> > many religious rituals are designed to be isomorphic to processes in
> >reality
>
> Ah, but they all fail, mostly because initially they have gathered wrong
> items of comparison. Is a false isomorphism an example of cosmetic
> surgery of the truth? How small were those tits to begin with?
Excuse me? This seems an astoundingly presumptuous declaration. On what
grounds do you feel you can claim that "all religious rituals" fail to
have isomorphisms with reality? There are plenty of religious rituals
that parallel "real-world" events--some of them are historical
re-enactments, some are celebrations of (or prayers for or against)
natural phenomena. The structure of such rituals generally bears some
resemblance to the structure of the real event--that's what makes it
recognizable, and encourages a mental association between the ritual and
what it represents.
> And why the hell use 'isomorphism' a truly gruesome piece of jargonistic
> crap, rather than the damn simple and readily understood 'analogy' or
> 'metaphor' or even 'simile'?
The Hofstadter example of isomorphism was not a metaphor by our usual use
of those terms. It was a mapping of two symbol systems, not a mapping of
one symbol system onto the "real world". The fact that you can say pretty
much the same thing in two different languages is not a metaphor, but it
is an isomorphism. Isomorphism is when two or more systems behave in
equivalent ways when treated in equivalent fashions. What counts as
"equivalent" depends largely on what level you're looking at, and may
involve metaphor or analogy, but the whole shebang demonstrates
isomorphism only if the systems display the same patterns of behaviour or
structure, given the equivalencies that have been assigned.
> I'm sorry, but this useless jargon crap really gets my goat. We need to
> be more like country music around here, not Harry Partch.
I have no idea who that is.
--Eva