Reddit reviews Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

The analogy dig bugged me too, but not just because of the hypocrisy. Douglas Hofstadter (who is an intellectual heavyweight to say the least) has argued extensively for the position that analogy is the fundamental core of all thinking. If someone like Hofstadter calls analogy the "fuel and fire of thinking" I would listen to him before I would an economist turned cartoonist...

Hofstadter has expanded that idea into a 500+ pg book, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel & Fire of Thinking.

This view also seems to be gaining a foothold in the computer vision community. I recall a recent talk by a UC Berkeley professor specializing in CV, Alyosha Efros, IIRC, the main theme of which was: Ask not "what is this?", ask "what is this like?"

BTW, Bongard problems seem like a far better test for intelligence than the vague Turing test.

It's possible to bypass the "is it permissible?" question by pointing out that our use of language is thoroughly saturated with analogies and metaphors. So much so that it seems impossible to conceive of a way of thinking and talking that excludes metaphors as tools of the living language. This point has been pretty extensively argued in Doug Hofstatder's Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking.

Even if we could conceive of a metaphor-free language, that language would not be our own, so it may follow that the question of permissibility is bypassed on the grounds that there is no alternative.

> The funny thing is, this is probably the exact same way the human brain works to think.

Not necessarily. Many believe it is though analogy, which Douglas Hofstadter (of G.E.B. fame) has been working on for decades. You can read more about his work and ideas on this subject in the book Surfaces and Essences.

Hofstadter had this to say on the importance of Bongard problems in What are A and I?:

>... It is clear that in the solution of Bongard problems, perception is pervaded by intelligence, and intelligence by perception; they intermingle in such a profound way that one could not hope to tease them apart. In fact, this phenomenon had already been recognized by some psychologists, and even celebrated in a rather catchy little slogan: "Cognition equals perception"...
>
>...Sadly, Bongard's insights did not have much effect on either the AI world or the PR [pattern recognition] world, even though in some sense his puzzles provide a bridge between the two worlds, and suggest a deep interconnection. However, they certainly had a far-reaching effect on me, in that they pointed out that perception is far more than the recognition of members of already-established categories--it involves the spontaneous manufacture of new categories at arbitrary levels of abstraction. As I said earlier, this idea suggested in my mind a profound relationship between perception and analogy-making--indeed, it suggested that analogy-making is simply an abstract form of perception, and that the modeling of analogy-making on a computer ought to be based on models of perception...

It is unfortunate that Hofstader's insight on Bongard's insights still hasn't had much effect on the AGI world (AFAIK, no mention on the opencog group) or the ML [machine learning] world!

BTW, Hofstadter has expanded the latter portion of the 2nd paragraph above into a 500 page book published just last month: Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. Has anyone here read it?

All of the above and more. This is a large area of philosophy of biology and of biology itself. Huge amounts of literature on the gene concept. You could start with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article and move on to Keywords in Evolutionary Biology.

It is indeed a foolish question in the sense that thinking there is one and only one gene concept that works for everything and all uses is the wrong way to think about concepts (never mind the gene concept). I just started reading Surfaces and Essences and am taken by its argument.

Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Douglas Hofstadter


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36OscZs3cCQ

The expansion of the term hemiola to mean things other than 3:2 groupings is a natural process of the acquisition of language. We learn a rule or a meaning and generalize. Check out Surfaces and Essences for this process of analogizing—it is excellent even if it’s a bit example heavy.

I got the idea of a hemiola being a note that is held over the end of one bar into another, but that’s because I heard the term from someone who either didn’t understand or didn’t properly explain it. Judging from your experience and the comments of some others, similarly vague and over-generalized definitions seem to be pretty widespread, which as a linguist, makes me want to encourage the redefinition of hemiola to be broader and more useful.

Some of it just recognition - if you see something in a book that reminds you of something you read about in another book, or something you know about the world, or history, or religion, then your mind may make the leap to say "Oh, this is a symbolic reference to trench warfare in France during WWI" or whatever. So the more "stuff" you know about, the more equipped you are to recognize references. So studying history, religion, economics, world news, various natural sciences, etc., etc. will help you with this And the more you know about the author you're reading, the time he/she lived and wrote in, etc., the more you can pick up on.

Note though that a lot of this symblic stuff is indirect / abstract... they are vague allusions using analogy or metaphor, and not necessarily explicit. So the more you develop your capacity for abstract thinking, thinking in metaphors, etc., the better. To that end, you might consider reading Metaphors We Live By, Surfaces and Essences, and similar books.

Also, a lot of "symbolism" is rooted in the thinking of Freud and Jung, even to this day. A lot of Freud's stuff has been discredited now, but from a "cultural literacy" standpoint, it wouldn't hurt to read his book on dream interpretation, as well as some of Jung's stuff. The stuff about archetypes and the "collective unconscious" would be good.

Also, a lot of symbolism may be rooted in, or linked by metaphor, to existing mythology. Some ideas from myth are tropes that appear again and again. With that in mind, I'd suggest reading The Hero With A Thousand Faces and The Hero's Journey by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. If you're really interested, any and all of his other books would probably be useful as well.

One last final note: It's entirely possible that all of most of this "symbolism in literature" stuff is total bullshit. What I mean is, you (or I, or whoever) can "find" all sorts of symbolic links in a work, and find arguments to support that link. But unless the author is still alive, and willing to confirm or deny his intent, you never really know if the "link" you've found is really "a thing" put there by the author, or just your own overactive imagination running wild.

I'm afraid it's not a secret. Someone wrote a book about it.