When I first read the sequence of passages that I quote below, I felt like I had discovered a diamond while exploring a shop of horrors. The passages come from a book by Julian Jaynes, whose controversial (and carefully thought out) theory is that just a few thousand years ago, human beings weren’t conscious like us, but instead did what they were told to do by god-like voices in their heads. The book is an intellectual shop of horrors in a good way, because it makes you think hard about the possibility of the seemingly impossible.

But rather than get into Jaynes’s broader theory, I want to focus on a small section that I think can be useful for how you think about the world, one that I think jives well with Charlie Munger’s “mental models” approach to thinking.

Munger believes in collecting little packets of understanding for how things work, little models of the world. When you collect models from lots of different fields—say psychology, literature, science, math, and so on—you will then be able to recognize lots of interesting connections. Models are reference points of understanding.

Jaynes writes not about models but about metaphors. I think that by collecting what Jaynes calls “metaphiers,” you can position yourself to better understand new things in the future. His explanation is useful for those trying to understand the world, come up with something new, or combine things into creative new patterns (which could be a piece of art of a company). It also has implications for salespeople or for anyone trying to convince or explain. Conveying an idea through metaphor is almost always a good idea.

Metaphors and Understanding

Jaynes begins by defining metaphor, which is made up of two components:

the thing to be described, which I shall call the metaphrand, and the thing or relation used to elucidate it, which I shall call the metaphier. A metaphor is always a known metaphier operating on a less known metaphrand.

Yesterday I used two hypothetical basketball teams to describe quirks of value style indexes like the Russell 1000 Value. I did so because the difference between the two teams I made up is much easier to understand than the difference between the investment strategies I was trying to explain. The metaphrands (thing to be explained) were the Russell Value indexes, the metaphier (reference point used to explain) was the odd made up NBA team of the five best centers in the league.

It is through metaphors that language and understanding grow from simple things to more complex things. We start with things we understand, like the body, and our own simple behaviors, and create new language:

The human body is a particularly generative metaphier, creating previously unspeakable distinctions in a throng of areas. The head of an army, table, page, bed, ship, household, or nail, or of steam or water; the face of a clock, cliff, card, or crystal; the eyes of needles, winds, storms, targets, flowers, or potatoes… and so on and on …All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication. In early times, language and its referents climbed up from the concrete to the abstract on the steps of metaphors, even, we may say, created the abstract on the bases of metaphors.

We aren’t aware of this slow building up of metaphors through time.

Because in our brief lives we catch so little of the vastnesses of history, we tend too much to think of language as being solid as a dictionary, with a granite-like permanence, rather than as the rampant restless sea of metaphor which it is.

We have a “fixed” view of the world. We think language is fixed, that models of the world are fixed, but they are not. Language and models and understanding are forever changing, and the best way to be at the vanguard of this change is to collect packets of understanding: metahpiers which will be used to understand (and explain) new metaphrands.

what are we really trying to do when we try to understand anything? Like children trying to describe nonsense objects, so in trying to understand a thing we are trying to find a metaphor for that thing. Not just any metaphor, but one with something more familiar and easy to our attention. Understanding a thing is to arrive at a metaphor for that thing by substituting something more familiar to us. And the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding. A theory is thus a metaphor between a model and data. And understanding in science is the feeling of similarity between complicated data and a familiar model.

This is the same thing as I’ve written about before on the topic of creativity. The creation of something new and interesting results from the combination of “familiar models.”

The “mental model” approach to life suggested by Charlie Munger is a version of this entire thing. Having more “models,” or reference points of understanding, is like casting a wider net when fishing (you see what I did there!!).

Here is Munger (much more here) on the need for models (which are just big metaphiers).

You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience ‑ both vicarious and direct ‑ on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.

Things aren’t static, they change. Our understanding and communication changes on the basis of new metaphors. We understand new things in reference to some older thing that we already understand. What will we be trying to understand in the future? Who knows? Don’t try to predict the future, but instead collect models and metaphiers so that you’ll recognize opportunity for new combinations, patterns, and ideas when they come. Since I’ve relied on other’s thinking in this post, I may as well close it out with a great quote from Paul Graham.

It seems to me that beliefs about the future are so rarely correct that they usually aren’t worth the extra rigidity they impose, and that the best strategy is simply to be aggressively open-minded. Instead of trying to point yourself in the right direction, admit you have no idea what the right direction is, and try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of change.

END NOTE: for those still interested (Bueller?), here is a continuation that deals more with consciousness. This book tripped me out!