E26: Hofstadter's Scrumptious Edibles - Analogy as the Core of Cognition

The Dawdler's Philosophy

Does A = A or not!? Or is it just approximate? Or none of it…

We Dawdlers take a dip into the book Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander on the significance of analogy-making in thinking.

00:04:40 – The book itself

00:14:30 – The man himself // Form and content

00:18:06 – The form of the content // The main thesis

00:25:15 – Analogy and category // Category, concept, and classification

00:32:22 – Aristotelian and Wittgensteinian styles

00:37:02 – What makes all “A’s” the “same”? // Conceptual skeletons at the gist level

00:43:26 – Ryan derails the discussion (homology)

00:50:06 – A test of analogies (?) // Aesthetics in analogy-making // Analogy-making is quasi-arbitrary

01:03:22 – Ryan derails the discussion once more (homology again)

01:15:31 – Influences on encoding // Organs of perception, etc. // A “biology” of convenience

01:27:44 – Ryan’s natural history of Doug’s abstractions on cognition

01:34:35 – Intelligence via analogy-making

01:39:01 – Einstein’s analogical quantum leap