Friday, May 31, 2013

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: Surfaces and Essences

For the first installment of the Armchair Squid's free-for-all blog book club, I've been aiming to profile the new book by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking.  Problem is... I haven't finished this sucker yet!  It's almost a running gag that Hofstadter's books are long; this one clocks in at 592 pages and I've really only gotten to 135.  I considered switching from reading to skimming, to get further by now, but I don't want to short-change it.

I'm still thinking this book will be important in my ongoing quest to build a real-world version of Hesse's Glass Bead Game, so I'm intending to do a mini "progress report" with today's post, and just keep reading at my own pace.  The full review will come at some point.  :-)

Ah, Douglas Hofstadter.  He's becoming an internet meme for being the patron saint of "meta" (i.e., self-referentiality taken to the Nth degree).


His books have been considered difficult, but mind-expanding if approached with effort and earnestness.  Gödel-Escher-Bach (1979) won many awards for its mix of musings on intelligence (natural and un), complexity theory, and deep connections between far-flung fields.  G-E-B gave me an important weapon in my arsenal of Glass Bead Game concepts: it showed that the idea of "rising tension, followed by release" is central to a huge number of different kinds of human-created works of art and science -- especially sequential works that one experiences linearly in time.  I've blogged about that here and here.

Surfaces and Essences may be just as long and involved as G-E-B, but I think it's central thesis is much simpler to communicate:  Hofstadter and Sander claim that just about every step in a human being's thought process is governed by the making and manipulating of analogies.  They use a pretty broad definition of an "analogy:" any way of comparing something to something else, or noting that an idea has some commonality with another idea.  (They talk briefly about the formal logical kind of analogy -- sometimes known as the SAT analogy -- but these "jewels of precision and elegance" are only a tiny subset.)

The early chapters are full of interesting linguistic examples that show how we use words and phrases to help us define mental categories.  Once we have these (usually fuzzy-edged) categories swirling around in our brains, they help us approach new and unfamiliar situations.  When we see something new, we search our storehouse of categories for something similar to compare it to -- i.e., we search for apt analogies -- so we can make sense of the new data.  This is usually done unconsciously, all the time, as we navigate through life.  In some cases, the new data cause us to refine or redefine our categories; this happens much more frequently when we're very young and still learning to speak and understand others.

Above I mentioned "words and phrases," but it goes beyond that, to full stories.  Those can be useful categories, too.  If you see a colleague at work whom you know wanted to get a big promotion, then didn't get it, and then feigned relief at not having to go to boring meetings with all the higher-ups, you may recognize that immediately as an example of Aesop's fable of the fox and the sour grapes.  But making that connection is a very subtle thing.  Nobody can figure out how to teach a computer to recognize that kind of non-surface similarity, but our minds do it constantly.  Hofstadter and Sander go further to actually define sentient intelligence as the ability to size up a new situation quickly by identifying concepts that get to its core (i.e., that separate the relevant wheat from the useless chaff). In other words, intelligence is the ability to come up with strong and useful analogies!

Like I said, I'm only through the first few chapters.  There will be many more examples to come, and I'm especially excited to get to the chapters about how scientists, mathematicians, and artists have created super-insightful analogies that have rocked their fields to their foundations.  I'm also looking forward to the chapter titled "How We Manipulate Analogies," because I'm really wanting to know how I can exploit this knowledge to create a better Glass Bead Game!

More on this later!  :-)

21 comments:

  1. The title isn't coming to me but there's a Star Trek TNG episode that plays with this very idea. There's a civilization whose language is based entirely on references to commonly known stories.

    I like the progress report idea, Cyg. My wife is doing just such a project on her own blog with The Pickwick Papers.

    Thank you so much for participating and for helping to spread the word. I'll get June's bloghop list posted tomorrow.

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    1. Laoch beat me to the punch. Yeah, I was always kind of annoyed at that episode. I'm not sure why -- I love the idea of playing with language in that way, and subverting the TV-trope assumption of instant "universal translation." I think it ended up being a bit preachy in ways that it didn't need to be... :-)

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    2. TNG was good with what-if episodes. What if someone had a phobia of the transporter system? What if someone had a holodeck addiction? (Gotta love Lt. Barclay!) Dorak (thanks, Laoch!) was a nice one along those lines, too, I thought.

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  2. The Star Trek NG episode AS mentions is "Darmok"

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok

    My brother did his masters at IU and had Hofstadter as a teacher in some of his classes. He said he was pretty recursive and much more interesting in his asides than the main material. From your description it sounds like Hofstadter is drawing on a lot of Wittgensteinian ideas. I must add this to my reading list. Thanks for featuring it.

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    1. Thanks for finding the TNG episode! I've never read Wittgenstein... but I'll at least see what his Wikipedia page has to say about these ideas. :-)

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  3. Well, I've no doubt that Laoch will get to it but I WON'T! :D I've given up on books longer than 350 pages. No, I'm joking. But I have found that as time goes on, non-fiction clocking in at 400 or 500 or 600 (!) pages is becoming increasingly challenging for me to plow through. I'm sure this has to do with the tower on the night stand which seems to eerily expand while I sleep ...

    And you know just the mention of TNG eps while I still haven't watched OS 'Conscience of the King' or 'Balance of Terror' just drains me. I'm finding myself spending the teensiest bit more time at yoga than on reading -- and I don't mind the balance falling on physical vs. intellectual exertion at the moment.

    I will, however, look forward to the rest of your thoughts on this doorstop.

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    1. TOS and TNG are really very different species, despite surface commonalities like the name "Enterprise" and such. They eventually began to acknowledge that on TNG. There was an episode where Scotty guest-starred and experienced some major culture shock.

      Is it bad that I've been looking at this doorstop as if it was an albatross lately? (How many analogies are in that sentence?) :-)

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  4. Hi- popping in for the Cephalopod Coffeehouse. I wouldn't beat myself up over not finishing this book quickly. Seems to me this is something that needs to be read slowly- to absorb it all.

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    1. Hey, thanks for stopping by. Yeah, I may take a little break from it this coming month...

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  5. I'm impressed that you've read as far as you have. I've tried probably 3 times to read G-E-B, but just couldn't do it:( And I usually finish everything I start. So I await your finishing of this book & will just absorb your thoughts on it.

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    1. I'll do my best, Kerry! :-) I'm finding it harder to slog through these things in my mid-40s in comparison to how it was in my mid-20s. Still, I hold out hope that the coming chapters won't be much of a slog!

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  6. I love the idea of human thought being analogy-based. Also, I remember "Darmok." That was a fascinating episode. At least, the premise was. I don't remember the preachiness but I rarely remember more than the premise of most ST episodes.

    My husband is a Wittgenstein nerd, I will have to point him at Surfaces and Essences.

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    1. Maybe the preachiness is just in my memory. I'd have to watch it again to really remember what annoyed me about it. In seasons when TNG was sagging a bit in quality, my wife and I often approached watching it in a kind of MST3K mode. (We still refer to Picard as "Pickle," since he often seemed as unbendable as a fresh gherkin!)

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  7. There are some days I am glad I teach math! While words and phrases fascinate me (as do Trek and "Darmok" in particular) I'm nOt sure I would've made it as far as you did with this book....perhaps I'll do some googling tonight...

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    1. Oh, by all means check out Hofstadter's earlier books. He's a computer science guy first and foremost. If you survey people who started G-E-B but didn't finish it, the top one-word reason you'd get is probably "math!"

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  8. Wow, I am way out of my league here, but I'm going to comment anyway! I'm impressed by your ambitious book club choice and found Part I of your review to be very interesting. The comments, too. I'm looking forward to reading more as you read more. As for reading the book itself...well, stranger things have happened. There's no chance that 592 was a typo, is there? :-)

    Jenny at Choice City Native

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    1. Not a typo, but I admit to just copying the number amazon gives. It is a doorstop, though!

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  9. I'll have to read him at some point. (I feel as if I made that comment here already, probably during A-t-Z...)

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    1. April was such a whoosh of posts for me, I can't remember either. :-)

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