Bootstraps
I can never tell if my "hits" are from robots or human beings. Please do me a huge favor and leave a comment, however short, to tell me someone is out there reading this stuff ...
I owe Hofstadter a huge debt of gratitude for his "Surfaces and Essences" and, to a lesser extent "I Am a Strange Loop". He points out the central role that analogy plays in our thinking and, in Strange Loop, the fact that we "bootstrap" our idea of what it is to be human through an analogy between our own experience and that of others. Our conviction that the world is full of folks like us and that we are a person such as those around us is ultimately based on analogy.
We then proceed to endlessly refine this most fundamental of analogies. What is it like to be somebody else? Let me explain what it is like to be me. I wonder what it would be like to be James Bond? Or Superman? Or God?
Such curiosity leads us quickly into deep trouble.
By analogy, we ask ourselves how the world came about and why things happen in it. By analogy we imagine a person or persons "behind the scenes" controlling everything. Like us, "he" has plans, a will, and who knows what abilities. Like us, he can be persuaded, flattered, angered. Like us, he has a strong sense of what is right and wrong - rules that are often beyond the ken of his "children".
It is hard for us to imagine an alternative source of all the phenomena in the universe. We have no choice but to build on what we know - to extend our analogies into realms where they become less and less apt. Or, in the words of Hofstadter, farther and farther from the "essence" of the matter.
I saw this in High School, where we were told that the atom is "like" a little Solar System, with electrons whizzing around the nucleus. This is impossible, as we soon learned in University Physics, but what is actually happening is hard to grasp (some say impossible) since the atom is not like anything in our experience.
We find the same problem with issues in astronomy and cosmology, where we leave the world of everyday experience behind. We cannot wrap our minds around the "Big Bang" theory, because it requires something to begin without anything at all happening before that. What category of phenomena does that belong to? And what about dark matter? What we see is gravitation without any kind of "stuff" like anything we know.
In a way, Science is all about discovering totally new categories: things, events, relationships that have no parallel in our previous experience. One subtle pleasure I have experienced since my High School days is to sit in on lectures by people who are comfortable with what the atom really is. Each new example like this opens so many doors ...
I owe Hofstadter a huge debt of gratitude for his "Surfaces and Essences" and, to a lesser extent "I Am a Strange Loop". He points out the central role that analogy plays in our thinking and, in Strange Loop, the fact that we "bootstrap" our idea of what it is to be human through an analogy between our own experience and that of others. Our conviction that the world is full of folks like us and that we are a person such as those around us is ultimately based on analogy.
We then proceed to endlessly refine this most fundamental of analogies. What is it like to be somebody else? Let me explain what it is like to be me. I wonder what it would be like to be James Bond? Or Superman? Or God?
Such curiosity leads us quickly into deep trouble.
By analogy, we ask ourselves how the world came about and why things happen in it. By analogy we imagine a person or persons "behind the scenes" controlling everything. Like us, "he" has plans, a will, and who knows what abilities. Like us, he can be persuaded, flattered, angered. Like us, he has a strong sense of what is right and wrong - rules that are often beyond the ken of his "children".
It is hard for us to imagine an alternative source of all the phenomena in the universe. We have no choice but to build on what we know - to extend our analogies into realms where they become less and less apt. Or, in the words of Hofstadter, farther and farther from the "essence" of the matter.
I saw this in High School, where we were told that the atom is "like" a little Solar System, with electrons whizzing around the nucleus. This is impossible, as we soon learned in University Physics, but what is actually happening is hard to grasp (some say impossible) since the atom is not like anything in our experience.
We find the same problem with issues in astronomy and cosmology, where we leave the world of everyday experience behind. We cannot wrap our minds around the "Big Bang" theory, because it requires something to begin without anything at all happening before that. What category of phenomena does that belong to? And what about dark matter? What we see is gravitation without any kind of "stuff" like anything we know.
In a way, Science is all about discovering totally new categories: things, events, relationships that have no parallel in our previous experience. One subtle pleasure I have experienced since my High School days is to sit in on lectures by people who are comfortable with what the atom really is. Each new example like this opens so many doors ...
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