Analogy-Making Lies At The Heart Of Intelligence

The part of Hofstadter's book that I am going to be focusing on today came from his section entitled "The Key Role of Analogies" on page 62 of his book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. In this section, Hofstadter begins to talk about how analogy-making is used in seeking out "Islands of Order" in pattern sequences (read page 58 for more details on Islands of Order).

This seemed to me like a very important concept in the daily lives of humans. When we look at everyday objects, numbers, or things of the like we either relate or differentiate between these things to make note of them within our minds.

This is a quote that I’d like to take from Hofstadter’s passage that I had enjoyed: “…pattern-finding is the core of intelligence, the implication is clear: analogy-making lies at the heart of intelligence. Yet these extremely simple ideas have seldom been stated in cognitive science, let alone explored in detail.” This reminded me of the research that I had done 2 summers ago when I was attending the URSI program at Vassar College with Professor Jan Andrews and Ken Livingston.

The research that I took part in was on Category Learning with the use of 3-D objects in a virtual world. The virtual world we used was Second Life. Hofstadter talked about how “Analogies vary not only in their degrees of salience but also in their degrees of strength.” I could not help but reminisce of doing research and how his ideas about analogies closely correlated with the ideas put forth in some of the research.

In the research that we did we had 2 sets of objects, a gex and a zof, that varied slightly from one another within their respected groups. We had extreme forms in both of the objects and we also had forms of each object that looked as though they crossed the threshold to where they looked the exact same when in actuality they did not. The participants would then go through a random order of these objects and try to categorize and choose which form the object was that they were looking at (either a gex or zof). This is where I saw the connection between Hofstadters looks on analogies and the research that I took part in.

Though the research did not include mathematical sequences I do believe that there is some sort of connect in a broader sense. I could keep going on this topic, but I know that I only have a set number of words that I am allowed to use in my blog entry for this class and I am really cutting it close to the amount of words that I’m using. I can post more on this topic later at some point if need be.