down has been triggered. The same reaching-down reflex one day occur-
red just after I'd left the radio at a repair shop and was driving away,
wanting to hear some music. Odd. Many other representations for the
same object exist, such as
shiny silver-knob haver
overheating-problems haver
lying-on-my-back-over-hump-to-fix thing
buzz-maker
slipping-dials object
multidimensional representation exampleAll of them can act as ports of access. Though they all are attached to my
symbol for my car radio, accessing that symbol through one does not open
up all the others. Thus it is unlikely that I will be inspired to remember
lying on my back to fix the radio when I reach down and turn it on. And
conversely, when I'm lying on my back, unscrewing screws, I probably
won't think about the time I heard the Art of the Fugue on it. There are
"partitions" between these aspects of one symbol, partitions that prevent
my thoughts from spilling over sloppily, in the manner of free associations.
My mental partitions are important because they contain and channel the
flow of my thoughts.
One place where these partitions are quite rigid is in sealing off words
for the same thing in different languages. If the partitions were not strong,
a bilingual person would constantly slip back and forth between languages,
which would be very uncomfortable. Of course, adults learning two new
languages at once often confuse words in them. The partitions between
these languages are flimsier, and can break down. Interpreters are particu-
larly interesting, since they can speak any of their languages as if their
partitions were inviolable and yet, on command, they can negate those
partitions to allow access to one language from the other, so they can
translate. Steiner, who grew up trilingual, devotes several pages in After
Babel to the intermingling of French, English, and German in the layers of
his mind, and how his different languages afford different ports of access
onto concepts.
Forced MatchingWhen two ideas are seen to share conceptual skeletons on some level of
abstraction, different things can happen. Usually the first stage is that you
zoom in on both ideas, and, using the higher-level match as a guide, you try
to identify corresponding subideas. Sometimes the match can be extended
recursively downwards several levels, revealing a profound isomorphism.
Sometimes it stops earlier, revealing an analogy or similarity. And then
there are times when the high-level similarity is so compelling that, even if
there is no apparent lower-level continuation of the map, you just go ahead
and make one: this is the forced match.Artificial Intelligence: Prospects^671