CS Colloquium
April 17, 2009
10:30 a.m., BCT C031, 15 Prospect Street

Host: Drew McDermott

Speaker: Douglas Hofstadter, Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition Indiana University
Title: Analogy as the Core of Cognition

Abstract: It has been stated that "cognition equals perception". The implications of this motto are profound.

Perception tells us not only that an object in front of us is an apple, but also that the driver of a car 500 meters behind us in the darkest of nights on the autostrada is aggressive and hostile. Perception tells us that the person on the radio commercial is female, is an adult, is a native speaker of English, and is smiling broadly. Perception tells us that a particular piece of music we've never heard before was composed in the early twentieth century by a French composer. Perception distinguishes between circumstances calling for "Thanks", "Thank you", "Thank you very much", "Thanks a million", and many other shades of gratitude. Perception tells us when we are facing a "sour-grapes" situation, when we are facing a "catch-22" situation, when we are facing a "tail wagging the dog" situation, when we are facing a "hoist by one's own petard" situation, and on and on, with no end in sight to the levels of abstraction that may be reached.

Perception, in short, is the evocation of one or more appropriate concepts by chunks of reality in which we find ourselves, and concepts run the gamut from the most concrete of nouns, verbs, and adjectives (etc.) to the most abstract of complex situations.
Moreover, any act of perception is an act at whose core is a mapping from something fresh and novel to something previously known -- and such a mental mapping is nothing other than an analogy.

If, thus, one takes the motto "cognition equals perception" seriously, one is led to the inevitable conclusion that the core mechanism of all human thinking is analogy-making.

Bio: Douglas Hofstadter is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington. His cognitive-science interests include the key role of analogy in thinking, the mechanisms of human thought, and the nature of consciousness.

He is also deeply involved in language and translation, and not only has written two books on those topics ("Le Ton beau de Marot" in 1997, plus "Translator, Trader", which has just been published) but also has translated three novels into English (including one in verse). Probably his best-known book is "Gödel, Escher, Bach", published in 1979, though a runner-up might be his 2007 book "I Am a Strange Loop" -- and by an amusing though essentially meaningless coincidence, his 1995 book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" (co-authored with the members of the Fluid Analogies Research Group) was the very first book ever sold on Amazon.