{"id":18438,"date":"2016-01-31T05:15:36","date_gmt":"2016-01-31T10:15:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/?p=18438"},"modified":"2016-05-03T07:22:51","modified_gmt":"2016-05-03T11:22:51","slug":"flickering-clusters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/2016\/01\/31\/flickering-clusters\/","title":{"rendered":"Flickering Clusters"},"content":{"rendered":"

I thought about what was so special about water and how it moves. A fluid responds to pressures by constantly changing shape in the most supple, flowing manner; it is neither rigid and brittle like a solid, nor volatile and insubstantial like a gas. Where do these special properties come from? From the invisible molecular substrate, of course. As I pondered this, I recalled one of my favorite images and phrases from all of science—that of “flickering clusters.” This poetic little phrase encapsulates a well-known theory of water according to which H_{2<\/sub>0 molecules continually make fleeting little associations, thanks to the very weak hydrogen bond that can form between the 0 of one and an H of another, if they happen to be passing close enough by each other (see Figure P-1). If the flickering-clusters model of water is correct (and when I last read about it, this was somewhat unclear), then all throughout every tiny droplet of water, trillions of complex, randomly-shaped clusters of H_{2<\/sub>0 molecules are forming and then falling apart every microsecond, all completely silently and invisibly. And thanks to this fantastically unstable, dynamic, stochastic substrate, the familiar and utterly stable-seeming properties of wateriness emerge.<\/p>\n}}
This image is ideal, I feel, for suggesting our philosophy, according to which the familiar and stable-seeming fluidlike properties of thought emerge as a statistical consequence of a myriad tiny, invisible, independent, subcognitive acts taking place in parallel. Concepts have this fluidity, and analogies are the quintessential manifestation of it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
—Douglas Hofstadter, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I thought about what was so special about water and how it moves. A fluid responds to pressures by constantly changing shape in the most supple, flowing manner; it is neither rigid and brittle like a solid, nor volatile and insubstantial like a gas. Where do these special properties come from? From the invisible molecular […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[2623,2624,2622],"class_list":["post-18438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-ai","tag-analogies","tag-cognitive-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18438\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}