I’m planning on going to this lecture, as is my brother. I think it’s going to be good…
Analogy as the Core of Cognition
September 14, 2006
Thursday, 7:30 p.m.
Theatre, Lincoln Hall
702 South Wright Street, Urbana
Douglas Hofstadter
Director, Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University
The widely known author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid argues that every concept in our minds arises from an accumulation of analogies stretching back to our earliest childhood, and that thinking – the pinpointing of the right concept at the right time – is the result of a relentless swarm of unconscious analogy-makers competing with each other. He will offer many examples, including errors of diction, expanding spheres of word meanings, proverbs as situation labels, the sudden bubbling-up of buried memories, and counterintuitive leaps that constitute the pinnacle of creative human thought.
