Douglas Hofstadter

Surfaces and Essences

by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander  · 10 Sep 2012  · 1,079pp  · 321,718 words

SURFACES AND ESSENCES SURFACES AND ESSENCES ANALOGY AS THE FUEL AND FIRE OF THINKING DOUGLAS HOFSTADTER & EMMANUEL SANDER BASIC BOOKS A Member of the Perseus Books Group New York Grateful acknowledgment is hereby made to the following individuals and organizations for

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to publish their poems in this volume. Copyright © 2013 by Basic Books Published by Basic Books A Member of the Perseus Books Group Designed by Douglas Hofstadter Cover by Nicole Caputo and Andrea Cardenas All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission

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found we had an instant personal rapport — a joyous bright spark that gradually developed into a long-term and very strong friendship. In 2001–2002, Douglas Hofstadter spent a sabbatical year in Bologna, Italy, and during that period he was invited by Jean-Pierre Dupuy to give a set of lectures on

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–36. Hobbes, Thomas (1651). Leviathan. Reissued by Cambridge University Press (New York), 1996. Hofstadter, Douglas (1985). “Analogies and roles in human and machine thinking”. In Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. New York: Basic Books, pp. 547–603. Jaspert, W. Pincus, W. Turner Berry, and A

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”. Cognitive Science, 33 (8), pp. 1343–1382. Hofstadter, Douglas and Melanie Mitchell (1995). “The Copycat project: A model of mental fluidity and analogy-making”. In Douglas Hofstadter and the Fluid Analogies Research Group, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. New York: Basic Books, pp. 205–267. Horowitz, Alexandra (2010). Inside of a Dog

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Grenoble. Chalmers, David J., Robert M. French, and Douglas R. Hofstadter (1992). “High-level perception, representation, and analogy: A critique of artificial intelligence methodology”. In Douglas Hofstadter and the Fluid Analogies Research Group, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. New York: Basic Books, pp. 169–193. Coulson, Seana (2001). Semantic Leaps: Frame-Shifting

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Paradoxes of Translation. New York: Basic Books. Hofstadter, Douglas and Melanie Mitchell (1993). “The Copycat project: A model of mental fluidity and analogy-making”. In Douglas Hofstadter and the Fluid Analogies Research Group, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. New York: Basic Books, pp. 205–267. Holland, John H., Keith J. Holyoak, Richard

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

by James Gleick  · 1 Mar 2011  · 855pp  · 178,507 words

for perfection—for proof—otherwise the enterprise had little point. The more rigorously they built, the more paradoxes they found. “It was in the air,” Douglas Hofstadter has written, “that truly peculiar things could happen when modern cousins of various ancient paradoxes cropped up inside the rigorously logical world of numbers,… a

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, an “amazing fact”—“that our logical intuitions (i.e., intuitions concerning such notions as: truth, concept, being, class, etc.) are self-contradictory.”♦ It was, as Douglas Hofstadter says, “a sudden thunderbolt from the bluest of skies,”♦ its power arising not from the edifice it struck down but the lesson it contained about

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the machine’s own behavior. That is the necessary recursive twist. The entity being reckoned is fatally entwined with the entity doing the reckoning. As Douglas Hofstadter put it much later, “The thing hinges on getting this halting inspector to try to predict its own behavior when looking at itself trying to

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his philosophical purposes. Gödel’s code substitutes plain numbers for mathematical expressions and operations; the genetic code uses triplets of nucleotides to represent amino acids. Douglas Hofstadter was the first to make this connection explicitly, in the 1980s: “between the complex machinery in a living cell that enables a DNA molecule to

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Brain) When I muse about memes, I often find myself picturing an ephemeral flickering pattern of sparks leaping from brain to brain, screaming “Me, me!” —Douglas Hofstadter (1983)♦ “NOW THROUGH THE VERY UNIVERSALITY of its structures, starting with the code, the biosphere looks like the product of a unique event,”♦ Jacques Monod

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terms viral text and viral sentences seems to have been a reader of Dawkins named Stephen Walton of New York City, corresponding in 1981 with Douglas Hofstadter. Thinking logically—perhaps in the mode of a computer—Walton proposed simple self-replicating sentences along the lines of “Say me!” “Copy me!” and “If

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Cuyler, Betty Shannon, Norma Barzman, John Simpson, Peter Gilliver, Jimmy Wales, Joseph Straus, Craig Townsend, Janna Levin, Katherine Bouton, Dan Menaker, Esther Schor, Siobhan Roberts, Douglas Hofstadter, Martin Seligman, Christopher Fuchs, the late John Archibald Wheeler, Carol Hutchins, and Betty Alexandra Toole; also my agent, Michael Carlisle, and, as always, for his

I Am a Strange Loop

by Douglas R. Hofstadter  · 21 Feb 2011  · 626pp  · 181,434 words

, in the same way again.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review “Nearly thirty years after his best-selling book Gödel, Escher, Bach, cognitive scientist and polymath Douglas Hofstadter has returned to his extraordinary theory of self.” — New Scientist “I Am a Strange Loop is thoughtful, amusing and infectiously enthusiastic.” — Bloomberg News “[P]rovocative

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I inside this body and not in a different one? This is among the most irresistible and fascinating questions humanity has ever asked, according to Douglas Hofstadter. His latest book I Am a Strange Loop asks many more challenging questions: Are our thoughts made of molecules? Could a machine be confused? Could

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the person I was two days ago, and so forth. In other words, although there is a great degree of overlap between the individuals Douglas Hofstadter today and Douglas Hofstadter yesterday, they are not identical. We nonetheless standardly (and reflexively) choose to consider them identical because it is so convenient, so natural, and so

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tendencies and inclinations and habits, including verbal ones. In the end, we have to believe both Douglas Hofstadters as they say, “This one here is me,” at least to the extent that we believe the Douglas Hofstadter who is right now sitting in his study typing these words and saying to you in print

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, Alexander S. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse (translated by James Falen). New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. — — — . Eugene Onegin: A Novel Versification (translated by Douglas Hofstadter). New York: Basic Books, 1999. Quine, Willard Van Orman. The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. Ringle, Martin. Philosophical

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Sabatini for the photograph of the lap loop in Anterselva di Mezzo, facing Chapter 8. Thanks to Peter Rimbey for the photograph of Carol and Douglas Hofstadter facing Chapter 16. Thanks to David Oleson for his parquet deformation “I at the Center” in Chapter 17. “Three Kangaroos” logo, designed by David Lance

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University Press. Excerpts from Albert Schweitzer, Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit. © C. H. Beck, Munich, 1924. Personal translation for use in this book only, by Douglas Hofstadter. Reprinted with permission. INDEX A abbreviations piled on abbreviations aboutness, double, of Gödel’s formula absorbing someone else’s essence “abstraction ceiling” in author’s

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

by Melanie Mitchell  · 14 Oct 2019  · 350pp  · 98,077 words

was there only as a tagalong. The meeting was happening so that a group of select Google AI researchers could hear from and converse with Douglas Hofstadter, a legend in AI and the author of a famous book cryptically titled Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, or more succinctly, GEB (pronounced

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weeks, I devoured it, becoming increasingly convinced that not only did I want to become an AI researcher but I specifically wanted to work with Douglas Hofstadter. I had never before felt so strongly about a book, or a career choice. At the time, Hofstadter was a professor in computer science at

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the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, waiting for a class to begin, and I caught sight of a poster advertising a lecture by Douglas Hofstadter, to take place in two days on that very campus. I did a double take; I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I went to

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Google meeting. Chess and the First Seed of Doubt The group in the hard-to-locate conference room consisted of about twenty Google engineers (plus Douglas Hofstadter and myself), all of whom were members of various Google AI teams. The meeting started with the usual going around the room and having people

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of Google) was an early supporter and is a frequent speaker at SU’s programs. Several other big-name technology companies have joined as sponsors. Douglas Hofstadter is one thinker who—again surprising me—straddles the fence between Singularity skepticism and worry. He was disturbed, he told me, that Kurzweil’s books

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times to the players; there are no hidden or uncertain parts of a player’s “state.” The real world doesn’t come so cleanly delineated. Douglas Hofstadter has pointed out that the very notion of a clearly defined “state” isn’t at all realistic. “If you look at situations in the world

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translation as well as in speech recognition, the question remains: To what extent is such “understanding” needed for machines to reach human levels of performance? Douglas Hofstadter argues, “Translation is far more complex than mere dictionary look-up and word rearranging.… Translation involves having a mental model of the world being discussed

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feeds back through the nervous system to produce a physical perception of selfhood—or consciousness, if you like. This circular causality is akin to what Douglas Hofstadter called the “strange loop” of consciousness, “where symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down, with symbols seeming to

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(“the exact same thing happened to me”) all involve the act of abstracting the situations that we experience. Abstraction is closely linked to analogy making. Douglas Hofstadter, who has studied abstraction and analogy making for several decades, defines analogy making in a very general sense as “the perception of a common essence

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it in any general way. Bongard’s book, published in English in 1970, was rather obscure, and initially few people knew of its existence. However, Douglas Hofstadter, who had come upon the book in 1975, was deeply impressed by the hundred problems in the appendix and wrote about them at length in

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to these fundamental human abilities. Active Symbols and Analogy Making After reading Gödel, Escher, Bach and deciding to pursue research in AI, I sought out Douglas Hofstadter, with the hope that I could work on something like Bongard problems. Happily, after some persistence, I was able to persuade him to allow me

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wrong way, and could never perceive that it had previously been down a similar, unsuccessful path. James Marshall, at the time a graduate student in Douglas Hofstadter’s research group, took on the project of getting Copycat to reflect on its own “thinking.” He created a program called Metacat, which not only

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many years, I am finding the embodiment argument increasingly compelling. 16 Questions, Answers, and Speculations Near the end of his 1979 book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter interviewed himself about the future of AI. In a section called “Ten Questions and Speculations,” he posed and answered questions not only about the potential

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wrote, a “finite oeuvre—as all human composers, beset by mortality, do.”10 I don’t know if my opinion will offer any consolation to Douglas Hofstadter, who was so upset by EMI’s most impressive compositions and their ability to fool professional musicians. I understand Hofstadter’s worry. As the literary

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general intelligence can’t be separated from all these apparent shortcomings, in humans or in machines. In his “Ten Questions and Speculations” section in GEB Douglas Hofstadter addressed this issue with a deceptively simple question: “Will a thinking computer be able to add fast?” His answer surprised me when I first read

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the very legitimate worries of people concerned about the impacts of technology on the lives of humans. I began this book with an account of Douglas Hofstadter’s dismay regarding recent AI progress, but he was terrified, for the most part, about something altogether different. Hofstadter’s worry was that human cognition

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Human Knowledge’ Without Help,” Newsweek, Oct. 18, 2017, www.newsweek.com/deepmind-alphago-ai-teaches-human-help-687620.   2.  In the following sections, quotations from Douglas Hofstadter are from a follow-up interview I did with him after the Google meeting; the quotations accurately capture the content and tone of his remarks

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.,” The Scientist, Oct. 17, 1988.   7.  A. Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 26.   8.  As Douglas Hofstadter pointed out to me, the grammatically correct version is “good old old-fashioned AI,” but GOOFAI doesn’t have the same ring as GOFAI. 3

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:1606.04671 (2016). 12.  Marcus, “Deep Learning.” 13.  Quoted in N. Sonnad and D. Gershgorn, “Q&A: Douglas Hofstadter on Why AI Is Far from Intelligent,” Quartz, Oct. 10, 2017, qz.com/1088714/qa-douglas-hofstadter-on-why-ai-is-far-from-intelligent. 14.  I should note that a few robotics groups have actually

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Barsalou gives a detailed argument for such mental simulations in L. W. Barsalou, “Perceptual Symbol Systems,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (1999): 577–660.   6.  Douglas Hofstadter points out that when one encounters (or remembers, or reads about, or imagines) a situation, the representation of the situation in one’s mind includes

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Press, 1995). 16.  One particularly interesting program that attempted to solve Bongard problems was created by Harry Foundalis when he was a graduate student in Douglas Hofstadter’s research group at Indiana University. Foundalis explicitly declared that he was building not a “Bongard problem solver” but a “cognitive architecture inspired by Bongard

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of ‘Artificial Intelligence,’” Rodney Brooks’s blog, April 27, 2018, rodneybrooks.com/forai-the-origins-of-artificial-intelligence. Acknowledgments This book owes its existence to Douglas Hofstadter. Doug’s writings were what attracted me to AI in the first place, and his ideas and mentorship guided my PhD studies. More recently, Doug

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Melanie Mitchell has a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan, where she studied with the cognitive scientist and writer Douglas Hofstadter; together, they created the Copycat program, which makes creative analogies in an idealized world. The author and editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

by Jon Ronson  · 12 May 2011  · 274pp  · 70,481 words

the only one curious enough to pick it up.” What followed were elliptical quotations:My thinking is muscular. Albert Einstein I am a strange loop. Douglas Hofstadter Life is meant to be a joyous adventure. Joe K The book had only twenty-one pages with text, but some pages contained just one

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found in the box underneath the railway bridge. “A railway bridge,” I said to Deborah. “Have you noticed the parallel? In that covering letter to Douglas Hofstadter, the writer talks about finding some old typewritten pages carelessly thrown in the corner of an abandoned railroad station. And now Levi Shand has found

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doesn’t exist,” I said, “who created him?” “I think they’re all Hofstadter,” said Deborah. “Levi Shand. Petter Nordlund. I think they’re all Douglas Hofstadter.” I went for a walk through Gothenburg, feeling quite annoyed and disappointed that I’d been hanging around here for days when the culprit was

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thousand miles away at Indiana University. Deborah had offered me supplementary circumstantial evidence to back her theory that the whole puzzle was a product of Douglas Hofstadter’s impish mind. It was, she said, exactly the sort of playful thing he might do. And being the author of an international bestseller, he

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until the moment, an hour later, I had a Skype video conversation with Levi Shand, who, it was soon revealed, wasn’t an invention of Douglas Hofstadter’s but an actual student from Indiana University. He was a handsome young man with black hair, doleful eyes, and a messy student bedroom. He

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were face-to-face. He told me it was all true. He really did find the books in a box under a railway viaduct and Douglas Hofstadter really did have a harem of French women living at his home. “Tell me exactly what happened when you visited him,” I said. “I was

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is true?” I asked. “Every word,” said Levi. But something didn’t feel right. Levi’s story, and indeed Deborah’s theory, worked only if Douglas Hofstadter was some kind of playful, dilettantish prankster, and nothing I could find suggested he was. In 2007, for example, Deborah Solomon of The New York

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make his mission sound mysterious and titillating. It’s a shame that people do this kind of thing and post it on the Web. Sincerely, Douglas Hofstadter I e-mailed back. Much of Levi Shand’s tale didn’t ring true, I said, not only the business of the harem but also

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they are extremely obsessive. This particular case was exceedingly transparent because it was so exceedingly obsessive. Yes, there was a missing piece of the puzzle, Douglas Hofstadter was saying, but the recipients had gotten it wrong. They assumed the endeavor was brilliant and rational because they were brilliant and rational, and we

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walked fast toward me. She sat down and smiled. “So?” she said. “Well . . .” I said. I recounted to her my exchanges with Levi Shand and Douglas Hofstadter, my meetings with Petter and Lily, and my subsequent e-mail correspondence. When I finished, she looked at me and said, “Is that it?” “Yes

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond

by Daniel Susskind  · 14 Jan 2020  · 419pp  · 109,241 words

of building an artificial intelligence was not insurmountable: the researchers merely had to make their own, simple computers more sophisticated.20 As the computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter puts it in his celebrated Gödel, Escher, Bach, it was an “article of faith” for many researchers that “all intelligences are just variations on a

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more a source of disappointment than a cause for celebration. Take their response to the chess triumph of IBM’s Deep Blue over Garry Kasparov. Douglas Hofstadter, the computer scientist and writer, called its first victory “a watershed event” but dismissed it as something that “doesn’t have to do with computers

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David Cope. Was this machine acting “creatively” in putting together the piece? A music theory professor at the university found the whole business “disconcerting.”40 Douglas Hofstadter, who organized the musical experiment, called EMI “the most thought-provoking project in artificial intelligence that I have ever come across,” saying that it left

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like people.” Quoted in William Grimes, “Hubert L. Dreyfus, Philosopher of the Limits of Computers, Dies at 87,” New York Times, 2 May 2017. 21.  Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 579. 22.  Daniel Crevier, AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence

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.   3.  Ibid., p. 6.   4.  Quoted in Bruce Weber, “Mean Chess-Playing Computer Tears at Meaning of Thought,” New York Times, 19 February 1996.   5.  Douglas Hofstadter, “Just Who Will Be We, in 2493?,” Indiana University, Bloomington (2003), available at https://cogsci.indiana.edu/pub/hof.just-who-will-be-we.pdf

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Real AI,” Popular Mechanics, 10 February 2014.   9.  John Searle, “Watson Doesn’t Know It Won on ‘Jeopardy!’,” Wall Street Journal, 23 February 2011. 10.  Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 601: “There is a related ‘Theorem’ about progress in AI: once some mental function

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Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler’s Theorem: ‘AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.’” 11.  Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 678. 12.  Douglas Hofstadter, “Staring Emmy Straight in the Eye—And Doing My Best Not to Flinch” in David Cope, ed., Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style (London

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

by Daniel C. Dennett  · 7 Feb 2017  · 573pp  · 157,767 words

won’t be convincing until we can reach a vantage point from which we can look back and see how all the parts fit together. Douglas Hofstadter’s book, I Am a Strange Loop (2007), describes a mind composing itself in cycles of processing that loop around, twisting and feeding on themselves

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quote Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at this juncture: “God is in the details.” Now let’s turn the knobs on our thought experiment, as Douglas Hofstadter has recommended (1981) and look at the other extreme, in which Dr. Frankenstein leaves most of the work to Spakesheare. The most realistic scenario would

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large audiences of scientists to confirm that they were inspired to become scientists by reading the works of Stephen Hawking, E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Douglas Hofstadter, Steven Pinker, and other excellent communicators of science. It is a shame, really, that the arts and humanities have not managed to generate many great

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for what a successful account would have to accomplish. A number of thinkers have recently been homing in on related and congenial ideas: among them Douglas Hofstadter’s “active symbols” (1979, 1982b, 1985 [esp. pp. 646ff], 2007), and three books in 2013, by psychologist Matthew Lieberman, neuroscientist Michael Graziano, and philosopher of

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. (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/helping-computers-understand-language.html) This would no doubt be useful for many purposes, but not for all. As Douglas Hofstadter has noted, in an open letter to a former student, then at Google working on this project: It worries me and in fact deeply upsets

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Sussex (e.g., Harvey et al. 1997), but I have not discussed it in print. 383David Cope. Cope’s Virtual Music (2001) includes essays by Douglas Hofstadter, composers, musicologists, and me: “Collision Detection, Muselot, and Scribble: Some Reflections on Creativity.” The essays are filled with arresting observations and examples, and the volume

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includes many musical scores and comes with a CD. 384substrate-neutral. See DDI (1995) on substrate neutrality. 385analogizers. See also Douglas Hofstadter’s many works on the importance of analogy finding, especially Metamagical Themas (1985), Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (1995), and Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as

Complexity: A Guided Tour

by Melanie Mitchell  · 31 Mar 2009  · 524pp  · 120,182 words

2009 501—dc22 2008023794 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To Douglas Hofstadter and John Holland CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgments PART ONE Background and History CHAPTER ONE What Is Complexity? CHAPTER TWO Dynamics, Chaos, and Prediction CHAPTER THREE Information

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whole can be understood completely if you understand its parts, and the nature of their ‘sum.’ ” No one in her left brain could reject reductionism. —Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid REDUCTIONISM HAS BEEN THE DOMINANT approach to science since the 1600s. René Descartes, one of reductionism’s earliest

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the core curriculum as software engineering or compiler design. In 1989, at the beginning of my last year of graduate school, my Ph.D. advisor, Douglas Hofstadter, was invited to a conference in Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the subject of “emergent computation.” He was too busy to attend, so he sent

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helping me think more clearly about the issues in this book: Bob Axelrod, Liz Bradley, Jim Brown, Jim Crutchfield, Doyne Farmer, Stephanie Forrest, Bob French, Douglas Hofstadter, John Holland, Greg Huber, Ralf Juengling, Garrett Kenyon, Tom Kepler, David Krakauer, Will Landecker, Manuel Marques-Pita, Dan McShea, John Miller, Jack Mitchell, Norma Mitchell

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, Google Books, Amazon.com, and the often maligned but tremendously useful Wikipedia.org for making scholarly research so much easier. This book is dedicated to Douglas Hofstadter and John Holland, who have done so much to inspire and encourage me in my work and life. I am very lucky to have had

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). And how did biological evolution produce creatures with such an enormous contrast between their individual simplicity and their collective sophistication? The Brain The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach, makes an extended analogy between ant colonies and brains, both being complex systems in which relatively simple components with

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an anticodon and the corresponding amino acid (the codon A U C happens to code for the amino acid isoleucine in case you were interested). Douglas Hofstadter has called tRNA “the cell’s flash cards.” FIGURE 6.3. Illustration of translation of messenger RNA into amino acids. The ribosome cuts off the

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characters and the meaning of those strings, and the paradoxes that self-reference can produce, are discussed in a detailed and very entertaining way in Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Similarly, this kind of dual use of information is key to Turing’s proof of the

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type of architecture, including robustness, efficiency, and evolvability. One additional major advantage is that a fine-grained parallel system is able to carry out what Douglas Hofstadter has called a “parallel terraced scan.” This refers to a simultaneous exploration of many possibilities or pathways, in which the resources given to each exploration

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. But putting their names together in a book title didn’t make sense to me, and my curiosity was piqued. Reading the book, written by Douglas Hofstadter, turned out to be one of those life-changing events that one can never anticipate. The title didn’t let on that the book was

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and “self-aware” computer programs. These ideas quickly became my passion as well, and I decided that I wanted to study artificial intelligence with Hofstadter. Douglas Hofstadter. (Photograph courtesy of Indiana University.) The problem was, I was a young nobody right out of college and Hofstadter was a famous writer of a

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: Belknap Press, 1990, p. 107. “I have studied E. burchelli”: Franks, N. R., Army ants: A collective intelligence. American Scientist, 77(2), 1989, p. 140. “Douglas Hofstadter, in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach”: Hofstadter, D. R., Ant fugue. In Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Chapter

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Gershenson, Carlos, 299 Gide, André, 303 Gladwell, Malcolm, 253 Glance, Natalie, 223 Gleick, James, 302 glycolysis, 179, 249 Gödel, Escher Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas Hofstadter), ix, 5, 121, 189 Gödel, Kurt, 59–60, 68–70 Gödel’s theorem, 59–60 Google, 236, 239–240. 244–245 Gordon, Deborah, 177, 293

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

by Brian Christian  · 1 Mar 2011  · 370pp  · 94,968 words

the advancing front of technology? And why is it that we are so compelled to feel unique in the first place? “Sometimes it seems,” says Douglas Hofstadter, “as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.” While

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, “that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.” The scientific community, by and large, seemed to agree with that sentiment. Douglas Hofstadter’s 1980 Pulitzer Prize–winning Gödel, Escher, Bach, written at a time when computer chess was over twenty-five years old, advocates “the conclusion that

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the intellect,” under the bus. The New York Times interviewed the nation’s most prominent thinkers on AI immediately after the match, and our familiar Douglas Hofstadter, seeming very much the tickled corpse, says, “My God, I used to think chess required thought. Now, I realize it doesn’t.” Other academics seemed

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, really, might be one of the hallmarks of an AI program—a hallmark that a Turing test judge would do well to try to evince. Douglas Hofstadter, emphasis mine: “One definitely gets the feeling that the output is coming from a source with no understanding of what it is saying and no

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far that I’ve been involved with.”11 What might it mean in the future? What might the Lindbergh- or Earhart-comparable voyage be? As Douglas Hofstadter writes, “If the bandwidth were turned up more and more and more and still more … the sense of a clear boundary between them would slowly

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or break the envelope, necessarily, but to force a sort of three-card monte where one never becomes sure which envelope one’s in.15 Douglas Hofstadter muses in Gödel, Escher, Bach, “Perhaps works of art are trying to convey their style more than anything else.” I think that when we’re

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argue, by and large wise and honorable. Does this suggest, then, a moral dimension to compression? Putting In and Pulling Out: The Eros of Entropy Douglas Hofstadter: We feel quite comfortable with the idea that a record contains the same information as a piece of music, because of the existence of record

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. 131. 6 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 7 “the conclusion that profoundly insightful chess-playing”: Douglas Hofstadter, summarizing the position taken by Gödel, Escher, Bach in the essay “Staring Emmy Straight in the Eye—and Doing My Best Not to Flinch,” in

How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, From Home Renovations to Space Exploration

by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner  · 16 Feb 2023  · 353pp  · 97,029 words

term that with Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein I have also applied to underestimates of cost and overestimates of benefits.17 The physicist and writer Douglas Hofstadter mockingly dubbed it “Hofstadter’s Law”: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”18 Research documents

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R. Sunstein, “The Principle of the Malevolent Hiding Hand; or, The Planning Fallacy Writ Large,” Social Research 83, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 979–1004. 18. Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 19. Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Johanna Peetz, “The Planning Fallacy: Cognitive, Motivational

Track Changes

by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum  · 1 May 2016  · 519pp  · 142,646 words

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch  · 30 Jun 2011  · 551pp  · 174,280 words

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil  · 14 Jul 2005  · 761pp  · 231,902 words

The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think

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The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence

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Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything

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Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb

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The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

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Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

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Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software

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