" (the Crab's speech). This is such a vividly pictorial image that it
instantaneously maps, in my mind, onto a picture of two homologous
chromosomes joined by a centromere in their middle, which is an image
drawn directly from meiosis, as shown in Figure 132.FIGURE 132.In fact, this very image is what inspired me to cast the description of the
Crab Canon's evolution in terms of meiosis-which is itself, of course, yet
another example of conceptual mapping.Recombinant IdeasTh~re are a variety of techniques of fusion of two symbols. One involves
lining the two ideas up next to each other (as if ideas were linear!), then
judiciously choosing pieces from each one, and recombining them in a new
symbol. This strongly recalls genetic recombination. Well, what do chromo-
somes exchange, and how do they do it? They exchange genes. What in a
symbol is comparable to a gene? If symbols have frame-like slots, then slots,
perhaps. But which slots to exchange, and why? Here is where the crab-
canonical fusion may offer some ideas. Mapping the notion of "musical
crab canon" onto that of "dialogue" involved several auxiliary mappings; in(^668) Artificial Intelligence: Prospects