The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think

[imatfaal]

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/

 

A nice article in the Atlantic on Douglas Hofstadter and his counter mainstream approach to life the universe and everything.

 

Roaming in his 1956 Mercury, Hofstadter thought he had found the answer—that it lived, of all places, in the kernel of a mathematical proof. In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself. Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.” He sat down one afternoon to sketch his thinking in a letter to a friend. But after 30 handwritten pages, he decided not to send it; instead he’d let the ideas germinate a while. Seven years later, they had not so much germinated as metastasized into a 2.9‑pound, 777-page book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which would earn for Hofstadter—only 35 years old, and a first-time author—the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

 

And an interesting comparison via a book review from 30 years ago in the NYT

 

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/20/reviews/hofstadter-magazine.html

 

Hofstadter argues that artificial intelligence has been caught up with mimicking logic and deduction, at the expense of the more mysterious processes of subcognition. It is a sharp critique. ''It is my belief,'' Hofstadter says, ''that until A.I. has been stood on its head and is 100 percent bottom-up, it won't achieve the same level or type of intelligence as humans have.''

 

[overtone]

The article did not mention Hofstadter's recent collaborative (with Emmanuel Sander) book "Surfaces and Essences" - an interesting ommission by Fallows, wtihout doubt deliberate.

 

I'm working through that book and into a quarrel with it, which may bear on the questions at hand: Hofstadter uses "analogy" as his fundamental act of human thought, and I want to use "metaphor".

[imatfaal]

The article did not mention Hofstadter's recent collaborative (with Emmanuel Sander) book "Surfaces and Essences" - an interesting ommission by Fallows, wtihout doubt deliberate.

“At every moment,” Hofstadter writes in Surfaces and Essences, his latest book (written with Emmanuel Sander), “we are simultaneously faced with an indefinite number of overlapping and intermingling situations.” It is our job, as organisms that want to live, to make sense of that chaos. We do it by having the right concepts come to mind. This happens automatically, all the time. Analogy is Hofstadter’s go-to word. The thesis of his new book, which features a mélange of A’s on its cover, is that analogy is “the fuel and fire of thinking,” the bread and butter of our daily mental lives.

 

-1 point for reading comprehension If his missing it out was without doubt deliberate - what does your missing of (an admittedly fleeting) reference point to?

 

 

I'm working through that book and into a quarrel with it, which may bear on the questions at hand: Hofstadter uses "analogy" as his fundamental act of human thought, and I want to use "metaphor".

 

I struggle to see a functional distinction - metaphor is a form of analogy. Analogy is the catch-all term for terms of rhetorical comparison - metaphor simile allegory etc. What form of analogy other than metaphor do you say that Hofstadter unduly uses?

[Endy0816]

That was one of the more illuminating books I've ever read.

[imatfaal]

That was one of the more illuminating books I've ever read.

 

Endy - which one? 'Surfaces and Essences' or 'GEB - An Eternal Golden Braid'. I can honestly say that the reading of GEB for the first time will be an experience I will never forget; it felt that my brain was changing, making room for new stuff and ways of thought, and would never be the same again - I am pretty sure that over 20 years later I am a distinctly different person because of it.

[Endy0816]

 

Endy - which one? 'Surfaces and Essences' or 'GEB - An Eternal Golden Braid'. I can honestly say that the reading of GEB for the first time will be an experience I will never forget; it felt that my brain was changing, making room for new stuff and ways of thought, and would never be the same again - I am pretty sure that over 20 years later I am a distinctly different person because of it.

 

GEB - An Eternal Golden Braid

 

Fully agree. Borrowed it from a roommate and was up all night reading it. I can truly say I felt transcendent afterward.

Edited October 31, 2013 by Endy0816

[overtone]

-1 point for reading comprehension If his missing it out was without doubt deliberate - what does your missing of (an admittedly fleeting) reference point to?

Geez, there it is.

 

Sleep deprivation? Reading stuff on a screen (I despise doing that, and tend to skim)? Not the brevity - I was initially intrigued by "Fallows's omission", and looking for the reference. I suspected bad editing, on second thought after posting. But it's all better now. Any idea where I left my phone?

 

 

 

I struggle to see a functional distinction - metaphor is a form of analogy. Analogy is the catch-all term for terms of rhetorical comparison - metaphor simile allegory etc. What form of analogy other than metaphor do you say that Hofstadter unduly uses?

That's just it - his thesis seems to work for metaphor exactly and significantly and exclusively, and enlightens by specifically excluding - as a deep matter of function - such conventionally AI emulatable rhetorical acts as simile etc.

 

It is the fact that in human thought a curve ball thrown by a good pitcher is in some sense a "hammer" - that it is not "like" a hammer or similar to a hammer or separately comparable in some features to a hammer, but partakes directly of the nature of what we mentally create when we call "hammer" to attention, that seems central to what I am deriving as Hofstadter's approach.

 

But I have a long way to go - his books are too damn thick.

Edited October 31, 2013 by overtone

[imatfaal]

Ah yes I see what you mean - we could view the results of what deep blue is doing as analogous to the actions of a human player but if we referred to a human player as deep blue we would be hinting at something mechanical and non-human in his game play; this is of course Hofstadter's point that almost comes down to ends and means. I can see why you prefer the metaphor phrasing rather than the more catch-all analogy.