The Venomous Clash of Broken Sound

I still have not finished Hofstadter. And I would say that its mostly a lack of.... discipline... on my part. I've found some rather uncreative ways to piss away the days (not to say that I haven't had some creative ones as well). But despite all this, I am closing on the end. And as I get closer, I'm of the inclination that it's time to start poking bits and pieces of it with a stick. Otherwise, I'll end up with a tangled, incoherent mess (which it may turn out to be anyway) that rambles on for a span long enough to kill the attention span of a birdwatcher, let alone myself.


So. On to the potatoes (I'll save the meat for another day).


The first bit that I want to get to (and will in all likelihood come back to at a later date as well) concerns something that pokes its head out at various points throughout the book (and if Wikipedia is any indication, comes through in much of his other work and thought as well). This is the notion that the mechanism of human cognition is based around analogy.



A few quotes (ordered in level of abstractness):

"thanks to a mapping, full-fledged meaning can suddenly appear in a spot where it was entirely unsuspected" p. 148

"Virtually every thought in this book (or in any book) is an analogy, as it involves recognizing something as being a variety of something else." p.xviii

"Standing in line with a friend in a cafe, I spot a large chocolate cake on a platter behind the counter, and I ask the server to give me a piece of it. My friend is tempted but doesn't take one. We go to our table and after my first bite of cake, I say, "Oh, this tastes awful." I mean, of course, not merely that my one slice is bad but that the whole cake is bad, so that my remark exemplifies how we effortlessly generalize outwards. We unconsciously think, This piece of the cake is very much like the rest of the cake, so a statement about it will apply equally well to any other piece." p. 149

Analogy is about relating symbols (or strings of symbols) to each other. On a concrete level, this can amount to the simple act of relating the properties of a part to a whole (this piece of cake is bad, thus the entire cake is bad), or similar objects to each other (this one cookie I took from the plate was good, so the other cookies must be good), or dissimilar objects (I think these wool gloves will keep my hands warm and dry, because my wool hat keeps my head warm and dry). In the last case, it's easier to think of things in terms of categories (which is a nice concise way of saying "things that are similar" in a particular way X). Categories get established to account for the way in which we experience objects in the world.

Name 10 green things. Name 10 sharp things. Name 10 hot things... From the day we are born, the learning process is associative. We're given 5 different ways to experience our external environments. Sight. Hearing. Touch. Taste. Smell. (and in further pursuit of that, it's interesting to think that the same internal symbol is triggered by the senses individually as well as in conjunction. If you were blindfolded and put in a room, and you were to hear purring and meowing, you'd think cat. Similarly, if you were to walk by a pet store and see whiskers, tabby markings and a tail, you'd also think cat. In either case, a small subset of characteristics allow you to relate a specific instantiation to a general concept).

And as sleep creeps up on me, I'll post what likely amounts to a stub. The idea of thought as analogy is quite alluring to me. For another day, I would like to look at this idea in the light of behaviorism.