Douglas Hofstadter

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Douglas R. Hofstadter

Born February 15, 1945 (1945-02-15) (age 62)
New York, New York
Occupation Professor of cognitive science
Nationality United States
Writing period 1979-Present
Subjects Cognitive science, philosophy of mind, translation, analogy-making

Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945 in New York, New York) is an American academic whose research focuses on the nature of thinking, consciousness, and creativity. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (abbreviated as GEB) which was published in 1979, and which won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.

Contents

Hofstadter is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. He grew up on the campus of Stanford University, where his father was a professor. The younger Hofstadter graduated with Distinction in Mathematics from Stanford in 1965 and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975.

Hofstadter is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University 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). He was initially hired by Indiana University's Computer Science Department in 1977, and at that time he launched his research program in computer modeling of mental processes (which at that time he called "artificial intelligence research", a label that 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, and also was appointed Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology, but he states that his involvement with most of these departments is nominal.[1][2][3][4]

Hofstadter is a polymath. His many interests include music, visual art, the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation and mathematics. He has numerous recursive sequences and geometric constructions named after him.[5][6]

At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, he co-authored, with Melanie Mitchell, a computational model of "high-level perception" — Copycat — and several other models of analogy-making and cognition. The Copycat project was subsequently extended under the name "Metacat" by Hofstadter's doctoral student James Marshall.[7] The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model the act of artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid). Other more recent models are 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.[8][9]

Hofstadter collects and studies cognitive errors (largely but not solely speech errors), "bon mots" (spontaneous humorous quips), and analogies of all sorts, and his long-time observation of these diverse products of cognition, and his theories about the mechanisms that underlie them, have exerted a powerful influence on the architectures of the computational models developed by himself and FARG members.[10]

All FARG computational models share certain key principles, among which are: that human thinking is carried out by thousands of independent small actions in parallel, biased by the concepts that are currently activated; that activation spreads from activated concepts to less activated "neighbor concepts"; that there is a "mental temperature" that regulates the degree of randomness in the parallel activity; that promising avenues tend to be explored more rapidly than unpromising ones. There is also an overarching philosophy that all cognition is built from the making of analogies. The computational architectures that share these precepts are called "active symbols" architectures.

Hofstadter's thesis about consciousness, first expressed in GEB but also present in several of his later books, is that it is an emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in the brain. In GEB 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", which is an abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena as audio and video feedback, and which Hofstadter has defined as "a level-crossing feedback loop". The prototypical example of this abstract notion 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 precisely one brain.[11][12][13]

Hofstadter has considered the predictions of a technological singularity. Prompted by Stanford's Symbolic Systems Program at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, he organized and, on April 1, 2000, moderated a panel at Stanford, inviting Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Kevin Kelly, Ralph Merkle, Bill Joy, Frank Drake, John Holland, John Koza.[14] He admires minds with certain qualities such as rationality. and that are articulate, polite, kind and skeptical. He note that sentient life on Earth has, to some extent, already "changed its substrate" from aquatic to terrestrial with the evolution of fish into reptiles. He suggests that this transition supports the notion that, in the long run, sentient life on Earth could change its substrate from DNA to perhaps carbon nanotubes or silicon. He has commented that the music composed by the EMI software program, while impressive, is not as beautiful as that of Bach's. He is not hopeful that genetic programming will lead computers to display the characteristic constellation of behaviors that are associated with human beings of high IQ. He has made similar comments about natural language processing or the idea of computers displaying common sense. He points out that — for the purposes of understanding the information content of a human mind — while humans and their neurons are, at one level, made of cells, a more effect analysis of the information content might require one to first view those neurons as being made of organelles and molecules. He reminds thinkers that the exponential growth of Moore's Law is not like the unrealistic growth represented in "hockey stick" graphs sometimes presented by futurists and that the increase in ability of Moore's Law alone still does not bestow upon the more-powerful future machine a spirit.[15][16]

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 has "no interest in computers."[12][17] 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".[3] For example, upon the defeat of Kasparov by Deep Blue, he commented that "It was a watershed event, but it doesn't have to do with computers becoming intelligent."[18]

In 1988 Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos created a docudrama about Hofstadter and his ideas entitled "Victim of the Brain" based on The Mind's I. It includes interviews with Hofstadter about his work.[19] In 2010: Odyssey Two, Arthur C. Clarke's first sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 is caught in a "Hofstadter-Moebius loop". Hofstadter's book Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought was the first book sold by Amazon.com.[20]

When Martin Gardner retired from writing his "Mathematical Games" column for Scientific American magazine, Hofstadter succeeded him in 1981 with a column entitled 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 which has an online implementation.[21] 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 entitled "A Person Paper on Purity in Language", in which the reader's presumed revulsion at racism and racist language is used as a lever to motivate an analogous revulsion to sexism and sexist language.[22]

Hofstadter met his late wife, Carol Ann Brush in Bloomington and they married in Ann Arbor in 1985. They had two children, Danny and Monica, but Carol died in 1993 from the sudden onset of a brain tumor when their children were five and two. The Carol Ann Brush Hofstadter Memorial Scholarship for Bologna-bound IU students was established in 1996 in her name.[23] 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".

Both inside and outside his professional work, Hofstadter is driven by a pursuit of beauty. He seeks beautiful mathematical patterns, beautiful explanations, beautiful typefaces, beautiful sonic patterns in poetry, and so forth. Hofstadter has said of himself, "I'm someone who has one foot in the world of humanities and arts, and the other foot in the world of science." He has had several exhibitions of his artworks in various university art galleries. 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). (The term "ambigram" was invented by Hofstadter in 1984 and has since been taken up by many ambigrammists all over the world.)[24]

Hofstadter has composed numerous pieces for piano, and a few for piano and voice. He created an audio CD with the title DRH/JJ, which includes all these compositions performed primarily by pianist Jane Jackson, but with a few performed by Brian Jones, Dafna Barenboim, Gitanjali Mathur and himself.[25]

Hofstadter's writing is characterized by an intense interaction between form and content, as is exemplified by the 20 dialogues in GEB, many of which simultaneously talk about and imitate strict musical forms used by Bach, such as canons and fugues. Most of Hofstadter's books are characterized by some kind of structural alternation in GEB between dialogues and chapters, in The Mind's I between selections and reflections, in Metamagical Themas between Chapters and Postscripts, and so forth. Both in his writing and in his teaching, Hofstadter stresses the concrete, constantly using examples and analogies, and avoids the abstract. Typical of the courses he teaches is his seminar "Group Theory and Galois Theory Visualized", in which abstract mathematical ideas are rendered as concrete as possible. He puts great effort into making ideas clear and visual, and asserts that when he teaches, if his students do not understand something, it is never their fault but always his own.

Hofstadter is passionate about languages. He has studied many of them, and speaks them to varying degrees. In addition to English, his mother tongue, he speaks French and Italian fluently (the language spoken at home with his children is Italian). At various times in his life, he has studied (in descending order of level of fluency reached) German, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Mandarin, Dutch, Polish, and Hindi. His love of sounds pushes him to strive to minimize, and ideally get rid of, any foreign accent.

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 leitmotivs is a set of some 88 translations of "Ma Mignonne", a highly constrained poem by sixteenth-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's studied comes to 3.14159...), as well as an "oligoglot" (someone who speaks "a few" languages).[26][27]

In 1999, the bicentennial year of Russian poet and writer Alexander Pushkin, Hofstadter published a verse translation of Pushkin's classic novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin. It is highly constrained and filled with many types of sonic pattern. Aside from Eugene Onegin, Hofstadter has translated many other poems (always respecting their formal constraints), and two other novels (in prose): La Chamade (That Mad Ache) by French writer Françoise Sagan, and La Scoperta dell'Alba (The Discovery of Dawn) by Walter Veltroni, the Mayor of Rome and head of the Partito Democratico in Italy. Both of these translated novels are slated for imminent publication.

Hofstadter is related by marriage to the evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould: Hofstadter's paternal aunt was married to Gould's maternal uncle. Hofstadter is a vegetarian.[28]

The books published by Hofstadter are (the ISBNs refer to paperback editions, where available):

Hofstadter wrote, among many others, the following papers:

  • "Energy levels and wave functions of Bloch electrons in rational and irrational magnetic fields", Phys. Rev. B 14 (1976) 2239.
    • Written while he was at the University of Oregon, this paper was enormously influential in directing further research. Hofstadter predicted that the allowed energy level values of an electron in a crystal lattice, as a function of a magnetic field applied to the latice, formed a fractal set. That is, the distribution of energy levels for large-scale changes in the applied magnetic field repeat patterns seen in the small-scale structure. This fractal structure is generally known as "Hofstadter's butterfly",which was the first fractal ever found in physics, and it has recently been confirmed in transport measurements in two-dimensional electron systems with a superimposed nano-fabricated lattice.
  • "A non-deterministic approach to analogy, involving the Ising model of ferromagnetism", in E. 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.
  • "On seeing A's and seeing As.", Stanford Humanities Review 4,2 (1995) pp. 109-121.
  • "Analogy as the Core of Cognition", in Dedre Gentner, Keith Holyoak, and Boicho Kokinov (eds.) The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press/Bradford Book, 2001, pp. 499-538.
  • "To Err is Human; To Study Error-making is Cognitive Science", Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, 1989, pp. 185­215.
  • Hofstadter wrote over 50 papers that were published through the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition [29]

Hofstadter wrote forewords for or edited the following books:

Some of Hofstadter's former students include:

  1. ^ IU pages as faculty, IU distinguished faculty (see this announcement on March 21, 2007) and as speaker
  2. ^ A Day in the Life of... Douglas Hofstadter 2004
  3. ^ a b Seminar: AI: Hope and Hype 1999
  4. ^ Hofstadter items at the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences: Q-sequence, Hofstadter-Conway $10000 sequence, G-sequence, H-sequence, type, Anoher type, Reg Allenby, K. Pinn : A chaotic cousin of Conway's recursive sequence, S. M. Tanny : A well-behaved cousin of the Hofstadter sequence, Hofstadter-type sequence
  5. ^ Douglas Hofstadter's sequences Java applet 2002
  6. ^ Hofstadter items at Wolfram MathWorld: Hofstadter-Conway $10,000 Sequence, G-Sequence, H-Sequence, Q-Sequence, Male-Female Sequences, Figure-Figure Sequence and geometric constructs: Hofstadter Point, Hofstadter Triangle, Hofstadter Ellipse
  7. ^ An overview of Metacat 2003
  8. ^ By Analogy: A talk with the most remarkable researcher in artificial intelligence today, Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach Wired Magazine, November 1995
  9. ^ Analogy as the Core of Cognition Review of Stanford lecture, Feb 2, 2006
  10. ^ 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.
  11. ^ Consciousness In The Cosmos: Perspective of Mind: Douglas Hofstadter
  12. ^ a b Me, My Soul, and I. Wired (March 2007). Retrieved on 2007-12-10.
  13. ^ Author Interview by Greg Ross, American Scientist Online, March 22, 2007
  14. ^ Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity By 2100? April 1, 2000 Note: as of 2007, videos seem to be missing.
  15. ^ Trying to Muse Rationally about the Singularity Scenario 35 minute video, May 13, 2006
  16. ^ Quote from his Singularity Summit 2006 presentation
  17. ^ New York Times Magazine, 2007-04-01
  18. ^ Mean Chess-Playing Computer Tears at Meaning of Thought by Bruce Weber, February 19, 1996, New York Times
  19. ^ Victim of the Brain - 1988 docudrama about the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter
  20. ^ Amazon.com's company timeline July 1995
  21. ^ Online implementation of his Reviews of this Book idea
  22. ^ A Person Paper on Purity in Language by William Satire (alias Douglas R. Hofstadter), 1985 - a satirical piece, on the subject of sexist language
  23. ^ French and Italian Spring 1996, Vol. X
  24. ^ Sounds like Bach
  25. ^ Piano Music by Douglas Hofstadter (Audio CD) ISBN 1576771431, 2000
  26. ^ Hofstadter, Douglas R. Le Ton Beau de Marot. New York: Basic Books, 1997, pp. 16-17.
  27. ^ Hofstadter, Douglas R. Le Ton Beau de Marot. New York: Basic Books, 1997, p. 627
  28. ^ Gardner, Martin (august 2007). "Do Loops Explain Consciousness? Review of I Am a Strange Loop" (pdf). Notices of the American Mathematical Society (7): 853. Retrieved on 2007-12-10. 
  29. ^ CRCC Publications offline

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Persondata
NAME Hofstadter, Douglas Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hofstadter, Douglas
SHORT DESCRIPTION American academic and author
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City, New York
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter"
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