Image courtesy of BING AI AI Provides a helpful summary of its own summaries: The book "Surface and Essences" by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander explores key concepts related to human thought and language. It emphasizes the importance of analogy, category, essence, metaphor, blending, pattern recognition, and recursive thinking in shaping our understanding and creative thinking. The book challenges conventional wisdom and offers insights into perceiving, understanding, and creating meaning. (I) value the book for its insights into systematic thought and the limitations of language.   (I) also mention Antonio Damasio's book "Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds," which explores the relationship between emotions and cognition. Damasio argues that emotions play a crucial role in guiding our thoughts and actions and that our sense of self is shaped by emotional experiences. Overall, both books offer comprehensive perspectives on human cognition and consciousness

Thinking about how our "normal" experience is deeply analogous (isomorphic) with virtual reality. We all have a different idea of what is going on "beneath the surface" but much of this depends on language. The "Matrix" idea is not as interesting as people think. In that fantasy people still have a real brain. Whether or not we actually do have a real brain or just an illusion of one seems to be hardly worth discussing. What is worth discussing is how interaction with the real world (or something!!) turns into the rich "gold standard" VR of everyday life.

This is an experimental blog post. The idea was to simply talk about a range of issues with the aim of creating a "mind map", then using the map to create traditional posts that are more structured and focused. But along the way, I wondered if I could post the original voice note So, to test this, click on the link below, which will show you a LINK to the audio Store that and play it. Your machine will probably have an app that plays audio. In my case, it's iTunes. This talk can be indexed just like a text essay. In the long run, the plan is to take notes on my own "rant" in mind map form (which can also be shown in the blog). A Random Talk

  Proust and the Squid is a classic analysis of reading. Reading is a learned activity that involves nested multi-tasking between  Character recognition Word recognition Sentence parsing  Context detection Imagination - the oldest form of Virtual Reality Criticism  Both Hawkins' Frame theory and Surfaces and Essences analogy-based theory is relevant. I lost the actual hard copy but finally remembered the title and bought the book for Kindle.

BOXES One fanciful vision of the (flat) Earth was that it was supported on the back of a turtle, which was, in turn, standing on another turtle and so on:  Turtles all the way down . Similarly, I find it useful to think of "boxes within boxes all the way down." Box 1 is the world we experience "in our head," which includes all experience and everything we know. In particular, it includes what we have been taught and what we have been taught to assume, which is, to a certain extent, " programmed ". Box 1 is the " matrix " of individually shared reality. But, unlike the Matrix of Science Fiction fame, our matrix depends deeply on the "real world" outside and our senses within, as eloquently explained by Antonio Damasio . Our evolutionary survival strategy involves survival as a member of a group, or " super person ". Not only do we not "think for ourselves," we can't . We experience ourselves as o

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Most people shy away from simple math. In fact, publishers demand that no equations, however simply don't appear in popular books. From this perspective, the simple graphs and equations that appear in introductory textbooks appear sophisticated. In particular, these tools have a hard time presenting anything but a super simple, static picture of the world. If you approach the same situation with different tools, a very different picture emerges. Even simple computer simulations can show complex behavior that can't be reduced to equations of any sort. I played around with this idea a bit but abandoned it because it would have involved an unrealistic effort to implement it. However, even while simply drawing up a specification, you can see the kind of things a model could address. Most important is the question of stability or even a stable pattern of oscillation. Model specifications seem t

The idea of the meme was invented by Richard Dawkins and hammered into its most robust form by Daniel Dennett. It is an extended analogy that claims that human ideas are somehow like genes and have their own process of evolution independent of the evolution going on in their "hosts", the human race. It's an attractive idea and it works well as a rhetorical device, especially the way that Dawkins and Dennett use it to attack religion as an infection of the brain. True believers in "memetics" claim that all of human thought is "infection" by memes - a strong claim that memetics is a fundamental explanation of mind. Memeticists claim that the brain is a "meme machine". The problem comes when you try to apply memes outside of the examples trotted out by the "founders". Personally, I can't figure out what a "meme" is. The old words of ideas, doctrines, theories and especially paradigm seem perfectly serviceable and don'

I have a coffee cup in front of me (I usually do). If I rotate it or move or see it in different light it my brain automatically makes me experience it as the same cup. If you have ever tried to make a computer figure this out, you will see how astonishing this is. What's more, the cup will be seen as the same cup tomorrow and the same as the cup that I washed a week ago (or is it two weeks? The point is, that doesn't matter). This is symmetry under a transformation in time and space . It takes place so automatically that most of us will go through our entire lives without thinking of it at all. There is another, related, trick that the brain does. It makes me "see" the cup as a form . A form is a bunch of "stuff" that is more or less arbitrarily treated as the "same thing". My dog is quite capable of seeing a flying tennis ball as a "thing" that can be snatched out of the air, but she seems to be uninterested in the "things" sh

Surfaces and Essences I have known my wife for almost 50 years. I'm still only vaguely aware of what it is "like" to be her. But language is a big help. I know what it is like when her back hurts and how she feels when the neighbors block our driveway. But some things I will never understand, such as the way she intercepts everything on its way to the recycle bin and thinks of ways to use it in her Kindergarten class. But here, language comes to the rescue. We invent a word. A private word that is known only to her and me. KINDERGARBAGE.  We have invented a new name for a situation, thus creating a bridge between her mind and mine. We both know what kindergarbage is. It's a new category . We both recognize when any particular object is in this category, although she is much more inclusive than I am. "Surfaces and Essences" is about the magic of language - specifically our ability to instantly form  new categories and instantly recognize them by analogy. If

If IQ is a measure of intelligence, we are much smarter than previous generations. This is a verified fact. In this presentation, Flynn himself analyses the effect. At the core of his argument is the idea that we are getting better and better at considering the "hypothetical". This can also be seen as an enhanced capability to use analogy and find abstract categories: an ability that increases with successive generations. Taking it all together, we see the power of analogy growing through time. In other words, it's culture as a whole that's getting "smarter".

Questions: Is thought based on "nothing but" analogies? Prevailing theories of "attention" (the "pointy end" of consciousness) focus on "working memory", which has a limited ability to juggle "things". Working memory therefore tries to "cheat" by making "chunks" of percepts. For example, not four lines -- a square. In general, some kind of pattern. What is the relationship between "pattern" and "analogy". Are there not patterns that are not clearly analogies? It would seem that, once recognized, a pattern can be the source of a new analogy, but perhaps analogy is a special case of pattern and it's pattern seeking that's the "fuel" of idea creation. "Pattern recognition" is the mental model behind modern efforts at machine perception What is meant by "our" concepts? Do the insights of S&E apply to "the" mind or the mechanism of a cultural mind - t

The idea of a meme was introduced by Richard Dawkins in a final chapter of his popular 1976 book on genetics: "The Selfish Gene". Dawkins kicks around the meme idea with philosopher Daniel Dennett here . Even after 40 years, Dawkins still brings up the meme constantly, especially when he's talking about religion as a meme that "infects" the human brain. The word "meme" is now tossed around quite freely, almost a synonym for "idea", but usually confined to a "big idea" or at least one that is effectively communicated from person to person and somehow "survives" competition with competing ideas. Given " Surfaces and Essences " (S&E), we can immediately see that the meme is an explicit analogy with the gene. We can also ask if it's a very good analogy. Does it lead us to understand anything about ideas that we can't easily see without it? Does it mislead us to think that ideas have properties or behavior

This post compares Noam Chomsky's Linguistics to the ideas put forward in "Surfaces and Essences" - S&E- by Hofstadter and Salter. A good introduction to Chomsky's theories can be obtained in: " Noam Chomsky on Linguistics " For anyone new to Chomsky, I suggest that you read S&E first. While Chomsky is confident that analogies (the core of S&E) are irrelevant to the study of linguistics, anyone familiar with S&E will find themselves shouting at Chomsky's video. THE INNATE CAPACITY OF LANGUAGE It seems to me that Chomsky's theory harks back to an era when theories of computation were in vogue, especially at Chomsky's home base, MIT. His linguistic theory (Universal Grammar) is closely analogous (oops) to fledgling formalism behind the new computer languages being developed in the 1950's. His core assumptions seem to be: Language is an innate capacity of humans; Language is computational in its essence. It is a computational pro

This post compares Noam Chomsky's Linguistics to the ideas put forward in "Surfaces and Essences" - S&E- by Hofstadter and Salter. A good introduction to Chomsky's theories can be obtained in: " Noam Chomsky on Linguistics " For anyone new to Chomsky, I suggest that you read S&E first. While Chomsky is confident that analogies (the core of S&E) are irrelevant to the study of linguistics, anyone familiar with S&E will find themselves shouting at Chomsky's video. THE INNATE CAPACITY OF LANGUAGE It seems to me that Chomsky's theory harks back to an era when theories of computation were in vogue, especially at Chomsky's home base, MIT. His linguistic theory (Universal Grammar) is closely analogous (oops) to fledgling formalism behind the new computer languages being developed in the 1950's. His core assumptions seem to be: Language is an innate capacity of humans; Language is computational in its essence. It is a computational pro