Why We Use Analogies

We often use analogies to describe ideas or express ourselves. Here are a few common analogies, mostly from nature.

"We are not out of the woods yet"

"You are walking on thin ice"

"Save some for a rainy day"

"Plant a seed and watch it grow"

"Let's not put the cart before the horse"

"Things really went south after that"

"They are holding all of the cards"

"It would be killing two birds with one stone"

This shows that we are more complex than our surrounding inanimate environment. The ideas that we express are as complex as we are. Our methods of expression are also as complex as we are. But to express something, the method of expression must be more complex than that which is being expressed. This makes it impossible to fully express some of the things that we may want to.

In our surrounding environment, information and energy is the same thing. We cannot add information to anything without applying energy to it and we cannot apply energy to anything without adding information to it. Another way we can see that energy and information is the same thing is that we can make our lives physically easier by way of technology, but only at the expense of making them more complex. We can never, on a large scale, make our lives physically easier and also less complex. This shows that energy and information is interchangeable, and thus ultimately the same thing.

The reason that we see energy and information as two different things is our higher level of complexity, relative to our inanimate environment. Because of this higher level of complexity, we can use words to express ideas without the corresponding energy. But we are still limited by the fact that some of the ideas that we want to express are as complex as we are, and thus our method of expression is not sufficient because it would have to be more complex than the ideas that we express.

What we have going for us is that patterns tend to repeat themselves, from lower to higher levels, because there is a limited amount of information in the universe and it is a lower information level to reuse patterns. Remembering that energy and information is really the same thing, we can see that the universe always seeks the lowest energy state in how the sphere is the default gravitational form of matter, as in stars and planets. This is because a sphere is the three-dimensional form that has the lowest surface area per volume and thus the least information. One example of how patterns tend to repeat themselves is how the orbits of planets around the sun resemble the orbitals of electrons around the nucleus of an atom.

We are more complex than our surrounding inanimate environment but yet we have to live within it and, to some degree, in harmony with it. This means that we have to share it's patterns, although in more complex form, and this is why we can use patterns displayed in the world around us as analogies for ideas that we would have difficulty expressing because our ideas are as complex as we are.