Abstract Analogies (Preface 5)

This part of the reading discusses what allows analogies to be detected. He suggests that 'the ability to perceive regular patterns and to formulate rules describing those patterns' is what allows analogies to be detected and it feels to me that he is right or very close to being right. He then goes on to talk about how humans look at certain things in terms of the 'role' it plays. He shows how humans have a tendency to 'feel' like things usually have only one role. He gives an example by asking the reader to think about what the word "hard" means and says that it probably feels like one idea to you. He then lists about fifteen different meanings that the word hard can take on. Even after we are shown that it does have a lot more then one meaning he suggests that we still might think of those things as one idea still. He then gives all the meanings of the german word hard which ultimatley shows how context and culture determines the boundary lines of concepts.

After thinking about the seemingly infinite things that must be considered to identify an analogy it seems like a much more complex cognitive process than I had previously thought. Making a program that can recognize analogies in two different conceptual things seems near impossible after reading how complex the process is behind such a thing.

High-level Perception (Chapter 4)

A point of interest in this chapter was the discussion on high-level perception and what constitutes it. Hofstadter suggests that a critical part of high-level perception involves "mental representaion," which he defines as "the fruits of perception." "In order for raw data to be shaped into a coherent whole, they must go through a process of filtering and organization, yeilding a structered representation that can be used by the mind for any number of purposes." The previous quote explains how humans 'make sense' of what's around them and appropriately react to stimuli in their environment.



He then goes on to explain what it is in my opinion the most important property of high-level perception, and that is that it's extremely flexible. Because of this flexibility input may be perceived in many different ways the book goes on to say. This made mt think of something pretty awesome, I realized that everyone in the world literally has a 'different' kind of high-level perception and that they all have cognitive processes unique to them. Because of this uniqueness of cognitve processes, the term 'human-level cognition' literally has about 6.7 billion different and 'correct' definitions. This also makes me think that when someone is trying to create AI are they being so ignorant as to imply that humans all behave and act the same way, or do they try create a certain 'type' of human level cognition, perhaps the one possessed by the programmer or something.



I don't think it is possible for one single program to represent accurately the level of cognition that humans have, instead one program could only represent a single humans unique cognitive processes.

The Eliza Effect (Preface 4)

In this section of the book, Hofstadter discussed how computers have a sort of "empty" understanding of the world we love in. For example, a computer may be able to make an 'analogy' of water flowing in a pipe and heat flow through a metal bar. Even though the computer may be able to produce a great analogy between water flow and heat flow it still does not have a deep unstanding of water and heat. A computer "has no representation anywhere of what it means to be liquid, or of what "greater than" means, or of what beakers and vials are, etc".

In the world of computer science there exists a thing known as the "Eliza Effect." The "Eliza Effect" is the term given to the illusion of a computer 'understanding' you, 'sympathizing' with you and showing you 'empathy'. In reality, computers have no conceptual understanding of what anything is really, in a way it only 'knows' 'empty' facts. An example of the "Eliza Effect' occuring in the real world would be someone actually thinking that an ATM was actually thanking them when the screen flashed "THANK YOU" after making a transaction. The "Eliza Effect" really interests me because it explains how computers can seem to interact with humans while appearing to display human emotions without actually expressing any emotions at all.

Numbo 138-154

An interesting concept that was discussed in this section was the concept of cytoplasm. Cytoplasm is what Hofstadter calls the place where "the building and dismantling of temporary, puzzle-specific structures take place". Numbo shares this cytoplasm with Jumbo. Hofstadter said the cytoplasm could be thought of as a "black board" or a "working memory", this sounds very intuitive to me. I would thinking it could also sort of be like a "mind" because all processes occur within it, just like everything humans percieve occurs within their mind.

Numbo is desgned to imitate human cognition during the solving of a Numble problem. It sounds like Numble does a pretty good job in replicating human cognition, it even makes mistakes like a human and will go in wrong directions. I admire Hofstadters pursuit of creating human-level cognition and the fact that he even accounts for the flaws that humans have when solving such problems. I never really thought of how hard it would be to create human-level cognition.