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Issue 3.11 | Nov 1995

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By Analogy (continued)

Archive Category:
Robots & AI


No. I think it's channeled my creativity in certain directions. Take Fats Waller - a great jazz musician. He just immersed himself in jazz. And he became more and more creative as he immersed himself more deeply. A deep immersion in anything makes you more creative, if you're creative to begin with. Constantly honing your faculties enhances you.

But I'm a bit wary of the idea that by thinking about creativity I can tweak the mechanisms that are responsible for my creativity. Some people say that by studying parallel processing, parallel hardware, parallel this and that, we develop a whole new paradigm for thought that will make us think differently. That's a really weird claim. It seems no more likely to me than that it will alter the mechanisms of our digestive tract. We can't modify those things! There's a fine line between what it means to have your thoughts shaped and having your thought processes shaped.

Wired: You often talk about the essences of things, as in your attempt to create a program that can extract the stylistic essence of the letter a from many kinds of alphabets. You talk about reducing complex things to their cores. Are you a Platonist? Do you believe all things have essences and cores?


Things are context-dependent. But if intelligence arose on another star system and somehow became aware of a situation that I too was aware of - and thought I really deeply understood - my hunch is the alien intelligence would understand the same thing I did. That's why we believe that prime numbers are going to be found by other civilizations.

I believe in the idea that intelligent creatures, wherever they are, when faced with complex situations, will see similar things in them - if they're really intelligent. Life is such that we have a certain way of filtering situations and finding what's at their core. Good intelligences, the kind that really survive well, will probably all be very similar to one another in their ability to do this.

Wired: Your new book is all about analogies and trying to understand how our minds understand statements like "Amsterdam is the San Francisco of Europe." If we make an analogy and say Richard Feynman was the coyote trickster of physics, then who is Douglas Hofstadter? Who are you? What's your role?


Hmmm. I guess I'm the type for whom analogy is the driving force behind the way I think. And I've managed to convince myself that analogy is really at the core of thinking - not just for myself, but for other people, too. I'm trying to put forth a vision of thought that involves - if you don't want to say "analogy-making" you can say "stripping away irrelevancies to get at the gist of things." I feel I've discovered something essential about what thinking is, and I'm on a crusade to make it clear to everybody. n

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