Reasoning Metaphor

This book claims to reveal the secrets of the physical work of the philosophers stone, however, though it stays close to its theme it uses metaphorical and philosophical allusions to the process, rather than approaching it directly in physical terms. The author indicates in the preface the reason for the title of his book "We therefore... do raise this knowledge, buried and obscured under the pretext of the Tomb of the most wise Semiramis, formerly Queen of Babylon..."... 

The reason that the illicit use of these drugs is so difficult to curb is not only because they elevate vigilance, but also because they greatly enhance mental energy, elevate mood, increase physical strength, and maximize sexual potency. This sounds like a dream, in the metaphorical sense, and indeed, some actual dreams have these desirable qualities, but the stimulants do not produce otherwise dreamlike mentation even when they trigger psychoses. The similarities between dopamine and cocaine can be appreciated in figure 15.2. 

In applied molecular evolution, fitness generally has one of two meanings (i) It can refer specifically to how well a molecule performs a desired function, typically the affinity of a ligand for a given receptor or its catalytic activity for a given reaction, (ii) It can refer to the rate at which a molecule in a population of molecules is copied over one iteration, similar to the notion of enrichment in die molecular diversity literature. This second definition is more complex, as fitness depends not only on the properties of a molecule but also on the properties of the rest of the population. Since fitness then changes each iteration as the population changes, the whole fitness landscape metaphor is weakened. For these reasons, I will restrict myself to the first definition of fitness. 

The results were as predicted subjects in the Consistent condition (M = 1445 ms) responded significantly faster than subjects in the Inconsistent condition (M = 2722 ms), r( 38j = 2.449, p <. 05. Most people answered correctly three erroneous responses were excluded from the analyses. Neither order of presentation nor gender had any significant effect on response times. These results demonstrate a sizable cost for shifting between metaphorical systems in ordinary commonsense reason-... 

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