Surfaces and Essences
Shows how analogy-making pervades human thought at all levels, influencing the choice of words and phrases in speech, providing guidance in unfamiliar situations, and giving rise to great acts of imagination.
Stats for nerds
14recommend
29mentions
18people
2013–2026years
66% recommend31% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- “Surfaces and Essences” is one of my favourite books, but “I Am A Strange Loop” is probably his both most profound and accessible.
- 1. Please read the paper before making that judgement; it is brief. The paper is focused on variation of visual representation of concepts, not variation of concepts themselves. That the concepts of “smiley face” or “pizza” are sketched differently by different people does not mean that those different sketches are actually representing different concepts. They very clearly are still representing the same concepts.
2. However, there can absolutely be variation of concepts without necessitating treatment of those variations as separate concepts (up to a point). There are very strong arguments for understanding concepts as being very often not rigid but fluid/cloudy. Football and crossword puzzles are both wildly different variations of the concept of “games” for example, yet that concept is able to contain such disparate variations without becoming absurd or impractical. See Douglas Hofstadter’s books “Surfaces and Essences” and “ Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies ”; Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” also touches on this, as do many other reputable thinkers in philosophy of mind.
- So happy to see Hofstadter referenced!
He's the GOAT in my opinion for "thinking about thinking".
My own thinking on this is that AI actually IS thinking - but its like the MVB of thinking (minimum viable brain)
I find thought experiments the best for this sort of thing:
- Imagine you had long term memory loss so couldn't remember back very long
You'd still be thinking right?
- Next, imagine you go to sleep and lose consciousness for long periods
You'd still be thinking right?
- Next, imagine that when you're awake, you're in a coma and can't move, but we can measure your brain waves still.
You'd still be thinking right?
- Next, imagine you can't hear or feel either.
You'd still be thinking right?
- Next, imagine you were a sociopath who had no emotion.
You'd still be thinking right?
We're just not used to consciousness without any of the other "baggage" involved.
There are many separate aspects of life and shades of grey when it comes to awareness and thinking, but when you take it down to its core, it becomes very hard to differentiate between what an LLM does and what we call "thinking". You need to do it by recognizing the depths and kinds of thoughts that occur. Is the thinking "rote", or is something "special" going on. This is the stuff that Hofstadter gets into(he makes a case for recursion and capability being the "secret" piece - something that LLMs certainly have plumbing in place for!)
BTW, I recommend "Surfaces and Essences" and "I am a strange loop" also by Hofstadter. Good reads!
- Not related but I have been recommending Douglas's new popular book "Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking". He has few lectures on youtube on this topic in case you want to explore the content of the book before jumping in.
> Analogy is the core of all thinking. This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize–winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over thirty years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making complex ideas vivid, he has partnered with Sander to put forth a highly novel perspective on cognition. We are constantly faced with a swirling and intermingling multitude of ill-defined situations. Our brain’s job is to try to make sense of this unpredictable, swarming chaos of stimuli. How does it do so? The ceaseless hail of input triggers analogies galore, helping us to pinpoint the essence of what is going on. Often this means the spontaneous evocation of words, sometimes idioms, sometimes the triggering of nameless, long-buried memories. Why did two-year-old Camille proudly exclaim, “I undressed the banana!”? Why do people who hear a story often blurt out, “Exactly the same thing happened to me!” when it was a completely different event? How do we recognize an aggressive driver from a split-second glance in our rearview mirror? What in a friend’s remark triggers the offhand reply, “That’s just sour grapes”? What did Albert Einstein see that made him suspect that light consists of particles when a century of research had driven the final nail in the coffin of that long-dead idea? The answer to all these questions, of course, is analogy-making—the meat and potatoes, the heart and soul, the fuel and fire, the gist and the crux, the lifeblood and the wellsprings of thought. Analogy-making, far from happening at rare intervals, occurs at all moments, defining thinking from top to toe, from the tiniest and most fleeting thoughts to the most creative scientific insights. Like Gödel, Escher, Bach before it, Surfaces and Essences will profoundly enrich our understanding of our own minds. By plunging the reader into an extraordinary variety of colorful situations involving language, thought, and memory, by revealing bit by bit the constantly churning cognitive mechanisms normally completely hidden from view, and by discovering in them one central, invariant core—the incessant, unconscious quest for strong analogical links to past experiences—this book puts forth a radical and deeply surprising new vision of the act of thinking.
- Surfaces and essences - Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander
A great book about how all communication and thought is mediated through metaphor.
Douglas Hofstadter's books in general tend to be very thought-provoking.
- Hofstadter's books (such as Surfaces and Essences) provide a salutary reminder of how distant we are in AI technology in approach to a machine understanding of even ordinary human language expression. For those unfamiliar with his work, Hofstadter's premise is that analogy is the core of human cognition.
