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Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video]
- jshen 6d agoThis is very similar to George Lakoff's work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff A good place to start for anyone that is interested is his book Metaphor's We Live By.
- FLeXMurphy 6d ago> According to Lakoff, an individual's experience and attitude towards sociopolitical issues are influenced by being framed in linguistic constructions. In Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Persian Gulf (1991), he argued that the American involvement in the Persian Gulf War was obscured or "spun" by the metaphors which were used by the first Bush administration to justify it.[3] Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank, the now defunct Rockridge Institute. I will never not find it amusing how a simple thing like money is obscured or "spun" by a thin veil of pseudointellectual bullshit.
- HarHarVeryFunny 6d agoHoftstader's video is pressumably based on his own book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies".
- goatlover 6d agoVery interesting book. You don't really think about how often metaphors are employed in language, and their influence on how we think. The book makes some rather strong claims regarding science and philosophy being misled by metaphorical thinking, but still a good read. And it's relevant today given how people like to anthropomorphize LLMs, and compare biology to digital machines we make. Of course there are similarities. But the point about metaphorical thinking is we are mislead by treating metaphors as literally true. Anyway if the stronger claims in the book are at all true, it might impact how an alien species thinks differently than us (given a lot of our metaphors are biologically based). And could present significant difficulties for decoding an alien signal.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6d agoOne of the best examples of a clear issue with metaphorical thinking came from discussions about the plaque installed on Pioneer 10. Some clever people thought up the idea of using a pulsar map to define where the sun/earth were. Some other clever people noted that pointing to the location with a line that ended in an arrow was very, very deeply rooted in the history of human hunting techniques and could be very hard to understand if you have never seen or even conceived of an arrow(head).
- saltcured 6d agoAdd a slight trailing decay and I think the basic arrow motif could be intuitive for trajectory for any observer who experienced aerodynamics? Whether it is the evolved shape of a flying creature or an abstract depiction of a meteorite (or even a comet!), there is a kind of intuition about the sharp end and the flaring of air or fluid around it, with some sort of trailing tail from whence it came... One can imagine many observers who could find our space probes would also have some of these experiences? Of course, all of this assumes some kind of visual perception and cognition to even recognize the plaque as having markings made with an intent to communicate some abstract ideas...
- pixl97 6d agoWhile I've not watched this video I don't think this is an uncommon idea. Or at least many people may see it in practice but never really follow thru on it. People with more knowledge, especially practical working knowledge over many fields, tend to have much more freedom in finding solutions. Now, an interesting question is how good at LLMs are at analogy, especially deeper transferable concepts?
- cnity 6d agoPlease read Hofstadter and you will know more about truly interesting questions.
- gowld 6d ago"Seinfeld isn't funny". Hofstadter was one of the pioneers of the "not uncommon" idea.
- cnity 6d agoRight, but there is a big difference between "not uncommon" as disparagement vs as invitation to take part. This is how Hofstadter can connect with such a large audience despite tackling really challenging and fascinating questions. Edit: it actually is very possible GP wasn't being disparaging, in which case truly sorry! I'm not trying to be too snarky.
- ameliaquining 6d agoScott Aaronson wrote a good post last week on how Hofstadter's theories of intelligence have held up: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10046 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10046 (The post primarily emphasizes self-referentiality rather than analogy, but I suspect similar things could be said about analogy.)
- jameshart 6d agoEmbedding spaces are all about analogy. I’m confused why there seems to be a dismissal of the most basic ‘strange loop’ of the LLM - the fact that it’s evaluating a context to choose the next word, then reevaluating in a context where that word has been appended. That always seemed to me like the essence of a Hofstadterish strange loop, so the emergence of Hofstadterish phenomena (self rep, etc) doesn’t seem surprising.
- CPLX 6d agoThat's a really interesting point. I hadn't drawn that connection before. And if anyone's reading this and hasn't read Hofstadter, you're making a mistake, it's utterly perspective-changing stuff. Well, it was for me, at least.
- bogzz 6d agoYou are guilt-tripping me for using my copy of Godel, Escher, Bach to raise my monitor before I got around to reading it.
- CPLX 6d agoI read it when I was about 9 or 10, I didn't understand any of it at all but I used to pick it up and look at the pictures of the Escher drawings, which were amazing. Then, after I graduated from college, a friend of mine who was finishing his physics degree mentioned that he had just finished it and that it was life-changing. I read it again and deeply regretted having put it down for those 12 intervening years.
- patcon 6d agoStrong agree. It's the finding of symmetries and folds along non-obvious crease lines, but in semantic space of language <3 It's akin to the amino acid interactions in proteins that hold biological matter together, and determine it's shape and active form. Protein folding and narrative/storytelling have strange homology :) (I work in this area via collective intelligence, and these ideas are very dear to me during the past decade. It's neat to see the intuitions seemingly becoming validated in language models)
- gilleain 6d ago> Protein folding and narrative/storytelling have strange homology Hmmmmmm. While I get what you mean, and I don't disagree, please be cautious when making analogies between biological systems and more distant fields. Yes, folding is driven by hydrophobic collapse due to interactions between residue sidechains. Really, though, we are just describing two 'complex systems', where large numbers of diverse interactions between elements leads to diverse and emergent structures.
- tony_cannistra 6d agoWhat is your rationale for advocating for caution here?
- z3c0 6d agoI expect because it's overly reductive to the point of falsehood. Two sufficiently complex systems will likely exhibit enough parallels to form a useful analogy, but that does nothing to reflect the ways the systems aren't alike.
- Jtsummers 6d agoAnalogies are like models, some are useful, but they're all wrong. Just because we can analogize between protein folding and narrative/storytelling doesn't mean that we can derive anything particularly useful about one from the other except maybe to give an intuition about complexity. The mechanisms and math behind protein folding and an analogy between that and storytelling doesn't necessarily give us any mechanism for or deep understanding into storytelling.
- delichon 6d agoThe drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense", 1873
- louiereederson 6d agoAlso Nietzsche: "“What do the people actually take knowledge to be? What do they want when they want ‘knowledge’? Nothing more than this: something unfamiliar is to be traced back to something familiar.”"
- ilaksh 6d agoHe was extremely skeptical of the capabilities of AI for years but eventually came around to calling it truly capable after testing advanced LLMs. He is still an AI skeptic in as many ways that he can reasonably be, but doesn't deny the raw ability. Actually he thinks it will eclipse humans and he is a doomer. He sees it as being an extremely empty type of intelligence though. But I hope that people who have an intuitive understanding of contemporary machine learning (not me) will sometimes watch videos like this and think about things at a higher level. LLMs have a LOT of assumptions built in.
- gaigalas 6d agosources?
- morkalork 6d agoI appreciate that he did not fall into the anthropomorphization trap unlike Noam Chomsky
- calebkaiser 6d agoI'd wager that the vast majority of the ML research community, especially anyone interested in "AGI", is familiar with Hofstader's work. And I don't think anyone working on contemporary language models would argue that they are somehow an assumption-less "pure" model--the particular inductive bias of the Transformer has been studied by a huge number of researchers and continues to be, and the same is true for things like training data bias. I think the Hofstader's view of modern LLMs is actually a deeply human and touching one. Looking at his work over the years, his curiosity has always veered towards human thought. He could have written GEB with a focus on completely different examples of self-reference, but he chose three striking humans from history. When he's describing modern systems as "empty intelligence", I think there's a little bit of heartbreak in his perspective, because he sees them as fundamentally different from humans in a way that leaves the part he loves--the "I" in the loop--out of the equation. He gave an interview a few years ago where he explains his feeling as being "diminished" not in a "What will I do if I'm not the best at math?" kind of way, but more specifically as he puts it, that humans are "imperfect, flawed structures".
- jgalt212 6d agoIt's like Uber for thinking.
- sim04ful 6d agoWhere does the strange loop reside in LLMs ?
- derac 6d agocurrently, the harness
- tolerance 6d agoThis seems like a worthwhile listen. As it stands I think that LLMs sort of suck at this. Either that or I don't understand what analogous thinking is or people who use LLMs to facilitate this kind of thinking are bad at it too. But I think that LLMs are bad at something that has to do with taking seemingly disparate concepts and assimilating one into the other to convey a novel idea. Like these articles... <https://spectrum.ieee.org/jimi-hendrix-systems-engineer https://spectrum.ieee.org/jimi-hendrix-systems-engineer> <https://zed.dev/blog/agentic-xanadu https://zed.dev/blog/agentic-xanadu> ...are anything but convincing once you read past the gravitas that the LLM lends the prose.
- delichon 6d ago> As it stands I think that LLMs sort of suck at this. Metaphors are at the core of LLM cognition too via vector embeddings. The distance between embeddings is an inverse measure of their metaphorical attachment. That lets AIs scrape meaning from natural language, which demonstrates that natural language is an encoded sequence of metaphors.
- tolerance 6d agoI'm going to need a weekend or two to figure out what this means.
- hbogert 6d agoHave you played with a vector databases and have them explained yet? The grandparent comment is only explaining that concept.
- tolerance 6d agoNope! But I'm soaking all of this in and I appreciate these nudges. And after some thought I'm curious whether this means that LLMs ought to be adept at forming new metaphors as opposed to handling pre-existing ones.
- esafak 6d ago(2009) Anyway, ML was already onto analogies with word2vec, which famously could answer questions like "man is to woman as king is to ____" mathematically. This stuff seems quaint now.
- HarHarVeryFunny 6d agoIt's been a long time since I read Hofstader's book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" that this is presumably based on, so I'll be interested to watch the video as a refresher, later. :) He also wrote a follow-on book, "Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking", published after this video was made, that I've never read. From what I recall, to Hofstafer analogy making isn't some higher level cognitive process, certainly not a language based one, but basically is THE cognitive process all the way from perception on up, and is the mechanism by which we form object categories in the first place. As always Hofstader's ideas are interesting, but I can't say I agree with them. It seems that the key evolutionary benefit, and function, of a brain is prediction, which is the superpower that moves us from being stuck in the present to being able to "see" (predict) the future, and therefore from being merely reactive to being able to proactively plan and predict future outcomes (what will the sabre-tooth do, where is the water supply?) based on our experience. Given the never-same-twice nature of sensory perception, before you can predict you need to be able to generalize/categorize, which I think Hofstader would regarded as analogy making (how is this thing I'm seeing similar to what I've previously seen?), although it seems the actual mechanism involved is embeddings or embedding-like representations where similar inputs have similar representations, and what might more simply be considered as associative recall provides the generalization from view/instance to identity/category. So, is it really analogies all the way up, or are our perception and cognitive processes better regarded as generalization and prediction, which seem not only seem to have direct and obvious neural realizations, but also match the evolutionary needs that we would expect to exist?
- GMoromisato 6d agoIronically, I think he was right! In fact some of his initial experiments, like copycat, were about predicting patterns. You can see next-token-prediction from there. But I think he always held out for an algorithmic/logical method rather than a purely statistical one. If he had accepted the "Bitter Lesson", I think he would have been at the forefront of LLMs.
- mentalgear 6d agoMaybe you haven't noticed that the "Bitter Lesson" had itself a "Bitter Lesson" - that scaling pure data and compute did not lead to AGI: diminishing training returns, GPT-5 disappointment, even openAI stating it was the last 'pure scale' model. The path forward all big llm providers ("ai" labs) have gone is neuro-symbolic (even though they publicly would never labeled it as such to not admit critics like Gary Marcus were right - even though all their actions actually point in that direction).
- maCDzP 6d agoI lover his book ”I am a strange loop”. It has shaped how I view myself.
- Dotnaught 6d agoSee George Lakoff/Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980): https://george-lakoff.com/books/metaphors-we-live-by/ https://george-lakoff.com/books/metaphors-we-live-by/ Took a course with Lakoff as an undergrad and it was compelling.
- vonnik 6d agoEvery category and noun is an analogy uniting things unlike in at least some details. We don’t even see most analogies, because they are more common than air and just as necessary.
- cgio 6d agoI am almost convinced and really like the core idea. My challenge has always been, with regards to surfaces and essences, why would a pattern be reflected as a word in context versus as syntax in different languages or contexts. Why not have just words? What is it that differentiates those analogy making devices. I don’t think we get a solid answer on that, and if it’s not answered then someone could think; is there a category higher than analogy and analogy is just one of its implementations? And if yes, then we are back to the drawing paper as we cannot explain something by pointing to its instantiation.
- feerfreeflight 5d agoI made this: https://sisuonspeaks.com https://sisuonspeaks.com Hebbian, analogies, agent monitoring and self pruning. Look at it or don’t, but I made it and I’m proud of it and I’m tired of marketing tactic-ese for self promotion. For how it works, https://gist.github.com/adromero/e6a776e6a6100d53116f4053677427b8 https://gist.github.com/adromero/e6a776e6a6100d53116f4053677...
- m-hodges 5d agoOh hey I just wrote about Hofstadter's deployment of Bongard problems to make may of these points in GEB: https://matthodges.com/posts/2026-08-19-bongard-problems/ https://matthodges.com/posts/2026-08-19-bongard-problems/
- qubex 5d ago“Surfaces and Essences” is one of my favourite books, but “I Am A Strange Loop” is probably his both most profound and accessible.
- tsoukase 5d agoIn ancient Greek the word Logos means Reason and Analogy. He explicitly states that they are not the same. So I guess we have a debate.
- HarHarVeryFunny 4d agoI watched this Hofstader video last night, and have to say the content was very disappointing and a waste of time. It doesn't help that Hofstader is a very poor speaker. All we get in this video is a rambling set of example analogies. The 2006 date of this talk precedes his "Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking" book where he really makes the claim of analogies being the basis of cognition. I haven't read "Essences", but the major criticism of it is that it was also mostly just endless examples of analogies, not delivering on the claim of the title. Hofstader's most famous book by far was GEB, which in retrospect seems it achieved it's cult status more for it's sprawling scope and intellectual appeal rather than for any coherent exposition or explanation of its ambitious subject matter. It was a book that felt deep and clever, but really was never more than a bunch of interesting talking points, only loosely related. Still, having read GEB I had high hopes for his "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" which came 15 years later in 1995, which one might have expected to be equally ambitious in scope and breadth of ideas, but it turned out to be his least popular book, and was more of a narrow discussion on some of his GOFAI programs such as "Copycat" trying to at least demonstrate the use of analogy as a computational mechanism, if not one related to the brain. I'm reminded now why I never bothered to read his final book "Surfaces and Essences", and reading the reviews of that confirms what anyone who had read "Fluid Concepts", or watched this video, might have suspected - that he was basically out of ideas. For anyone interested in analogies and their role in language and thought, a book that has better stood the test of time is George Lakoff's "Metaphors We Live By".