Social-Techno Anthropomorphy

JF Ptak Science Books  Post update

My friend Jeff Donlan sent along a suggestion for reading Michael Graziano's Consciousness and the Social Brain--I don't know anything about the book, but the title has done its job in provoking the imagination.  What the title asks me (apart from whatever the book might be about) is this: how long have people thought about some aspect of a "social brain" and what has that looked like over the decades (or centuries)?  "Social" and "brain", like society, or Earth, or some definition or classification of people, have made for themselves something much larger than the ordinary collective.  It is a very useful tool, this simple metaphor--in it are a wellspring of ideas.

I’m also interested in what anyone might know about the early use of metaphors (and analogies) relating large-scale societal techno advances and biological functions?  I have no doubt that they go back to modern-ancient times (say to William Gilbert (1544-1603)  and his vis electrica) and that some old mechanical/anthropomorphic examples are still in everyday use ("horsepower")—but I’m stopped today by seeing this paper by J. Norman Lockyer called “Social Electrical Nerves” (in two issues of  Nature for 14 and 28 February 1878).  In this paper the great astronomer (and the editor of the journal) looks at elements of the “grid” as it was and seeing how the new networks of police and fire communications via telegraph  interacts with the existing electrical systems.  It seems to me an early use of  nervous system/electrical analogy, in spite of the fact the first “electrical highways” (as Lockyer puts it 120 years before our own “information superhighway”) appeared in England 32 years earlier though apparently without these biological metaphors. 

The work pictured above is the electrically-draped world of the future, at least according to the vision of the wonderful Albert Robida, who was actually at work on these visions just at the time of the publication of the Lockyear paper . (Robida produced at least a trio of interesting and lovely and occasionally prescient works:  Le Vingtième Siècle (1883);  La Guerre au vingtième siècle (1887); and Le Vingtième siècle-- La vie électrique (1890)).   Many of Robida’s visions of electrical connectivity seem to me to move beyond the nervous system metaphor and become a kind of societal “skin”—which is not terribly far from the truth, especially when looking at images of congested metropolitan centers ca. 1910, when utility poles fairly well sagged under 20 (!) horizontal crossbars carrying a dozen lines apiece.   At the very least, you knew that something or other was happening (fast forward to the massive ductworks of Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece, Brazil.) 

And now that the wireless age is starting to get ridges in its fingernails (the “wireless” age being at least 115 years old, beautifully borne by Heinrich Hertz and Marconi), where are our bio-electrical  metaphors going?

Philosopher of science Rom Harre is one among very many who have written on the use of metaphor in science--he finds the practice an "indispensible element...to scientific creativity and imagination".¹ And he is certainly correct--the recognition of the Lockyer metaphor is instantaneous today, and must've been quite a shocking thing to see in 1878.  

I know that this is just a nibble around the edge of a vast amount of thinking on this subject, and perhaps I don't want ot do this so "out loud" in the public forum, but I am interested in a dialog on this, if anyone is interested in participating.

Notes: 

1. Harre's reasoning is nicely summed up here in "The Function of Scientific Metaphors: An Example of the Creative Power of Metaphors in Biological Theories",  by Xavier de Donato 
Rodríguez and Alfonso Arroyo-Santos:

 

"(1) New scientific theories try to provide a better understanding of reality.(2) In order to do that, these theories must be intelligible.(3) That intelligibility must ultimately derive from the intelligibility of the novel entities and forms conceived in the creative scientific imagination.(4) The novel entities and forms introduced by the theory become intelligible only if we interpret them in terms of the old entities and forms already available.(5) But, the only way to do this is by means of metaphors or analogies taking the entities and forms already available as a basis.(6) So, analogies and metaphors are indispensable for scientific theories."