Analogy as the Core of Cognition

This video has been bookmarked for 3 years and I am finally here.

Fast-forward to 13:40 to hear the actual presentation. (13 minutes of introduction? Seriously?)

we love you Doug! one of the greatest synthesists still alive today, inspired millions around the world with his ideas!

Read GEB twice and have to say that's not an easy thing, yet I still feel I need to check it out once more. Every time I learn so many things about myself and others, that I feel it would be a nice idea to have it as part of public literature.

At 59:30 he's talking about inadvertant combinatory words and pronunciation distortions, and unwittingly says something like "at one point I must have made 500 werrors per class". Combining w(ord)+error. Hah, awesome. Great talk btw, love it.

"Doug being disillusioned by his father about subscripts being analogous to superscripts in mathematics" would have been a good title too.

Nice to see a presentation with transparancies again. His book on analogies is great.

This guy makes such clever quips. He is a delightful speaker. We could all learn from his use of humor to illustrate his points and keep the audience's attention.

This makes a great deal of sense. If you consider that the cerebral cortex, which houses areas dedicated to language, is cross-mapped with other cortical areas dedicated to sensory processing and also higher levels of cognitive function, then language is immersed/housed in a massively, interconnected, parallel-processed associational matrix. The sentences we speak must "crystalize" out of these inter-twining, systemically-mapped, scrambled shadows of one map onto another. Given this, then the sorts of things Hofstadter is talking about are simply measurable byproducts of that mind-brain behavior/structure.

omg Hofstadter , i am gonna have to rewatch this, it's incredible actually as I find GEB difficult at times this really helps, really thanks for existing :)

Thought is (seeking) the highest level of abstraction. putting one's fingers on the essence of the situation, bouncing back and forth between the situation and the essence that it had reviled in its memory/memories

loved the applause after “sorry, I don’t use Powerpoint” lmao

WOW, the best way to enjoy my solitary Xmas eve 2020. WOW

The "fight" to come to a word or phrase I find really interesting. Not only that but the implications it has on communication. All these subtle dynamics sometimes are not so subtle and may completely change the direction of a conversation without either party planning it. I always found this an interesting limitation in human cognition. Nice to have someone else think so and lay it out a bit more thoroughly, although I wish it was even more thorough still, heh.

I love how he uses an OHP. Great talk! As a linguist, I immediately thought about Hermann Paul when Hofstadter mentioned proportional analogies.

He comments at 28:02 (in the 1:08:37 version of Apr/'20) that his thought -- which he should have described as a micro-seconds short mental picture -- was so "fleeting" that it nearly escaped his notice. As a songwriter, a key to capturing the purity and power of such a flashing mental picture is the following. Be very aware of these flashes and try (to the extent possible) to slow them, track them, and absorb them. It's a challenge.

When I decided to take a break from rap music and other mindless pursuits I listened to this lecture as a developing young man. It was a turning point for me to think differently about the world. Thank you Stanford for allowing me a "seat" at the table to see something I never would otherwise.

Creativity is the ability to see analogies in disparate things, as evidenced by the metaphysical poets who, as described by Johnson, yoke together heterogeneous images by violence in metaphysical conceits. When we nurture our ability to analogize, we develop our intellect and our creativity in whatever area of study we apply it to. Even the way science sees the world, as Kuhn has pointed out, is with ever-shifting analogy.

Sometimes these transient word blends become so ingrained, you intentionally memorize and carry them forward. One of my personal favorites as I've grown older and math has become more integrated into my daily life: Probablemistic. Probably problematic. But I don't have the statistics. It's a blend of 3 words and sums up an entire paragraph explaining that I don't see a problem, but I expect one when scaling, and that I'd like to have more proof before believing in the suggestion. One day this word came out, completely by accident. The crazy part is that my coworker naturally understood exactly what I meant without it needing explained. And I caught it and realized that it was a really good term in a sense. Fits this talk nicely. It's also a good measure of group cohesion when you find people using these word blends naturally amongst each other: If they understand and can naturally, without great hesitation, use the same localized terminologies.. They probably think in ways that they find easy to communicate to those around them. My older brother, who was my practical machining tutor of a sort at a young age, often uses the term "force and intent." But at times, when a high pressure system is leaking and he needs to communicate that I have to close this with "force and intent" will instead just shout the word "FORTENT!" This is his way of quickly yelling "just close the dang thing as hard as you can, it's not going to break but you don't have much time." That one word is a safety mechanism that has prevented damage and injury, resulting from one time he was too worried and panicked to communicate the whole phrase. Ironically, as we're both former military.. We find the formal language and syntax of communications in the military to be lacking in this regard: Concepts that can be communicated in half of a second take 6 seconds to express.. While they'll use acronyms like OPSEC to shorten terms in a briefing, in the field they won't shout something like "Bear 3, 4!" Which is something he and I use in online gaming: 4 targets visibly centered at bearing of roughly 30 degrees. Response time is key, and finding shorthand is actually a way to react faster... But because it sounds so informal, you'd never hear that on a radio in operations.. Even though for us, it's become an effective communication device for expressing the most important details as quickly as possible.

Thanks man, that is some seriously voluminous introducing they got in there.