Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American cognitive and computer scientist whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world,[1][4] consciousness, analogy-making, strange loops, artificial intelligence, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction[5][6] and a National Book Award (at that time called The American Book Award) for Science.[7][note 1] His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.[8][9][10][11]
Since 1988, Hofstadter has been the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature 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).[14] 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 he called "artificial intelligence research", a label 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. He was also appointed adjunct professor of history and philosophy of science, philosophy, comparative literature, and psychology, but has said that his involvement with most of those departments is nominal.[15][16][17] In 1988 Hofstadter received the In Praise of Reason award, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry's highest honor.[18] In April 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences[19] and a member of the American Philosophical Society.[20] In 2010 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden.[21]
At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, he and Melanie Mitchell coauthored a computational model of "high-level perception"—Copycat—and several other models of analogy-making and cognition, including the Tabletop project, co-developed with Robert M. French.[22] The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid). Other more recent models include 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, as well as George (Francisco Lara-Dammer), which models the processes of perception and discovery in triangle geometry.[23][24][25]
Hofstadter has had several exhibitions of his artwork in various university galleries.[citation needed] These shows have featured large collections of his gridfonts, his ambigrams (pieces of calligraphy created with two readings, either of which is usually obtained from the other by rotating or reflecting the ambigram, but sometimes simply by "oscillation", like the Necker Cube or the rabbit/duck figure of Joseph Jastrow), and his "Whirly Art" (music-inspired visual patterns realized using shapes based on various alphabets from India[citation needed]). Hofstadter invented the term "ambigram" in 1984; many ambigrammists have since taken up the concept.[citation needed]
Hofstadter collects and studies cognitive errors (largely, but not solely, speech errors), "bon mots", and analogies of all sorts, and his longtime observation of these diverse products of cognition. His theories about the mechanisms that underlie them have exerted a powerful influence on the architectures of the computational models he and FARG members have developed.[26]
Hofstadter's thesis about consciousness, first expressed in Gödel, Escher, Bach but also present in several of his later books, is that it is "an emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in the brain."[citation needed] In Gödel, Escher, Bach he draws an analogy between the social organization of a colony of ants and the mind seen as a coherent "colony" of neurons. In particular, Hofstadter claims that our sense of having (or being) an "I" comes from the abstract pattern he terms a "strange loop", an abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena as audio and video feedback that Hofstadter has defined as "a level-crossing feedback loop". The prototypical example of a strange loop is the self-referential structure at the core of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Hofstadter's 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop carries his vision of consciousness considerably further, including the idea that each human "I" is distributed over numerous brains, rather than being limited to one.[27]Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language is a long book devoted to language and translation, especially poetry translation, and one of its leitmotifs is a set of 88 translations of "Ma Mignonne", a highly constrained poem by 16th-century French poet Clément Marot. In this book, Hofstadter jokingly describes himself as "pilingual" (meaning that the sum total of the varying degrees of mastery of all the languages that he has studied comes to 3.14159...), as well as an "oligoglot" (someone who speaks "a few" languages).[28][29]
In 1999, the bicentennial year of the Russian poet and writer Alexander Pushkin, Hofstadter published a verse translation of Pushkin's classic novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin. He has translated other poems and two novels: La Chamade (That Mad Ache) by Françoise Sagan, and La Scoperta dell'Alba (The Discovery of Dawn) by Walter Veltroni, the then-head of the Partito Democratico in Italy. The Discovery of Dawn was published in 2007, and That Mad Ache was published in 2009, bound together with Hofstadter's essay Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation.
Hofstadter's Law is "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." The law is stated in Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Students
Hofstadter's former Ph.D. students[30] include (with dissertation title):
Bob French–Tabletop: An Emergent, Stochastic Model of Analogy-Making
Gary McGraw–Letter Spirit (Part One): Emergent High-level Perception of Letters Using Fluid Concepts
Melanie Mitchell–Copycat: A Computer Model of High-Level Perception and Conceptual Slippage in Analogy-making
Public image
Hofstadter in Bologna, Italy, in 2002
Hofstadter has said that he feels "uncomfortable with the nerd culture that centers on computers". He admits that "a large fraction [of his audience] seems to be those who are fascinated by technology", but when it was suggested that his work "has inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence" he replied that he was pleased about that, but that he himself has "no interest in computers".[31][32] In that interview he also mentioned a course he has twice given at Indiana University, in which he took a "skeptical look at a number of highly touted AI projects and overall approaches".[17] For example, upon the defeat of Garry Kasparov by Deep Blue, he commented that "It was a watershed event, but it doesn't have to do with computers becoming intelligent".[33] In his book Metamagical Themas, he says that "in this day and age, how can anyone fascinated by creativity and beauty fail to see in computers the ultimate tool for exploring their essence?".[34]
Provoked by predictions of a technological singularity (a hypothetical moment in the future of humanity when a self-reinforcing, runaway development of artificial intelligence causes a radical change in technology and culture), Hofstadter has both organized and participated in several public discussions of the topic. At Indiana University in 1999 he organized such a symposium, and in April 2000, he organized a larger symposium titled "Spiritual Robots" at Stanford University, in which he moderated a panel consisting of Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Kevin Kelly, Ralph Merkle, Bill Joy, Frank Drake, John Holland and John Koza. Hofstadter was also an invited panelist at the first Singularity Summit, held at Stanford in May 2006. Hofstadter expressed doubt that the singularity will occur in the foreseeable future.[35][36][37][38][39][40]
In 1988 Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos created a docudrama about Hofstadter and his ideas, Victim of the Brain, based on The Mind's I. It includes interviews with Hofstadter about his work.[41]
Columnist
When Martin Gardner retired from writing his "Mathematical Games" column for Scientific American magazine, Hofstadter succeeded him in 1981–83 with a column titled Metamagical Themas (an anagram of "Mathematical Games"). An idea he introduced in one of these columns was the concept of "Reviews of This Book", a book containing nothing but cross-referenced reviews of itself that has an online implementation.[42] One of Hofstadter's columns in Scientific American concerned the damaging effects of sexist language, and two chapters of his book Metamagical Themas are devoted to that topic, one of which is a biting analogy-based satire, "A Person Paper on Purity in Language" (1985), in which the reader's presumed revulsion at racism and racist language is used as a lever to motivate an analogous revulsion at sexism and sexist language; Hofstadter published it under the pseudonym William Satire, an allusion to William Safire.[43] Another column reported on the discoveries made by University of Michigan professor Robert Axelrod in his computer tournament pitting many iterated prisoner's dilemma strategies against each other, and a follow-up column discussed a similar tournament that Hofstadter and his graduate student Marek Lugowski organized.[citation needed] The "Metamagical Themas" columns ranged over many themes, including patterns in Frédéric Chopin's piano music (particularly his études), the concept of superrationality (choosing to cooperate when the other party/adversary is assumed to be equally intelligent as oneself), and the self-modifying game of Nomic, based on the way the legal system modifies itself, and developed by philosopher Peter Suber.[44]
Personal life
Hofstadter was married to Carol Ann Brush until her death. They met in Bloomington, and married in Ann Arbor in 1985. They had two children, Danny and Monica. Carol died in 1993 from the sudden onset of a brain tumor, glioblastoma multiforme, when their children were 5 and 2. The Carol Ann Brush Hofstadter Memorial Scholarship for Bologna-bound Indiana University students was established in 1996 in her name.[45] Hofstadter's book Le Ton beau de Marot is dedicated to their two children and its dedication reads "To M. & D., living sparks of their Mommy's soul".
In 2010, Hofstadter met Baofen Lin in a cha-cha-cha class, and they married in Bloomington in September 2012.[46][47]
Hofstadter has composed pieces for piano and for piano and voice. He created an audio CD, DRH/JJ, of these compositions performed mostly by pianist Jane Jackson, with a few performed by Brian Jones, Dafna Barenboim, Gitanjali Mathur, and Hofstadter.[48]
The dedication for I Am A Strange Loop is: "To my sister Laura, who can understand, and to our sister Molly, who cannot."[49] Hofstadter explains in the preface that his younger sister Molly never developed the ability to speak or understand language.[50]
As a consequence of his attitudes about consciousness and empathy, Hofstadter became a vegetarian in his teenage years, and has remained primarily so since that time.[51][52]
Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, co-authored with Emmanuel Sander ( ISBN0-465-01847-5) (first published in French as L'Analogie. Cœur de la pensée; published in English in the U.S. in April 2013)
Papers
Hofstadter has written, among many others, the following papers:
"A non-deterministic approach to analogy, involving the Ising model of ferromagnetism", in Eduardo Caianiello (ed.), The Physics of Cognitive Processes. Teaneck, NJ: World Scientific, 1987.
"Speechstuff and thoughtstuff: Musings on the resonances created by words and phrases via the subliminal perception of their buried parts", in Sture Allen (ed.), Of Thoughts and Words: The Relation between Language and Mind. Proceedings of the Nobel Symposium 92, London/New Jersey: World Scientific Publ., 1995, 217–267.
Are Quanta Real? A Galilean Dialogue by J.M. Jauch, Indiana University Press, 1989. (Foreword) ( ISBN0-253-20545-X)
Gödel's Proof (2002 revised edition) by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, edited by Hofstadter. In the foreword, Hofstadter explains that the book (originally published in 1958) exerted a profound influence on him when he was young. ( ISBN0-8147-5816-9)
Who Invented the Computer? The Legal Battle That Changed Computing History by Alice Rowe Burks, 2003. (Foreword)
Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science by Karl Sigmund, Basic Books, 2017. Hofstadter wrote the foreword and helped with the translation.
To Light the Flame of Reason: Clear Thinking for the Twenty-First Century by Christopher Sturmark, Prometheus, 2022. (Foreword and Contributions)
Self-reference is a concept that involves referring to oneself or one's own attributes, characteristics, or actions. It can occur in language, logic, mathematics, philosophy, and other fields.
A strange loop is a cyclic structure that goes through several levels in a hierarchical system. It arises when, by moving only upwards or downwards through the system, one finds oneself back where one started. Strange loops may involve self-reference and paradox. The concept of a strange loop was proposed and extensively discussed by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach, and is further elaborated in Hofstadter's book I Am a Strange Loop, published in 2007.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, also known as GEB, is a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter.
Analogy is a comparison or correspondence between two things because of a third element that they are considered to share.
Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language is a 1997 book by Douglas Hofstadter in which he explores the meaning, strengths, failings and beauty of translation. The book is a long and detailed examination of one short translation of a minor French poem and, through that, an examination of the mysteries of translation itself. Hofstadter himself refers to it as "my ruminations on the art of translation".
Metamagical Themas is an eclectic collection of articles that Douglas Hofstadter wrote for the popular science magazine Scientific American during the early 1980s. The anthology was published in 1985 by Basic Books.
In mathematical logic, a Gödel numbering is a function that assigns to each symbol and well-formed formula of some formal language a unique natural number, called its Gödel number. The concept was developed by Kurt Gödel for the proof of his incompleteness theorems.
In the platonia dilemma introduced in Douglas Hofstadter's book Metamagical Themas, an eccentric trillionaire gathers 20 people together, and tells them that if one and only one of them sends them a telegram by noon the next day, that person will receive a billion dollars. If they receive more than one telegram, or none at all, no one will get any money, and cooperation between players is forbidden. In this situation, the superrational thing to do is to send a telegram with probability 1/20.
Meta is an adjective meaning "more comprehensive" or "transcending".
A Bongard problem is a kind of puzzle invented by the Soviet computer scientist Mikhail Moiseevich Bongard, probably in the mid-1960s. They were published in his 1967 book on pattern recognition. The objective is to spot the differences between the two sides. Bongard, in the introduction of the book credits the ideas in it to a group including M. N. Vaintsvaig, V. V. Maksimov, and M. S. Smirnov.
Drawing Hands is a lithograph by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher first printed in January 1948. It depicts a sheet of paper, out of which two hands rise, in the paradoxical act of drawing one another into existence. This is one of the most obvious examples of Escher's common use of paradox.
Egbert B. Gebstadter is a fictional author who appears in the indices of books by Douglas R. Hofstadter. For each Hofstadter book, there is a corresponding Gebstadter book. His name is derived from "GEB", the abbreviation for Hofstadter's first book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid; the letters appear in his last name, permuted in his first name, and permuted again in his initials.
Copycat is a model of analogy making and human cognition based on the concept of the parallel terraced scan, developed in 1988 by Douglas Hofstadter, Melanie Mitchell, and others at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University Bloomington. The original Copycat was written in Common Lisp and is bitrotten ; however, Java and Python ports exist. The latest version in 2018 is a Python3 port by Lucas Saldyt and J. Alan Brogan.
Hofstadter's law is a self-referential adage, coined by Douglas Hofstadter in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979) to describe the widely experienced difficulty of accurately estimating the time it will take to complete tasks of substantial complexity:
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
The philosophy of artificial intelligence is a branch of the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of computer science that explores artificial intelligence and its implications for knowledge and understanding of intelligence, ethics, consciousness, epistemology, and free will. Furthermore, the technology is concerned with the creation of artificial animals or artificial people so the discipline is of considerable interest to philosophers. These factors contributed to the emergence of the philosophy of artificial intelligence.
Melanie Mitchell is an American scientist. She is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute. Her major work has been in the areas of analogical reasoning, complex systems, genetic algorithms and cellular automata, and her publications in those fields are frequently cited.
I Am a Strange Loop is a 2007 book by Douglas Hofstadter, examining in depth the concept of a strange loop to explain the sense of "I". The concept of a strange loop was originally developed in his 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach.
In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference.
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought is a 1995 book by Douglas Hofstadter and other members of the Fluid Analogies Research Group exploring the mechanisms of intelligence through computer modeling. It contends that the notions of analogy and fluidity are fundamental to explain how the human mind solves problems and to create computer programs that show intelligent behavior. It analyzes several computer programs that members of the group have created over the years to solve problems that require intelligence.
Cognitive musicology is a branch of cognitive science concerned with computationally modeling musical knowledge with the goal of understanding both music and cognition.
Robert M. French is a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. He is currently at the University of Burgundy in Dijon. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he worked with Douglas Hofstadter on the Tabletop computational cognitive model. He specializes in cognitive science and has made an extensive study of the process of analogy-making.
1 2 Hofstadter, Douglas Richard (1975). The Energy Levels of Bloch Electrons in a Magnetic Field (PhD thesis). University of Oregon. ProQuest288009604.
↑ Hofstadter, D. R. (1982). "Who shoves whom around inside the careenium? Or what is the meaning of the word "I"?". Synthese. 53 (#2): 189–218. doi:10.1007/BF00484897. S2CID46972278.
↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on April 5, 2013. Retrieved September 25, 2012.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link). Events.latimes.com (November 22, 1963). Retrieved on 2013-10-06.
↑ Shore, Lys Ann (1988). "New Light on the New Age CSICOP's Chicago conference was the first to critically evaluate the New Age movement". The Skeptical Inquirer. 13 (#3): 226–235.
↑ Hofstadter, Douglas, To Err is Human; to Study Error-making is Cognitive Science. Together with David Moser. Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, 1989, pp. 185–215.
↑ Hofstadter, Douglas R. Le Ton Beau de Marot. New York: Basic Books, 1997, pp. 16–17.
↑ Hofstadter, Douglas R. Le Ton Beau de Marot, Chapter "How Jolly the Lot of an Oligoglot", New York: Basic Books, 1997, pp. 15–62.
↑ "People at the CRCC". The Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. Archived from the original on February 22, 2014. Retrieved February 18, 2014.
↑ "Me, My Soul, and I". Wired. March 2007. Archived from the original on September 29, 2007. Retrieved December 10, 2007.
↑ Hofstadter, Douglas (1985). Metamagical Themas(PDF). p.9. Archived from the original(PDF) on August 12, 2018. Retrieved December 19, 2018.
↑ "Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity By 2100?", April 1, 2000 Note: as of 2007, videos seem to be missing.
↑ "Moore's Law, Artificial Evolution, and the Fate of Humanity." In L. Booker, S. Forrest, et al. (eds.), Perspectives on Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
↑ "Staring EMI Straight in the Eye—and Doing My Best Not to Flinch." In David Cope, Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
↑ Hofstadter, Douglas R. I Am a Strange Loop, p. v. Basic Books, 2007.
↑ Hofstadter, Douglas R. I Am a Strange Loop, p. xi. Basic Books, 2007. "No one knew what it was, but Molly wasn't able to understand language or to speak (nor is she to this day, and we never did find out why)."
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