Monday, Nov. 7, 2011 - 7:30 p.m.
Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011 - 8:00 p.m.Douglas R. Hofstadter
Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2009
Analogy as the Core of Cognition
Location: Grand Hall, Rice Memorial Center (building 57 on the campus map) • Time: 8 p.m.
It has been pithily stated that “cognition equals perception.” Douglas Hofstadter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,” argues that if that statement is taken seriously, it must lead to the inevitable conclusion that the core mechanism of all human thinking is analogy-making.
Perception tells us that an object in front of us is an apple and that the driver of a car behind us is aggressive and hostile. Perception tells us that the person on the radio commercial is an adult female, a native speaker of English and smiling broadly. Perception tells us when we are facing a “sour grapes” situation, a “catch-22” situation, a “tail wagging the dog” situation, and so on, with no end to the levels of abstraction that may be reached. Thus, perception’s core act is a mapping from something fresh and novel to something previously known — and such a mental mapping is nothing other than an analogy.
Director of the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University, Hofstadter has long been interested in exploring the mysteries of consciousness, free will, soul and “I”. His numerous other books include “I Am a Strange Loop,” winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society.
