I 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

I 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".