Seek An Improbable Partner

In December I plan to post a series of log entries dedicated to the use of analogies.  These posts will be true “log” items, in the sense that they will journal my progress as I try to create a “recipe” for applying analogical thinking in a research physics context, in order to generate insight and foster scientific discovery.

In the mean time, I picked up a copy of psychologist Margaret Boden’s book, The Creative Mind:  Myths and Mechanisms, for this week’s reading, thinking that I would be covering a separate intellectual arena.  But it turns out there was an intriguing section on analogies!  Needless to say, I wasn’t about to set it aside for a month and a half.  So, unofficially, this has become the first log entry in the analogy series.  If you’ve been following the Physicist’s Log and Boden’s name sounds familiar, that’s because it is; I used her in my earlier log entry discussing the definition of scientific discovery “In the Name of Discovery”.

Boden’s book explores the mechanisms, from a cognitive psychology standpoint, that underpin our ability to think new thoughts.  She draws on a wide range of research, most prominently computational psychology (mimicking processes in the mind using computer algorithms).  The advent of computational psychology and its studies into creativity, problem solving, and discovery are fortuitous because a recipe for practice and a computational algorithm are much the same.  Both provide (1) content necessary to obtain a given outcome and (2) a sequence of implementation guiding the use of that content to obtain the outcome.  (This attention to both content and action, I mentioned earlier in the log entry “The Physicist’s Repertoire”.)

Now, discovering why analogies play a role in scientific discovery is an attempt at scientific discovery itself.  So it should follow a scientific discovery cycle, which I’ve formulated as the process of question → ideation → articulation → evaluation → verification.  We can trace this flow in Boden’s discussion, as well as in a resource she cites in her book, essayist Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation, which also tackles questions about human creativity.

In the spirit of a recipe, or what Boden might prefer to call a “conceptual space…a structured [style] of thought…that is familiar to (and valued by) a certain group” (p.4), I will use the discovery cycle as an outline to frame my own discussion.  [Physicists respond to the idea of recipes, hence the reason that one of the most heavily referenced books in physics computation is called Numerical Recipes.]

BEGIN DISCOVERY PROCESS…

Question

I’ve already stated the starting question, the frame that highlights the desire to know or do more with something, which ignites a discovery chase:  why do analogies play a role in scientific discovery?  Or the more hypothesis friendly: by what mechanisms does analogy play a role in creativity?  Here we assume that scientific discovery, at the level of an individual thinking up a new idea, represents a sub-type of creativity.  Boden further crafts this overarching question into two sub-questions to frame the main discussion of analogies in her book (pps. 186 – 198):  How are existing analogies evaluated for relevance?  How are new relevant analogies generated?

Ideation

Ideation is about coming up with answers to the questions posed in the first phase of scientific discovery.  For the question of “How are existing analogies evaluated for relevance?” the overall idea presented by Boden as an answer (not necessarily her idea per se, but more a synthesis of the existing research) is that the mind contains a storehouse of possible analogs against which it can compare the present example, and it determines (or selects) a good match based on a set of criteria to be considered (called constraints).  The exact nature of this set of criteria, and the relative importance given to a certain criterion in the evaluation process remains an open question, but three areas are cited: structural match (correspondence between elements or relations), semantic match (similarity between meaning), and “pragmatic centrality” (likelihood that the match is important to the originator of the analogy).  For the second question of “How are relevant new analogies generated?” the overall idea elicited by Boden is that the mind contains a base set of knowledge and a set of descriptive identifiers which classify that knowledge.  When given a source item, the mind tries to generate a target item, drawing from its knowledge base and relying on its descriptive identifiers to tell it which features of the source item are the important ones to be re-created in the new target item.

Articulation

Boden cites studies of computational algorithms designed to either identify the best analog for a target item from among a set of pre-loaded items, or to generate an analog to a target item based on a set of creation rules.  These analogical mapping programs (ACME, ARCS, COPYCAT, SME) represent the articulation of the ideas from the previous phase of the scientific discovery cycle.  They translate an internalized mental conception into externalized physical artifacts, with well-defined content and relations that can be tested.  They are, of course, highly idealized and very simplified, but that’s what makes the clearest science: the ability to tinker with just one feature and see how the world responds, in order to better understand that feature’s role in “how things work.”

Evaluation

In the case of a bit of computer code, evaluating the overall utility of the initial idea is easy enough.  Run the code, interpret the output, i.e., asses the analogy returned and see whether or not it matches what a human being would have provided as the answer.  The more times it does, the more it suggests the processes coded may represent actual processes in the mind.  Some of the codes cited above do match human outputs, so it seems there is something useful to the ideas behind analogies that they encode.

Verification

Which brings us to the last step in the scientific discovery cycle.  I will take an associative mental leap at this point and jump to a discussion of Koestler’s work since, as an exemplar, it fits better into the phase of verification.  Also, much of Boden’s discussion around analogies, throughout her book, is driven by a passage in Koestler’s book (which somewhat echoes physicist Richard Feynman’s comments on discovery, previously covered in “Echoes of History”):

“Thus the real achievement in [scientific] discoveries…is ‘seeing an analogy where no one saw one before’.  The scientist who sets out to solve a problem…in the jargon of the present theory…experiments with various matrices, hoping that one will fit.  If it is a routine problem of a familiar type, he will soon discover some aspect of it which is similar in some respect to other problems encountered in the past, and thus allows him to come to grips with it…But in original discoveries, no single pre-fabricated matrix is adequate to bridge the gap…Here the only salvation lies in hitting on an auxiliary matrix in a previously unrelated field…”

[A. Koestler, The Act of Creation, p. 201]

Koestler defends his conclusion through a study of the role of discovering hidden analogies in two scientific discoveries: Benjamin Franklin’s discovery of lightning conducting rods and Nobel Prize winner Otto Loewi’s discovery of chemical transmission of nerve impulses.

In Franklin’s case, Koestler traces the final insight, or “Eureka moment” as Koestler prefers to call it, to Franklin’s recognizing an analogy between directing a pointed object toward a storm cloud to increase the likelihood of conduction and floating on his back as a boy with a kite tied to his toe being pulled along by the wind.  As Boden suggests, pragmatic centrality is key to Franklin’s analogy playing a role–he only considers a kite a valued analogy to a rod getting closer to a thundercloud because of his relationship with kites as a child as a way to get closer to the wind.

In Loewi’s case Koestler traces the discovery to a hidden analogy between recognizing that medications sometimes had the same effect on organs as observations of stimulation by electric impulse, and yet the drug case relied on a ‘soup theory’ (the correct analogy of a mechanism diffusing in a liquid), whereas, the impulse model relied on a ‘spark theory’ (the incorrect analogy of electricity jumping a gap or being conducted along a wire).  Here it’s a combination of pragmatic centrality-recognizing the importance of medication effects- and the weighting of value criteria that help select the preferred analogy.

“Verification” may be in the eye of the beholder here, but nonetheless Koestler’s approach to seeking case studies shows the idea behind verification, to take your articulated ideas into the real world and see if they hold up.

…END DISCOVERY PROCESS.

Like all of the readings that appear in these logs, there’s a lot to process and it can be difficult to translate it into your own habits and work.  Over the next few months it will be a key goal here at The Insightful Scientist to help shoulder some of that processing burden by trying to distill this wealth of research into everyday actions instead of leaving them as one-time theories.  But as for the logs, I’ve found it helps to come up with short “one-liners” that capture the heart of what I should be trying in my own work.  These one-liners are what appear as the titles to many log entries.  If I remember nothing else of what I read (or wrote!) then at least I always carry with me those titular reminders to “Feed the White Wolf”, that “What You Fire is What You Forge”, that “Representation (Not Rightness) Rules”, and so on.

For this week, I was struck by the analogy Koestler uses to summarize his thinking that the basis of discovery is finding new analogies:

“The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of cabbages and kings [a reference to a Lewis Carroll poem]—of previously unrelated frames of reference or universes of discourse—whose union will solve the previously unsoluble problem.  The search for the improbable partner involves long and arduous striving—but the ultimate matchmaker is the unconscious…the greater fluency and freedom of unconscious ideation; its ‘intellectual libertinage’…[its] indifference towards logical niceties and mental prejudices consecrated by tradition; its non-verbal, ‘visionary’ powers.”

[A. Koestler, The Act of Creation, p. 201]

Then my job as a discoverer is to seek the improbable partner, the previously unconnected and seemingly unrelated universes, whose union will make a more expansive whole.  Who knows: maybe pineapples and pools, the theme of this week’s log entry image, is a visual union that contains within it an intellectual union worthy of discovery.