hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter


 * Metamagical Themas: Questing For the Essence of Mind and Pattern** by Douglas Hofstadter (1985)


 * Essay 26: Waking up from the Boolean Dream, or, Subcognition as Computation**

The central problem for AI is the question: //What is the letter 'a'?// (p. 633)

Perception is where it's at!

Slippability is central to thinking (p. 652) aka 'almost situations', 'subjunctive instant replays' any perceived situation is surrounded by a cluster, a halo, of alternative versions of itself to contrast what is with our way of seeing things sideways connections


 * Essay 12: //Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity//** (1982)

Slipping can follow unpredictable path - malapropism, malaphor

Knuth - with computers, we now are in the position of being able to describe not just a thing in itself, but how that thing would vary, eg. MetaFont (240)

variations of letter A on page 243!!!

implicosphere = implicit counterfactual sphere referring to things that never were but that we cannot help seeing anyway (247)

each new concept begins life as a compound of previous concepts, and that from the slippability of those concepts, it inherits a certain amount of slippability ...

"variations on a theme" ... encompasses knobs, parameters, slippability, counterfactual conditionals, subjunctives, "almost" - situations, implicospheres, conceptual skeletons, mental reification, memory retrieval ... (249)

Arthur Koestler .... Act of Creation .... presents a theory of creativity whose key concept he calls 'bisociation' - the simultaneous activation and interaction of two previously unconnected concepts ... something new can happen when two concepts 'collide' and fuse - something not present in the concepts themselves ... in keeping with Koestler's philosophy that wholes are somehow greater than the sum of their parts ... By contrast, I have been emphasizing the idea of the internal structure of one concept ... the divisibility of concepts into subconceptual elements (250)

BK: Koestler's holism neglects internal contradictions

Reader criticism ... making variations (ie. twisting knobs) is easy ... so how can genius be that easy? (251)

For a genius it is easy to be a genius

the crux of creativity is not in twiddling knobs, but in spotting them ... where do good knobs come from? ... from seeing one thing as something else ... (251)

- fresh situations get unconsciously framed in terms of familiar concepts - those familiar concepts come equipped with standard knobs to twiddle - twiddling those knobs carries you into fresh new conceptual territory (254)

making concept into a legitimate scientific term is the central goal of cognitive science

you let your memory and perceptual mechanism do all the hard work for you (pulling concepts from dormancy); all you do is twiddle knobs (255)

The concept of the implicosphere of an idea - the sphere of variations on it resulting from the twiddling of many knobs a "reasonable" amount - is a difficult one ...

Slippage of thought is a remarkably invisible phenomenon