
Douglas Hofstadter has a new book - yarapavan
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465018475/
======
Jun8
Great news! Even when it's overwrought and opinionated, Hofstadter's writing
is never boring, _Le Ton Beau de Marot_ is, I think, one of the best books on
translation. There isn't too much (English) information on Emmanuel Sander
(other than his homepage:
[http://paragraphe.crac.free.fr/articles.php?lng=en&pg=79](http://paragraphe.crac.free.fr/articles.php?lng=en&pg=79),
Google seriously needs a semantic clustering algorithm for results, btw, had
to laboriously sift through results for Emmanuel Sanders).

Looking at the excerpt at Amazon, I learned that (i) Hofstadter married again
(see them dancing here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeB-wu7aV0w>)
recently, which is totally irrelevant to the book, but was interesting to me
since I was much moved from his heartfelt sorrow after his wife's death so
eloquently expressed in _Le Ton beau_ and (ii) there's a figure of speech
called _zeugma_ that I've never heard before
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeugma>), mentioned on pg. 5.

~~~
scrame
"I am a Strange Loop" had quite a bit of fixation on his wife's death as well,
I'm glad to hear he has re-married.

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dribnet
A great read by Hofstadter on Analogy as the Core of Cognition is here:
[http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.h...](http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.html)

I'm a big fan of Hofstadter and his emphasis on analogy. George Lakoff has and
others from cognative semantics provide strongly supporting views from
linguistics.

And in Machine Learning, Deep Learning is now providing new support for these
views on analogy. This isn't immediately obvious until realizing that analogy
is not necessarily an active process more likely a passive result of how
thoughts and memories are encoded and stored. I'm curious as to whether
Hofstadter will address this in this book - I would imagine so as he was long
ago excited by earlier similar ML approaches (Sparse Distributed Memory).

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chubot
Hm, so back in 2000 I met a girl at Stanford whose senior thesis was based on
the idea that _metaphor_ is the core of all thought.

I remember giving the counterexample of a mathematical formula. In what way is
e^i*pi = -1 a metaphor for anything? What role does analogy play in this idea?

Looking back, I am open to the fact that mathematicians use analogy to come up
with their ideas (but perhaps not metaphor, which seems essentially literary)
Mathematics is funny because it is presented in "reverse", i.e. not the way it
was derived.

Anyway I will have to read it, although I am slightly skeptical of ideas that
try to explain "everything". In retrospect Taleb's Antifragile had some of
that flavor, although I thought it was very good.

EDIT: I think it's probably accurate to say that the brain is fundamentally an
association machine. Analogies are a form of association, but not all
associations are analogies. This very post is a great example of an
association (not an analogy), because when I read "analogy is the core of all
thought" it made me think of the disputed "metaphor is the core of all
thought" idea I heard a long time ago.

~~~
pvarangot

      > In what way is e^i*pi = -1 a metaphor for anything?
    

Its a metaphor for taking the unit length vector [1,0] represented by the
complex number 1+0i and rotating it 180 degrees to -1+0i...

    
    
      > Mathematics is funny because it is presented in
      > "reverse", i.e. not the way it was derived.
    

Its usually presented in both ways in most curricula, sometimes depending on
where you read about it or who teaches/tells you about it. Most mathematical
books include historical contexts and non-formal accounts of the way results
were derived, specially for classic and old results such as Euler's Formula.
In most modern topics sometimes the historical context for a theorem is not
easy to understand (i.e. discrete signal processing or optimal control) and is
only briefly mentioned.

~~~
chubot
I appreciate what you're saying, but see my response below about semantics.

If you are calling it a metaphor, then aren't you calling ALL equations
metaphors? That is doing violence to the meaning of the word "metaphor".

There is for sure a "relation" (or association) between the symbols e^i*pi =
-1 and the picture of a unit vector on a complex plane. But that relation is
not a metaphor.

~~~
Evbn
You can prove that equality using pure analysis, or pure geometry, using
appropriate definitions. The metaphor is the intuition that the two proofs are
equivalent in an abstract sense.

------
dsr_
July 1994: Amazon.com sells first book, "Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies:
Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought" -- at
[http://phx.corporate-
ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=iro...](http://phx.corporate-
ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-corporateTimeline)

That's pretty cool right there.

~~~
raldi
I don't mean this in a rude way; I'm just confused: How is your comment at all
relevant to this submission?

Also, why are the dates all out of order?

~~~
unwind
The first book sold was written by the same author the submission is about.

The Wikipedia entry on the professor also mentions this fact from the Amazon
history
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter#In_popular_c...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter#In_popular_culture)).

------
themgt
The idea that analogy underpins all thought is also argued by Ian McGilchrist
in his book Master and His Emissary, which I'd highly recommend to people
interested in the sort of epic philosophical undertaking GEB was:
[http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/The_Master_and_his_Emissary_b...](http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/The_Master_and_his_Emissary_by_McGilchrist.pdf)

------
lhnz
I agree with the premise that analogy is the core of all thinking, but the
idea isn't new, at the very least I can trace it back to Julian Jaynes' 1976
book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and
it's highly probable other's have thought this through even before then.

------
gwern
Sounds like he's getting back to his research; which is good, since maybe it
won't be as maudlin and self-indulgent as _I Am A Strange Loop_ was.

~~~
craig552uk
I wasn't a fan of 'Strange Loop' either. I'll be buying this one though.

~~~
zwischenzug
Glad to hear I wasn't the only one disappointed by it.

------
devindotcom
How interesting - I've been leaving GEB on the coffee table in hopes that I
might pick it up and start it again (made it halfway about 10 years ago) but
now I wonder whether I ought to pick this up. Thanks for letting us know.

~~~
rhizome
GEB is the most popular book nobody has read.

~~~
tspiteri
I think it just doesn't work for everyone. While many people seem to love it,
I failed to read it, twice. I think I got his point about self-reference and
conciousness in the introduction, but from then on I found it so mind-
numbingly boring I just couldn't continue reading past a couple of chapters.
To me it seemed like he was going round and round re-explaining the same
points over and over. In fact I thought reading GEB must be a hazing exercise
for geeks. But then, since lots of people do seem to enjoy it, I guess it
might just be one of those love-it-or-hate-it things.

~~~
hp50g
Agreed. It seems disjoint and mostly hot air recycled over and over. Its not
just you: there are a lot of us. My copy has done the rounds in the office and
the conclusion is the same universally.

If the content was concise or written in the style of say Persig, Neal
Stevenson or Ray Bradbury, I could stomach it.

Then again even worse is Ray Kurzweil who manages to do a GEB with far less
content and that content is dubious and contrived rubbish.

------
zwischenzug
I wrote to DH around 2000 after a discussion I had with a friend about
Wittgenstein and GEB. It was a pretty callow email, but he was kind enough to
send a thoughtful reply.

He said he didn't know much about Wittg., but didn't like his vagueness, which
I found interesting from someone who was into Zen.

~~~
teeja
I'd suggest that the difference is that Zen (at least in some schools) is
after a meta-cognitive _experience_ (by definition inexpressible in concrete
terms) which transcends (even short circuits) cognition - whereas the aim of
Western philosophy (at least in some schools) is a _description_ of experience
in concrete terms accessible to the intellect.

I oversimplify, of course. But the extent to which Hofstadter is "into" Zen is
open to question. (I don't remember much Zen in GEB.)

~~~
zwischenzug
Precisely. Wittgenstein was (in approach at least) a reaction against Western
philosophy, and his "vagueness" was a consequence of that.

------
dirtyaura
An interesting subject. Elon Musk has been saying that it's important to
reason from first principles and not by analogy. A lot of reasoning in startup
world seems to be by analogy - the epitome being "AirBnB for Cars" type of
elevator pitches.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I was just watching a talk by him where he clearly says that it's impossible
to do this all the time, that you would go insane without using analogical
thinking all day. But that it's a useful exercise when you are trying to sit
down and find an innovative solution to a problem.

------
burgreblast
>Analogy is the core of all thinking.

Explains why great pitches are stories.

