Further notes about the morphostasis concept – split files
(74) Good imagery (good metaphors)
I have been considering whether to create a "Good imagery" section to pick out metaphor/analogy/imagery that forms a basis for better mental imagery of a process. Finding the following quote from Polly Matzinger prompted me to start now. I have a few more to add.
From Polly Matzinger 1998
In 1998, ran this item recording an interview with Polly Matzinger. I found this imagery very much to my liking.
"Let me use an analogy to explain it.
Imagine a community in which the police accept anyone they met during elementary school and kill any new migrant. That's the Self/Nonself Model.
In the Danger Model, tourists and immigrants are accepted, until they start breaking windows. Only then do the police move to eliminate them. In fact, it doesn't matter if the window breaker is a foreigner or a member of the community. That kind of mutant behavior is considered unacceptable, and the destructive individual is removed.
The community police are the white blood cells of the immune system. The Self/Nonself Model says that they kill anything that enters the body after an early training period in which "self" is learned.
In the Danger Model, the police wander around, waiting for an alarm signaling that something is doing damage. If an immigrant enters without doing damage, the white cells simply continue to wander, and after a while, the harmless immigrant becomes part of the community."
Further (this is my own added comment), the naïveity of the old self non-nonself paradigm is that it is not (analogously) "recognising" people", it is, instead, (analogously) "recognising" their clothing and the component bits they shed (the antigenic epitopes)