Compression and Emergent Structure

Thinkers have always been fascinated by mental patterns that are commonly classified under labels such as analogy, category extension, metaphor, framing, counterfactuals, and grammatical constructions. Typically, they are considered part of distinct disciplines: counterfactuals in philosophy and logic, metaphor in literature, analogy in psychology, framing in sociology and artificial intelligence, grammatical constructions in linguistics. We have recently discovered, however, that the mental principles behind all of these patterns are uniform. The patterns are all products of conceptual integration networks. A central feature of integration networks is their ability to compress diffuse conceptual structure into intelligible and manipulable human-scale situations in a blended space. These compressed blends are memorable and can be expanded flexibly to manage their integration networks. Compressions have been studied in great detail. They operate on a set of twenty or so vital conceptual relations, such as Cause-Effect, Analogy and Disanalogy, Time, Space, Change, Identity, Part-Whole, and Representation. Relations can be compressed into a human-scale version of themselves, or into different vital relations. As an example of compression, consider a statement like "Dinosaurs changed into birds," used to suggest the new theory according to which birds are descendants of dinosaurs. At one level, this evolutionary story spans millions of