Surfaces and Essences Quotes

“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.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“For Kant, analogy was the wellspring of all creativity, and Nietzsche gave a famous definition of truth as “a mobile army of metaphors”.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Thus our categories keep us well informed at all times, allowing us to bypass the need for direct observation. If we didn’t constantly extrapolate our knowledge into new situations — if we refrained from making inferences — then we would be conceptually blind. We would be unable to think or act, doomed to permanent uncertainty and to eternal groping in the dark. In short, in order to perceive the world around us, we depend just as much on categorization through analogy as we do on our eyes or our ears.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Context thus changes categorization and can modify how we perceive even the most familiar of items.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“The closer one looks, the more such questions one will find, and the more they are going to seem absurd.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“No thought can be formed that isn’t informed by the past; or, more precisely, we think only thanks to analogies that link our present to our past.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Such concepts, be they concrete or abstract, are selectively mobilized instant by instant, and nearly always without any awareness on our part, and it is this ceaseless activity that allows us to build up mental representations of situations we are in, to have complex feelings about them, and to have run-of-the-mill as well as more exalted thoughts. No thought can be formed that isn’t informed by the past; or, more precisely, we think only thanks to analogies that link our present to our past.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“We claim that cognition takes place thanks to a constant flow of categorizations, and that at the base of it all is found, in contrast to classification (which aims to put all things into fixed and rigid mental boxes), the phenomenon of categorization through analogy-making, which endows human thinking with its remarkable fluidity.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Indeed, the central thesis of our book — a simple yet nonstandard idea — is that the spotting of analogies pervades every moment of our thought, thus constituting thought’s core.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“If categorization is central to thinking, then what mechanism carries it out? Analogy is the answer.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Categorization thus helps one to draw conclusions and to guess about how a situation is likely to evolve.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“That is, once a situation has been described, it naturally invites analogies to be made that will generalize it and render its essence (or rather, one of its essences) ever clearer.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“in order to see that what they did was “exactly the same thing”, one has to ignore almost all the details of the two situations in order to extract from them one single shared essence.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Any situation permits a host of diverse categorizations.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Just as we need to hide the massively complex details inside our fancy gadgets by elegant and user-friendly packaging, so we need to hide the details of many ideas in order to talk about them in a sufficiently compact way that we won’t get lost in a mountain of details.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Often compound words have drifted so far from their etymological roots that native speakers can easily miss what is right in front of their eyes.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“in fact we all know many more categories than we know words.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“At the outset, there is a concrete situation with concrete components, and thus it is perceived as something unique and cleanly separable from the rest of the world. After a while, though — perhaps a day later, perhaps a year — one runs into another situation that one finds to be similar, and a link is made.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“What gives this zeugma its flavor of oddness is that one of the meanings of the verb “restore” that it depends on is “to return something that has been lost”, while the other meaning used is “to make something regain its former, more ideal state”, and although these two senses of the same word are clearly related, they are just as clearly not synonymous.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Although dictionaries give the impression of analyzing words all the way down to their very atoms, all they do in fact is graze their surfaces.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Why is it that we would use the very same word to denote two different levels on a ladder of abstraction?”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“In short, nonstop categorization is every bit as indispensable to our survival in the world as is the nonstop beating of our hearts. Without the ceaseless pulsating heartbeat of our “categorization engine”, we would understand nothing around us, could not reason in any form whatever, could not communicate with anyone else, and would have no basis on which to take any action.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“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.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“...when the verb 'to google' first appeared in the 2006 editions of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, the Silicon Valley giant instantly launched an intensive campaign to restrict the usage of its name.”
― Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“...and that's how we communicate all the time, with a minimum of effort, and a maximum of very simple analogies.”
― Emmanuel Sander and Douglas Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“But despite this risk, abstraction can be enriching: a gradual series of refinements can indeed reveal a unity among a set of situations that at first glance seem entirely different, and, thanks to our faculty of analogy-making, we soon come to see these situations as belonging to a single category, and to feel every bit as comfortable with the new category as we once felt with the old one. This kind of push towards ever-higher levels of abstraction can go remarkably far without adulterating the essence of a category,”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Our intense human desire to avoid ambiguity, to pinpoint the true and to discard the false, to separate the wheat from the chaff, tends to make us seek and believe in very sharp answers to questions that have none.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Usually one is unaware of these category shifts because one is mentally immersed in a specific context and such shifts are carried out in a totally unconscious manner. In a given context, just one categorization seems possible to most people. Their lack of awareness of the contextual blinders that they are wearing reinforces the widespread belief in a world in which every object belongs to one and only one Platonic category — its “true” category.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Every act is unique, and yet there are resemblances between certain acts, and it is precisely these resemblances that give a language the opportunity to describe them all by the same label; and when a language chooses to do so, that fact creates “families” of actions. This is a subtle challenge to which every language reacts in its own fashion, but once this has been done, each group of people who share a common native language accepts as completely natural and self-evident the specific breakdown of concepts handed to them by their language. On the other hand, the conceptual distinctions that are part and parcel of other languages may strike them as artificial, pointlessly finicky, even incomprehensible or stupid, unless they find some interest in the subtleties of such distinctions, which may then make them see their own set of concepts in a fresh light.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“each concept in our mind owes its existence to a long succession of analogies made unconsciously over many years, initially giving birth to the concept and continuing to enrich it over the course of our lifetime. Furthermore, at every moment of our lives, our concepts are selectively triggered by analogies that our brain makes without letup, in an effort to make sense of the new and unknown in terms of the old and known.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking