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Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

Douglas R. Hofstadter,

Emmanuel Sander

3.78 · Rating details · 798 ratings · 146 reviews

Analogy is the core of all thinking.

This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize–winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over thirty years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making complex ideas vivid, he ha Analogy is the core of all thinking.

This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize–winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over thirty years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making complex ideas vivid, he has partnered with Sander to put forth a highly novel perspective on cognition.

We are constantly faced with a swirling and intermingling multitude of ill-defined situations. Our brain’s job is to try to make sense of this unpredictable, swarming chaos of stimuli. How does it do so? The ceaseless hail of input triggers analogies galore, helping us to pinpoint the essence of what is going on. Often this means the spontaneous evocation of words, sometimes idioms, sometimes the triggering of nameless, long-buried memories.

Why did two-year-old Camille proudly exclaim, “I undressed the banana!”? Why do people who hear a story often blurt out, “Exactly the same thing happened to me!” when it was a completely different event? How do we recognize an aggressive driver from a split-second glance in our rearview mirror? What in a friend’s remark triggers the offhand reply, “That’s just sour grapes”? What did Albert Einstein see that made him suspect that light consists of particles when a century of research had driven the final nail in the coffin of that long-dead idea?

The answer to all these questions, of course, is analogy-making—the meat and potatoes, the heart and soul, the fuel and fire, the gist and the crux, the lifeblood and the wellsprings of thought. Analogy-making, far from happening at rare intervals, occurs at all moments, defining thinking from top to toe, from the tiniest and most fleeting thoughts to the most creative scientific insights.

Like Gödel, Escher, Bach before it, Surfaces and Essences will profoundly enrich our understanding of our own minds. By plunging the reader into an extraordinary variety of colorful situations involving language, thought, and memory, by revealing bit by bit the constantly churning cognitive mechanisms normally completely hidden from view, and by discovering in them one central, invariant core—the incessant, unconscious quest for strong analogical links to past experiences—this book puts forth a radical and deeply surprising new vision of the act of thinking.
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Hardcover, 578 pages

Published April 23rd 2013 by Basic Books (first published March 1st 2011)

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May 12, 2013 Ruben rated it it was ok

Recommends it for: Insomniacs

Shelves: 2013

Reading Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking is like biting an apple and finding half a worm. It's like a pancake eating contest. It is the Phantom Menace of cognitive science literature. What should have been a monumental work about understanding via analogy undermines itself by being too repetitive, too unfocused, too obvious, too silly and too self-referential.

I wanted this book the minute I saw the title because I'm a big fan of well-crafted analogies. I remembered ...more

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Mar 23, 2019 Bradley rated it liked it

Shelves: 2019-shelf, non-fiction, science, writing

There are two or three different books in this book, but by all apparent surfaces, it is all a single, exhaustive tome on ANALOGY.

As I read it, I was struck by how vast and careful his analysis was and how I would have REALLY loved this as a teen, being fascinated by all the variances, categories, and richness of analogies. They are a source of amusement, creativity, vast and widespread accidents, a mode and end of consciousness, and an integral aspect of math and science. What is an equal sign There are two or three different books in this book, but by all apparent surfaces, it is all a single, exhaustive tome on ANALOGY.

As I read it, I was struck by how vast and careful his analysis was and how I would have REALLY loved this as a teen, being fascinated by all the variances, categories, and richness of analogies. They are a source of amusement, creativity, vast and widespread accidents, a mode and end of consciousness, and an integral aspect of math and science. What is an equal sign but an analogy? And let's not forget Einstein making thought experiments that later became provable.

Analogy is in every word we use, constraining and freeing our understanding of the world as well as tumbling it into a mass of contradictions. Only logic and careful analysis can free it, but the source of all our greatest creativity comes from it.

As a kid, and perhaps unused to all the varieties of analogy and hungry for such a careful and well-thought-out stream of reasoning, I probably would have given this a full 5 stars just for is sheer chutzpah.

As an adult, I think it went on WAY TOO LONG.

Once the great and rather obvious arguments had been made, fought over, and survived the logic grinder, I was perfectly happy to throw it on the grill and garnish my the buns of my life with thrilling mustard, spicy onions, wholesome lettuce, and timely tomatoes.

I could easily see this book fueling the understanding of our cognition or developing Artificial Intelligence. I can see it becoming a monumental if a rather pedantic tribute to obviousness. But it is obvious only because we're in the heart of it.

Or rather, I might recommend this book to aliens trying to understand us humans. Or AIs from other stars trying to get a good grip on our alien psychology.

For the general lay-reader, DESPITE it being always lightly humorous and clear, I cannot recommend this... except, perhaps, in small doses while sitting on the toilet.

But am I happy I read it? Yes. I can say I'm a complete convert to the line of logic. It aligns to my own reasoning very well. But was it often boring AF? Yes. It was that, too. ...more

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Jul 30, 2013 Brian rated it did not like it

I read GEB on publication and it remains a landmark book for me. "The Mind's I", co-edited with Dennett, is fantastic and I greatly enjoyed his book on the perils of translation, "Le Ton Beau de Marot". Others might be hit and miss but always provided *something*. This one, co-written with Emmanuel Sander is not only an immense disappointment but just bafflingly bad. I'd read some reviews on Amazon that referred to certain problems but thought they might be exaggerating. What you have, at heart, ...more

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Apr 23, 2013 Neven rated it it was ok

I dreaded writing this review.

Douglas Hofstadter is among my favorite writers, and I usually name his 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' as my favorite book of all time. It's a gloriously fun, rambling, clever, surprising, educational, entertaining work that's easy to get lost in and hard to summarize, because it touches on a little bit of everything.

At this point I could make an easy comparison and say that 'Surfaces and Essences' is, in many ways, its polar opposite. You see, this book is far too long, dul I dreaded writing this review.

Douglas Hofstadter is among my favorite writers, and I usually name his 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' as my favorite book of all time. It's a gloriously fun, rambling, clever, surprising, educational, entertaining work that's easy to get lost in and hard to summarize, because it touches on a little bit of everything.

At this point I could make an easy comparison and say that 'Surfaces and Essences' is, in many ways, its polar opposite. You see, this book is far too long, dull, obvious, at times smarmy, and overall not worth your time.

The opening premise is right there in the subtitle: making analogies is the chief mechanism of human thinking and intelligence. Mental acts that don't normally get classified as analogies can, in fact, be understood better in the light of that framework. So far, so good.

What happens then is that the co-authors continue to stretch that premise over what seems like 1,000 pages. (In fact, it is only about 500.) Examples of the same sort of thing are given over and over. (Rather uninteresting examples, too; I don't think any of them would make for good party stories.) They are then dissected through pages and pages of mind-numbingly obvious, often patronizing explanation.

Through it all, chapters and sections are organized almost randomly, with no clear sense of progression or flow. I've always liked Hofstadter's micro-sections (one per page or so) complete with pun-y titles, but here, they're almost parodic. Sometimes, a new section simply continues the previous one. Other times, it changes gears and topics completely.

The writing style is very dull; the jokes are few and corny, the endless clarifications tiring, the tone needlessly argumentative. At one point, the authors complain about "why do so many people refuse to believe that analogy and categorization are the same thing." Really? I've never in my life heard anyone refuse to believe this, let alone "so many people". You probably haven't either. You and I simply haven't given the matter much thought prior to this book. I'm sure the authors have heard this complaint before—they're the ones writing the book. Why drag me, a willful reader, into this fight?

One of the ironies here is that the authors frequently mention just how remarkable it is that we find everyday analogies so unremarkable: we get them instantly, even when the mental work required to unpack them seems significant. But then, why spend so much of this book unpacking them? It simply doesn't seem like a good use of anyone's time to "explain" why we sometimes say things like "turn off the window" instead of "close the window". We all get it; that's kind of the point here. And while being strict and methodical about *one* of these examples is maybe a good starting point for the argument, Hofstadter & Sander just continue to do it over and over and over.

It then comes as a splash of cold water when the final chapters get extremely technical, cavalierly explaining rather advanced concepts from mathematics and physics; not so much to educate the reader about those concepts, but to use them as further examples of thinking as analogy. While I'm not a scientist of any sort, I consider myself fairly well versed in popular science, at least. I can follow most well-written accounts of scientific principles. Since I couldn't really follow these, I'm tempted to diagnose them as not very well written.

The book also overpromises when it says that "analogy is the core of all thinking." That may be true, but no particular part of the book addresses the question of whether other kinds of mental processes are also important. Maybe they're really not, but it would be nice to read that the authors considered it.

Hofstadter has already covered much of this material in 'Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies', his somewhat technical overview of different AI projects he has worked on. That book was challenging, but I remember emerging from it with a number of fresh insights into computer thinking and human thinking. Similarly, Hofstadter has already talked about the challenges of translation in 'Le Ton Beau de Marot'. Both of these books were, I swear to god, breezier to get through than the few pages devoted to those same subjects here.

This should have been a 20-page paper. I hope the authors—or a more disciplined reviewer than myself—write that paper, so you can get the otherwise solid central idea of this book without all the boring padding around it. ...more

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Jan 04, 2019 Rossdavidh rated it liked it

Shelves: black

Douglas Hofstadter (writing here with his Francophone colleague Emmanuel Sander) has written a 5-star book of about 200 pages, and has hidden it inside a 500+ page tome. He has made a really splendid book, and then repeated each and every point so often as to make the whole thing longer, and less splendid. He has penned a truly excellent work, were it of a modest length, but he has engaged in an abundance of redundancy, such that the whole is less than the sum of its parts, were there fewer part Douglas Hofstadter (writing here with his Francophone colleague Emmanuel Sander) has written a 5-star book of about 200 pages, and has hidden it inside a 500+ page tome. He has made a really splendid book, and then repeated each and every point so often as to make the whole thing longer, and less splendid. He has penned a truly excellent work, were it of a modest length, but he has engaged in an abundance of redundancy, such that the whole is less than the sum of its parts, were there fewer parts. He wrote a really fine work, that was greatly in need of a stern ruthless editor, not because any part of it was bad but rather because often four pages were used when one would do. He has...

I think you get the point.

To be honest, I gave up on this book about 1/3 of the way through, the first time. Then it sat on my "to be read" shelf for a year or two, waiting on judgement, in a sort of libro limbo. I had very nearly decided to send it to the used bookstore, but I did not, and ultimately returned to it.

The reason is that, over time, I noticed that my mind returned to the ideas in it again and again, months or years after reading only the first part of it.

So, once more unto the breach, and I started from the beginning because it had been so long. In the end, I was very happy to have persisted, as there are some real worthy insights here as to how and why, as the subtitle puts it, analogy is the fuel and fire of thinking. It's no small task, thinking about thinking, and a great deal of nonsense has been written about it. Finding out more about how your own brain works, is worth a bit of repetition. We get much more than a bit of repetition here, though.

But, towards the end, after all the threads and examples have been well and truly tied together, every 'i' dotted, every 't' crossed, every point and counterpoint addressed, he does it all again. Through a rather unconvincing dialogue between two characters, just introduced, he goes through nearly the entire book's contents, again, for 20 pages. Agh. Dr. Hofstadter, you are a man who thinks many interesting thoughts. Please allow an editor to guide you in the matter of how many times, and in how many ways, each one needs to be made.

However, in the meantime, I must say that I found the book well worth reading, and I will seek out his next. ...more

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Aug 02, 2013 Martin Cohen rated it liked it

Here's the short review: Yes, it is rather boring in places.

Here's the long one, because you know, there is a lot in here too.

Behind every word in our language, from nouns such as teapot to connectors such as 'and' or 'but', by way of adjectives and verbs such as 'blue' or 'to paint', "there lurks a blurry richness". Ordinary words don't just have two or three "but an unlimited number of meanings". Why do we use dictionaries then, one might ask? But the fault say Hofstadter and Sander, is with t ...more

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May 08, 2013 Pete Welter rated it really liked it

It's been a while since I've read Hofstadter, and so it took a little bit for me to get back in the rhythm of his style, which meanders somewhat, takes detours, and delights in self-reference. Given that the book is about analogy as the mechanism for human thought, as you might guess the book overflows with analogies about analogies, and examples of analogies. Early in the book I found this somewhat tiresome, but as the discussion hit it's stride the examples server to anchor the rather abstract It's been a while since I've read Hofstadter, and so it took a little bit for me to get back in the rhythm of his style, which meanders somewhat, takes detours, and delights in self-reference. Given that the book is about analogy as the mechanism for human thought, as you might guess the book overflows with analogies about analogies, and examples of analogies. Early in the book I found this somewhat tiresome, but as the discussion hit it's stride the examples server to anchor the rather abstract ideas firmly. This book could have been about half it's length to get across the same ideas, which at times made me impatient, but then it would have lost all it's Hofstadterness.

The book explores the core of what happens as we think, experience and learn, and apply those memories to new situations. The book is over 500 pages, so I'll only touch on the stuff I found most thought provoking, but my short recommendation is: if you are one of those people who enjoy thinking about thinking, then whether you come away agreeing with Hoftstadter and Sanders or not, Surfaces and Essences is well worth your time. At the very least the book make you question some of your assumptions on thinking, and if you're like me, it may end up giving you a broad set of intellectual tools with which to consider learning and thought.

The main purpose of analogy in our thoughts (and it's related cousin categorization) is to allow us understand novel situations (as many of our situations are) by leveraging our previous experiences and memories. Analogies exist on a continuum between surface level analogies, such as on physical features, and deep analogies, which are much more conceptual and abstract (and also more personal), and we make categorize objects and situations in any number of ways and at various level simultaneously. Hence the title of the book: Surfaces and Essences.

For those of us interested in learning, the section on naive analogies gave numerous examples on how people actually approach problems vs. the formal methods they are generally taught in school. The authors explore the mathematical concepts and multiplication and division, showing examples of where naive analogies of multiplication - adding something to itself a number of times - applies to problems and where it doesn't. The differences are more subtle than one might think. Part of the chapter dissects the wording and thought processes of simple multiplication and division word problems, and in just those seemingly simple examples there are layers of complexity to consider. Although there are educational researchers looking at these concepts, I'm unconvinced that much of this thoughtfulness on how we learn has filtered down to the practices of our educational system.

So, given all that we've learned in life and in school, how do we know what knowledge is applicable to a given situation? Analogy, of course. "This situation sort of looks seems like that, and I know how to handle *that*." If we were entirely rational beings, or our brains functioned like database lookups, we be able to apply the formal learning from school in the proper situations more often than we do. However, as the book explains, there are plenty of reasons why this doesn't happen. Firstly, the world is complicated, and number of cases where the formal method needed to figure out a solution is front and center is extremely small. In your area of expertise, you may become better at this mapping, but for most of what we do every day, there are large amounts of gray area. In those cases, we often fall back to our naive analogies, our heuristics and rules of thumb, because those more deeply ingrained in our thought processes than formal solutions are. And here is where we need to truly think about what school learning gives us. If the context and process of how we teach and what we teach has limited connections with students' experiences, the analogies and categories formed will be fragile and narrow. When that knowledge has few analogical and categorical "hooks" into other memories, the chance that we use school knowledge for practical purposes in our lives becomes small. Although this idea is often couched in the "when will I ever use this in real life" question common to students, the problem is nonetheless one that we need to answer - why does such a large percentage of school learning get entirely forgotten and go unused by so many of us?

Despite finding this book incredibly thought-provoking, I had a few issues with the book. First, I'm not overly fond of the dialogue format that they authors employ in their last chapter, although I realize this is probably my personal preference. I didn't find it nearly as informative as the actual discussion in the book on the same topics. Second, although the authors have a multitude of sources, I often had the feeling that there was more handwaving going on in their arguments than need be, given the amount of research that has been done on the topic. I would have liked to have seen more direct links to cognitive research results that supported their views. Lastly, and most importantly, I often get the impression that when Hoftstatder speaks of "most people' he starts and upper level undergraduates and moves up the formal schooling level from there. THere were a number of places where I questioned whether most people - say in the general population in the US - would think as abstractly or have the same intellectual breadth that the authors assume. This is where more studies among non-WEIRD populations (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) would have been useful. I'm not calling into question their general premise on how people think analogically and categorically, but I do think that seeing some more broad studies would be useful.
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Dec 08, 2014 Bart Jr. rated it it was amazing

Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander 12/08/2014

Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander

Fantastic book, full of interesting insights about analogies. And analogies about insights. I always try to distill a book like this into what I consider the key points.

The first of those, in my mind, was the definition of intelligence offered. Intelligence is the ability to rapidly and reliably see the crux, the gist of a situation. I thought about this. Was th Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander 12/08/2014

Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander

Fantastic book, full of interesting insights about analogies. And analogies about insights. I always try to distill a book like this into what I consider the key points.

The first of those, in my mind, was the definition of intelligence offered. Intelligence is the ability to rapidly and reliably see the crux, the gist of a situation. I thought about this. Was this the single most crucial element of intelligence? Just asking the question is a clue to the answer.

Naturally enough, I went to the bookshelf and pulled out Jeff Hawkins' book On Intelligence, to see if I could gain some insight. His take on the mind is that it is a memory-prediction device. It was almost as if these guys were climbing up different sides of the same mountain. Because if you really have the ability to see the crux of a situation, wouldn't you be in the best shape to make accurate predictions? And he also makes the point that the mind uses memories as analogs to predict, while Hofstadter and Sander think that the mind uses the analogies offered up by memory to categorize. In fact they think that categorization and analogy are really two sides of the same coin.

So while the focus of the two books is different, Hawkins' being on the physical structure of the brain and how it works to create intelligence, and the focus in Surfaces and Essences being analogies and how we use them to categorize, they both seem to agree also on the fundamental role that memory, or analogy, plays in thought and categorization. These two approaches actually complement each other.

So, I came away with a definition of intelligence that I thought did find the crux of what intelligence is. And also the fundamental importance of analogies in thought and categorization. The book was also full of interesting analogies of all description and variety.

I also love the use of the Copycat domain, which gives an amazing variety of peeks into the creative slippage of concepts and how complicated even the simplest can be. Every page of this book contains insights into thought and language. I would like to see Mr. Hofstadter examine symbolization itself more deeply, in speech, writing, computer use, etc. but I suppose that would be another book.

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Sep 04, 2014 Dave Peticolas rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Fantastic. This is Hofstadter's latest thinking about thinking and, as usual, he has some enormously interesting things to say and a delightful way of saying them. Highly recommended. ...more

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Jul 18, 2017 Aloha rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: genre-philosophy, z-hofstadter-douglas, a-own, 1-favorites, a-ebooks, genre-cognitive-science, genre-language, 20when-other-reads, z-sander-emmanuel

Fabulous as only Hofstadter can make it.

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Jul 04, 2013 Sylvia rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, philosophy, science

This book has a nice thesis (essentially all thought is merely the construction of analogies), and I enjoyed reading it. I felt that much of it was indulgent--full of dozens and dozens of examples where a few would have sufficed, and paced rather glacially, but it was quite readable and often pleasant.

The last few chapters, though, which highlight analogies in the fields of physics and mathematics were AMAZING. The authors step you through a series of analogies that lived in the minds of the ph ...more

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Jul 13, 2014 Elizabeth rated it it was ok

Shelves: non-fiction, audiobooks-library, 2014

When I started listening to the audiobook version I thought this was going to be a solid 4 stars. About half way through I had knocked it down to a three for the same reason many people have cited - the repetitive nature of the examples was becoming overwhelming. By the time I reached the last chapter, my final assessment hovers somewhere between a two and three. I felt that the last chapter - a manufactured debate about the thesis that was more than thoroughly covered up to that point was compl ...more

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Jul 22, 2014 Gary Beauregard Bottomley rated it it was ok

I didn't listen to the whole book. I listened to about 9 hours of it. The book is clearly for lovers of words of which I'm not. I do like the authors overriding theme that we think by categorization through analogy. I just didn't want to sit through a countless stream of analogies and word play examples.

Some people (especially lovers of words) will love the book. I just prefer less examples and more facts.

(I bought this book because I absolutely loved the senior author's book, "Godel, Escher and ...more

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Mar 22, 2014 Dan Falk rated it liked it

My first grade-school reader was titled A Duck is a Duck. (Stay with me on this one, folks.) Now, by first grade I had learned a few things about ducks: They have feathers and a beak; they can swim and fly. No doubt I had observed that pigeons are sort of like ducks (they have everything except the swimming part); ostriches, meanwhile, don’t look much like ducks or pigeons – they can’t even fly – but they’re close enough to ducks and pigeons to deserve the label “birds.” Of course, airplanes hav My first grade-school reader was titled A Duck is a Duck. (Stay with me on this one, folks.) Now, by first grade I had learned a few things about ducks: They have feathers and a beak; they can swim and fly. No doubt I had observed that pigeons are sort of like ducks (they have everything except the swimming part); ostriches, meanwhile, don’t look much like ducks or pigeons – they can’t even fly – but they’re close enough to ducks and pigeons to deserve the label “birds.” Of course, airplanes have wings and can fly – they’re not birds, but perhaps we can place them in a larger category of “things that fly”…

Knowing what makes a duck a bird and what makes a plane not-a-bird may not seem like very profound mental feats – but Douglas Hoftsadter and Emmanuel Sander see such cognitive connections as part of an extraordinarily profound process. In fact, they see the task of putting things into categories, and the related task of drawing analogies, as the very essence of thought. (It is not giving too much away to reveal that, toward the end of the book, they argue that these two tasks are intimately related.)

The jacket copy for their hefty new book proclaims it as “an ambitious new theory of how the mind works” – a bold claim which, if it came from lesser minds, would call for extreme skepticism. But Douglas Hofstadter, a cognitive scientist and computer scientist at the University of Indiana, is widely regarded as an intellectual heavyweight, and when he says that “analogy-making defines each instant of thought, and is in fact the driving force behind all thought,” one feels compelled to at least hear him out. After all, his first book, Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), won the Pulitzer Prize, and a string of follow-ups have established him as one of the most creative scientific thinkers of the last few decades, and a highly skilled conveyor of complex ideas. His younger co-author, Emmanuel Sander, is a psychologist at the University of Paris.

They begin inside the mind of an infant: A child’s first thought, the authors suggest, is “mommy”; the child identifies this concept with a specific physical entity, namely the caregiver who provides food and comfort. Later she learns that other children also have mommies, and, eventually, that animals have mothers too; and also that “father” is similar to “mother” but not quite the same thing. This impulse to categorize and compare stays with us, for “analogy is our perennial dancing partner.”
For scientists, categorization and analogy-making are even more crucial. Consider Galileo’s first observations with the newly-invented telescope. Before Galileo, there was only one “moon,” namely the earth’s moon; to speak of “moons” was simply gibberish. But when the Italian scientist observed four small, star-like bodies seemingly revolving around the planet Jupiter, he was forced to do a re-think: Any celestial body that revolved around a larger one might very well deserve the label “moon.” Another example is the broadening of the category “number” to include quantities less than zero. Today any fifth-grader can add and subtract negative numbers, but in 16th century Italy they were simply unimagined. When negative numbers were finally granted the same status as positive numbers, a whole slew of vexing problems suddenly yielded simple (or at least manageable) answers. The book’s most persuasive section involves the physics of the early 20th century, as the authors focus on the thought processes of Albert Einstein, who they label an “analogizer extraordinaire.”

Be prepared to become hyper-conscious of the myriad of analogies one makes every moment of every day. (“He’s using this Starbucks as his office”; “City Hall is a circus”; “This book is a bit like a doorstop.”) And be prepared for overkill: The question of what is and what is not a “sandwich” goes on for several pages. And a list of what the authors call “caricature analogies” runs through 24 examples, at which point we are told: “Such a list could be extended forever.” No kidding.

The dangers of putting things into categories gets only a brief mention. Recognizing that kangaroos and koalas are related means you know your marsupials; but linking “young black man” and “criminal” simply makes you a racist. And think how much is at stake when a politician or a news outlet classifies a violent attack as “gang-related” or an “isolated incident” or an “act of terrorism.” Hofstadter and Sander do not address these questions. They only briefly mention the problem of stereotypes, which “have a bad reputation” but are also “crucial to our survival.” They later note that stereotypes “are a frequent source of deeply erroneous categorizations” – a warning that comes three pages from the end of the book.

Some of the arguments in Surfaces and Essences feel a little dated – after all, the power of metaphor is hardly news, and Einstein’s thought processes have been probed up, down, and sideways. Meanwhile, some current topics, such as neuroscience, are simply bypassed. The end result is a book that is ambitious and provocative, though unfortunately lacking the originality and spark of Gödel, Escher, Bach. (Adapted from a review I wrote for The Globe and Mail.) ...more

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Jan 13, 2018 Richard Thompson rated it it was ok

Shelves: philosophy, neuroscience

This book was a huge disappointment. It has a promising premise — that categorization and analogies are basically the same thing and that they are the key building blocks in human thinking. And I found it about 75% convincing, but the presentation is awful. The book is about five times longer than it needs to be and makes the same points over and over again, using a seemingly never ending stream of examples far more extensive than is needed to make the point. And then the authors try to categori This book was a huge disappointment. It has a promising premise — that categorization and analogies are basically the same thing and that they are the key building blocks in human thinking. And I found it about 75% convincing, but the presentation is awful. The book is about five times longer than it needs to be and makes the same points over and over again, using a seemingly never ending stream of examples far more extensive than is needed to make the point. And then the authors try to categorize and define different types of analogies, which by their own logic can’t really be done with any degree of accuracy.

I was also concerned with a couple of key parts of the argument on a substantive level. First, at several points in the book, the authors argue that the process of analogy making is shaped by the forms of language, in effect that language shapes thought. But this just isn’t so, as discussed in great detail in McWhorter’s book, “The Language Hoax”. They do acknowledge that the more extreme aspects of Whorf’s theory that language influences thought may not be correct, but they still go way too far in embracing this discredited theory in support of their thesis. Then they go too far again in asserting that analogy making is the basis for scientific advancement, including a detailed discussion of how Einstein used analogies in developing the theory of relativity. I am prepared to accept the idea that analogy may have been an important tool in Einstein’s toolbox, but I think only one of many. These guys should read Paul Feyerabend’s wonderful book “Against Method”, in which he makes a powerful case for the idea that there is no single method that is or can be the basis for scientific advancement. Any attempt at boiling down the ways of science to a single tool or method is mistake, regardless of the chosen candidate method.

Seeing these mistakes in key parts of the reasoning cast doubts for me on the validity of the overall thesis. If I can see two errors in the reasoning, how many others are there that I did not see? In the end I still found the book to be persuasive, but deeply flawed. ...more

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Jun 13, 2013 Nick Klagge rated it liked it

Unfortunately, although I am a huge fan of Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach," I found this book to be much less impressive. S&E lacks the engaging format of GEB, with only one short dialog at the end (rather than interspersed throughout, as in the earlier book). In addition, I would say that S&E could have been significantly shorter, and probably would have been edited more aggressively if Hofstadter weren't such a big name. The book often goes on for multiple pages illustrating a topic where a ...more

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Feb 28, 2018 Alex Weird rated it it was amazing

As a linguistics student fascinated by cognition, I love the book for all the reasons others hate it.

The long lists of examples are joyous to pore through, providing a dense and diverse corpus of illustrative ammo to draw from in your own conversations and projects.

This is true in general of the book's overall length and repetition: it's just richness and comprehensiveness. Instead of a quick chug of meal replacement, the 500-so pages are a thicc, delicious stew for you to savour and truly dige ...more

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Nov 11, 2018 Rachel Moyes rated it liked it

It started out so good. Then it got so long and boring. Then there was a whole chapter about scientific discoveries that felt very self-indulgent. Like, you know Hofstadter just wanted to include that because he thought it was cool. It was overly technical and could have been its own book.

Then the ending was bizarre and completely unnecessary and very self-indulgent again. It's a dialogue between two people used to sum up the book. One, Katie, is arguing that categorization is the essence of al ...more

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Apr 28, 2018 Vicki rated it it was ok

Shelves: borrowed-book

Did not finish, stopped about half way through. I liked the concept, I think the theory is solid. I really enjoyed the prologue and first chapter. However, the writing is dense, and it becomes increasingly tedious.. The examples beat each point to death (to use an analogy...).

But what really killed it for me, was the implicit bias shown in the examples. The assumption that traditional gender roles are universally understood, the use of offensive stereotypical analogies, such as the Jewish Mother ...more

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Oct 30, 2013 Jafar rated it really liked it

I can't judge whether the authors manage to make a convincing case for analogy-making being the basis of human intelligence. That's beyond my qualifications, and moreover, I skimmed through the middle parts of the book. But there's such an amazing trove of interesting facts in this books, especially on the linguistic front, that the book is worth reading regardless of the its grand claim. There's a long and great chapter at the end about how Einstein used analogies to come up with his special an ...more

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Apr 19, 2014 Michael Dubakov rated it it was amazing

Shelves: programming, feature-owner, business, ai, favorites

This book is quite cool. It is about thinking and the authors main idea is that all our thinking processes based on analogies. They provides 530 pages of arguments in defence of this idea. While it looks convincing, the book is quite verbose. I believe it can be easily cut to 300 pages without any problems. Information-to-inc ratio could be easily improved, that is why I gave it 4 stars.

Last third of the book is brilliant though. There are very cool examples from math and physics I really enjoye ...more

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Jul 22, 2014 Shane Mcloughlin rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: All psychologists, regardless of experience.

Recommended to Shane by: Found it online and ordered it from Amazon.

This book was a great, easy to read, book about analogical cognition written by two cognitive scientists. While cognitive science doesn't provide an adequate model of what analogical cognition is and how it might be trained / manipulated, it does a great job of stressing its importance in the first place. The narrative that makes this book easy to understand would never be found in one of the articles that actually provides an empirical model of analogical responding. In this case, that's a grea ...more

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May 22, 2017 Mickey Kawick rated it did not like it

It is a terrible book. The author uses every comparison in the world as an analogy... this sounds like that... must be an analogy... this word is combined with another word... must be an analogy.

Boring, repetitive, and I find that a man whose only tool is analogy sees the entire world as an analogy.

The world is filled with more subtlety than that. Many other people here have read the same book and found it similarly dull, uninsightful, and childish. Save your reading time for a good book.

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Jan 11, 2014 AJ Armstrong rated it did not like it

Shelves: abandoned

Henceforth, I can use "surfaces and essences" as an analogical category for the idea of "taking a facile, even trivial, idea that might make an interesting dozen-or-so page paper and using an awe-inspiring amount of pedantry to expand it into a large corpus, to a degree that strikes the reader as almost a parody". This will, inevitably, be connected to the mental category "life is way too short to expend time on a long, boring, book." ...more

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May 29, 2013 Mani rated it it was amazing

This is now officially one of my favorite books. Towards the end it got tedious and I suspect that it's one of those books that just causes one to just reach in there and jostle one's own thoughts. Also I read it right after Dennett's Intuition Pumps- if that affected my state of mind. I would recommend it if you're into thinking about words, thoughts, and psychophysics. ...more

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Sep 06, 2013 Rogers George rated it really liked it

As I read, I felt that I already knew everything in the book--until I got to the last chapter, which contains the clearest explanation of why E equals mc squared that I have ever read. I felt that I knew the material intuitively, but the book organizes it, discussing and codifying how we think in analogies--in great detail, and with Hofstadter's trademark subtle humor. ...more

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Nov 20, 2014 Teo 2050 rated it really liked it

Shelves: misc_metaphor-analogy, y16, by_physicist, by_psychologist, _nonfiction, rated-4, y16q2, by_cognitive-sci, by_mathematician, _contents

2016.01.10–2016.04.18

Contents

Hofstadter D & Sander E (2011) (33:52) Surfaces and Essences - Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

Prologue: Analogy as the Core of Cognition
• Giving Analogy its Due
• What Dictionaries Don't Say about Concepts
• Zeugmas: Amusing Revealers of Conceptual Subtlety
• Some Revealing Zeugmas
• The "Natural" Conceptual Distinctions Provided by Each Language
• Wordplay with the Word "Play"
• Playing Music and Sports in Chinese
• Zeugmas and Concepts
• The Nature of Categorizati ...more

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Jun 08, 2020 Micah Grant rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: self-improvement

This book was like eating a 6-foot sandwich all by yourself. At first it tastes great, there are some really good flavors. But as you get father into the sandwich, the flavors aren't as bright and the bread is dried out making it harder to swallow. Until by the end you are so far into it that you just keep enduring until it's over. And finishing it was a bigger relief than was the fun you had at the beginning.

The book started off with some great concepts, and I had a lot of fun relaying what I w ...more

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Feb 18, 2020 Barbara rated it did not like it

Shelves: stopped-reading

I bought this and saved it for just the right reading moment and ugh! What a bore. I kept waiting for the book to say something that wasn’t obvious or derivative. I finally gave up. Nothing new or interesting or not glaringly obvious here but the author seems like he thinks he’s really enlightening us...and that we’re stupid. Don’t bother.

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Jun 13, 2019 Shreyash Tiwari rated it it was amazing

You how there is stuff, the moment you read it, feels like you knew it somewhat but never could articulate it, to draw inferences. Well this book is FILLED with it!

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About Douglas R. Hofstadter

Douglas R. Hofstadter

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Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research focuses on consciousness, thinking and creativity. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979, for which he was awarded the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.

Hofstadter is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physici Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research focuses on consciousness, thinking and creativity. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979, for which he was awarded the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.

Hofstadter is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. Douglas grew up on the campus of Stanford University, where his father was a professor. Douglas attended the International School of Geneva for a year. He graduated with Distinction in Mathematics from Stanford in 1965. He spent a few years in Sweden in the mid 1960s. He continued his education and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975.

Hofstadter is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition which consists of himself and his graduate students, forming the "Fluid Analogies Research Group" (FARG). He was initially appointed to the Indiana University's Computer Science Department faculty in 1977, and at that time he launched his research program in computer modeling of mental processes (which at that time he called "artificial intelligence research", a label that he has since dropped in favor of "cognitive science research"). In 1984, he moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was hired as a professor of psychology and was also appointed to the Walgreen Chair for the Study of Human Understanding. In 1988 he returned to Bloomington as "College of Arts and Sciences Professor" in both Cognitive Science and Computer Science, and also was appointed Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology, but he states that his involvement with most of these departments is nominal.

In April, 2009, Hofstadter was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the American Philosophical Society.
Hofstadter's many interests include music, visual art, the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation and mathematics. He has numerous recursive sequences and geometric constructions named after him.

At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, he co-authored, with Melanie Mitchell, a computational model of "high-level perception" — Copycat — and several other models of analogy-making and cognition. The Copycat project was subsequently extended under the name "Metacat" by Hofstadter's doctoral student James Marshall. The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model the act of artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid). Other more recent models are Phaeaco (implemented by Harry Foundalis) and SeqSee (Abhijit Mahabal), which model high-level perception and analogy-making in the microdomains of Bongard problems and number sequences, respectively.

Hofstadter collects and studies cognitive errors (largely, but not solely, speech errors), "bon mots" (spontaneous humorous quips), and analogies of all sorts, and his long-time observation of these diverse products of cognition, and his theories about the mechanisms that underlie them, have exerted a powerful influence on the architectures of the computational models developed by himself and FARG members.

All FARG computational models share certain key principles, among which are: that human thinking is carried out by thousands of independent small actions in parallel, biased by the concepts that are currently activated; that activation spreads from activated concepts to less activated "neighbor concepts"; that there is a "mental temperature" that regulates the degree of randomness in the parallel activity; that promising avenues tend to be explored more rapidly than unpromising ones. F ...more

Books by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul

Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language

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“We have a very hard time “seeing” our cognitive activity because it is the medium in which we swim. The attempt to put our finger on what counts in any given situation leads us at times to making connections between situations that are enormously different on their surface and at other times to distinguishing between situations that on first glance seem nearly identical. Our constant jockeying back and forth among our categories runs the gamut from the most routine behaviors to the most creative ones.” — 1 likes

“This contrast between language A, which has a blob where language B has none, is what we mean by the phrase “the genius of language A”; it is the special ability of language A to get at certain concepts that no other language gets at as easily — and complementarily, it is also the set of weaknesses that language A has in expressing certain things that, in some other languages, are as easy as falling off a log.” — 0 likes

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