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
