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Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking
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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 30 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? 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.
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Audible Audiobook
Listening Length: 33 hours and 52 minutes
Program Type: Audiobook
Version: Unabridged
Publisher: Gildan Media, LLC
Audible.com Release Date: April 25, 2013
Whispersync for Voice: Ready
Language: English
ASIN: B00CJ01LHA
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
Yes, it's long. If one wants to argue that "some X are Y," the argument is easily made in a short book. If, on the other hand, one wants to argue that "ALL X are Y," it takes a few more pages. Hofstadter and Sandler not only need lots of examples to make their point, they also need to think of reasonable counterarguments to their thesis and address those. The book is not only fascinating, it's of real practical use. Much of my job requires explaining things to people, and I've found that each time I read it I become better at making analogies and finding the appropriate level of abstraction for an effective explanation. I'm about to read it a third time.
This book is fairly thick, but more than that, it's 530 pages are *dense*.Douglas Hofstadter, of course, is the author of GODEL ESCHER BACH and other fine meditations on the nature of mind and thought. In this collaboration with French cognitive scientist Emmanuel Sander, they propose, quite seriously and with a great deal of supporting evidence, examples, and argumentation, that the basic nature of thought - its "fuel and fire," as the subtitle would have it - is _analogy_.Summarized in my own words, the conception might go something like this:As babies, we have no knowledge about the world, but we have a powerful instinct to try and "make sense of" our experiences. We notice certain _patterns_ -- this experience _is like_ that experience -- and begin to build a sort of vocabulary of phenomena in our brainminds. Things that _are like_ each other become _categories_ (that's right, categories are the children of analogies), and, as we have more categories and fit more things into them, our experiences seem to make more "sense."We build a category of causes and effects - babies discover gravity by dropping things - and one of the effects we find is response to our vocalizations. Speech begins with words like "ma ma." We make this sound and our mother responds, usually in a way we find pleasurable. We make it more often, and associate it with that person. Eventually it becomes, for us, a name for that person. Later we discover that other children have mommies too, and the concept of "mama" expands to a category with multiple examples, but one unique example which is *our* mommy.To think about a thing is to consider it like other things. If we look at an object and call it a "table," we are saying it is _like_, in some fundamental and useful way, other things that have been called tables in our past experience.Hofstadter and Sander say all this better, at greater length, and with much more elaboration - plus, they say a great deal more - than this brief review can do. But that's the gist of it: analogies create categories, and analogies/categories are how we perceive the world.One important thing to understand is that "category," for the authors, is much more than "groups of concrete objects." There are abstract categories - for example, situations for which the phrase "buying a pig in a poke" is applicable. The pig is analogical, obviously; less obviously, it names a category of situations that might otherwise seem very unlike each other. "Buying a pig in a poke" might serve as a name for the category of "situations in which one makes a commitment without knowing whether what we will get in return is really worth it."The book ends with a sort of Platonic dialogue on the analogy nature of categories -- which itself ends in a slightly surreal twist.I can recommend this to anyone who thinks they can handle it. I'm not sure I could, but I did anyway.
I have read GEB at least 4 times, and have read all DH's other books (Le Ton Beau twice). Always a stretchfor the mind, this one was quite a slog to get through. It is built on what seems to me a simple and obvious premise - that consciousness and creativity are built from analogy. But the superstructure built onto this means that the same points seem to be being made over and over with an inordinate number of examples, instances etc. I think it could be slimmed down to a volume half the size, made the argument more strongly and be a better book.Definitely don't start here
This book might get 5 stars if it were one third the length. It needed an editor.Hofstadter says that since the book was written simultaneously in French and English it should be read simultaneously in French and English, if possible. However, amazon.com does not offer L'analogie : Coeur de la pensée, and neither amazon.ca nor amazon.fr offers it for kindle.Hofstadter makes a strong case that analogy is the heart of thought. He does a great job of pointing out that any category can be extended by analogy. In the process he extends the categories “category†and “analogy†by analogy. He represents the AI school based on analogy, as opposed to the categories of the “Ontology†AI school or the categories of mathematical category theory.Nihilists and deconstructionists have shown that any category con be extended by analogy to the point of meaninglessness. Hofstadter does not do this, but he does try to eliminate category as a category separate from analogy.Shared language relies on shared categories. It would be a shame to lose the category category in shared language.
Having loved other books of Hofstadter, I was quite disappointed with this one. While it does contain some fresh insights, the usual Hofstadter sparkle seems to be missing. The basic idea of the book is an important one, but I feel that this could have been done better as a long essay than as a full-length book.
Well-written with many, many examples. In fact, the sheer number of examples per concept was enough to deduct a star from the review. The ideas presented are well-explained and intriguing but the enumeration of examples detracts from the flow and consequently the reader's full understanding of the concept being argued/presented. I got lost remembering what the examples were exemplifying the first time I ran into such a list and have since only read a the first two examples per concept, rather than the fully enumerated list.Aside from that, I found the exploration of analogy fun and entertaining.
Firstly, you don't need nearly 600 pages to make the point. Secondly, more important than analogies is what makes an analogy right or wrong or what makes one work and what doesn't. To say all thinking analogical doesn't really help, does it?
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