Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies

What Hacker News says

1. taybinAug 2026
   You should see his book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, which is entirely about his experiments with AI in The Fluid Analogies Research Group with his grad students. Although I wonder if those techniques could be paired with LLMs somehow.
   thread
2. ctdcoJul 2026
   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.

   Show morethread
3. VivtekSep 2025
   Gary McGraw was the first doctoral candidate to work on the Letter Spirit project:

   https://web.archive.org/web/20220331021500/http://goosie.cog...

   And John Rehling did a second portion in his doctoral work:

   https://web.archive.org/web/20150320160815/https://www.cogsc...

   (Thanks for this complaint - I hadn't realized that Rehling's thesis was linked from the Waybacked version of his personal page, and that finally completes my collection!)

   You can also read Chapter 10 in Hofstadter's 1995 book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" for a pretty solid overview.

   But yeah, seeing this project immediately reminded me of Letter Spirit, since it's basically a web editor for gridfonts.

   Show morethread
4. nicclMar 2024
   Not the original commenter but I'd include:

   Vanity Fair by Thackeray

   Mr Johnson by Joyce Cary

   Lavengro and Romany Rye by George Borrow

   The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan

   Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies by Douglas Hofstadter et al.

   Identity Crisis by Ben Elton

   Show morethread
5. nicclSep 2022
   The other Hofstadter gem is Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies.
   thread
6. throwawaymathsJun 2022
   You should read "fluid concepts and creative analogies", it's about his AI research results.
   thread