Surfaces and Essences

by Douglas Hofstadter

  If you don’t see the irony in our hypothetical observer’s remarks, then let’s quickly take another look at the relation between vision and understanding. Although the quotation above sounds like a diatribe ranting against blurring the notions of vision and understanding, it actually blurs the two notions considerably. Thus the rant itself, in the very act of lambasting people who fail to distinguish between visual perception and intellectual understanding, employs a hailstorm of phrases that clearly show that we do indeed see understanding in terms of vision. Many of the words in the quoted diatribe — “crystal-clear”, “enlightening”, “brilliant”, “luminous”, “perspective”, “blindly”, “shadow”, “look at”, “viewpoint”, “insight”, “appear”, “blurry”, and “glance” — come straight out of the experience of vision. Moreover, if we hadn’t highlighted these terms, they wouldn’t strike a casual reader as being particularly colorful or as representing a specific angle on the matter. In the end, then, one has no choice but to admit that we all blithely blur the concrete and the abstract, and that a deep familiarity with vision is indispensable if one wishes to make headway in the understanding of understanding.

  Thus, when we speak of ideas that are clear, murky, limpid, or opaque, we are far from using poetic metaphors. We are simply using the only way we have of speaking of ideas, which is to use analogies, and in this case, analogies based on vision. Vision is probably our most sophisticated sense, but in any case it is the sense that contributes most richly to our vocabulary, so it’s not too surprising that so many vision-based phrases are used to describe things that are far from being visual in a strict sense. But vision is certainly not the only one of our five major senses that is recruited by our language to describe other kinds of phenomena. In fact, all five senses help us to build bridges between the sensory world and that of emotions and ideas. For instance:

  Without anyone’s lifting a finger, one can be touched by a kind gesture, struck by a beautiful scene, or hurt by a jabbing remark.

  Without one’s taste buds being stimulated in the least, one can taste the joy of victory, find a movie to be tasteless, be in a sour mood, or make a bitter remark.

  Without perking up one’s ears whatsoever, one can hear from a friend, declare that an idea sounds crazy, find a shirt to be too loud or a guest to be a crashing bore.

  Without opening one’s eyes for a split second, one can see things in one’s own way, watch the trends, and think that things are looking ominous.

  Without any air passing through anyone’s nostrils, one can smell a rat, think that a plan stinks, and resent someone else’s sniffing around one’s mate.

  The words “sensitive”, “sensation”, and “sensitivity” are all equally applicable to concrete and abstract situations. Thus one can be sensitive to the cold and to an insult; one can have a sensation of burning and of déjà vu; one can have developed great sensitivity to penicillin and to beauty. Indeed, the word “sense” is itself perhaps the most striking illustration of the way in which we constantly intermix our physiological and our psychological senses. In a word, our physiological senses are embodiments of our psychological senses.

  This last metaphor, linking two senses of the word “sense”, both describes and constitutes the notion of “embodiment” — the theory that all of our concepts are intimately dependent on our bodies. It could be taken as the motto of the movement called “embodied cognition”, which has taken wing over the past couple of decades and is now very influential, involving neuroscience, psycholinguistics, philosophy, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Affective science — the scientific study of emotions, trying to establish connections between our emotions and our intellects — is connected as well to this movement.

  What all these highly diverse fields share is the belief that one’s interaction with one’s body and one’s environment constitutes the heart and soul of human thought. The concepts that one creates, as well as one’s way of reasoning, are seen as emerging from such interactions. Such a vision has no room for disembodied symbolic thinking, guided solely by the rules of logic. In other words, people do not mentally juggle with patterns of unanchored, meaningless symbols. Rather, thought is anchored in two fashions (that is, the meanings of our concepts come from two sources). Firsly, thought is anchored in the past through analogies, and secondly it is anchored in the concrete world through the body, which has participated in so many experiences.

  Embodiment and Abstraction

  The embodied approach to understanding cognition shares a fundamental thesis with our approach — namely, that all human thought is rooted in the life experience of an individual, as well as in the shared experiences of social groups, linguistic communities, and entire cultures. In our formulation, the thesis asserts that people think through the medium of their concepts, which are built up and retrieved through nonstop analogy-making, which is carried out in response to the exigencies of living in a physical body embedded in the physical world. The embodied approach to cognition, however, places little stress on the notion of abstraction, as if to imply that raw experience suffices for thinking, with abstraction being merely a luxury add-on.

  Let’s recall, however, that abstraction is the result of recognizing and isolating what different concrete concepts have in common. The fact that new situations constantly remind us of other ones that we (or our friends, family members, etc.) have encountered before, and the fact that complex situations constantly bring vivid, down-to-earth phrases to our lips, together show unmistakably that our minds are powerful engines built to seek hidden, deep commonalities linking one concrete thing to another one. This amounts to a drive to discover or create abstractions.

  Take the very concrete-sounding stock phrase “heading down the home stretch”, for example. This phrase is often used to describe a major undertaking that is about to be completed but that will still require some significant effort, and whose completion will be a source of great joy and relief. An appropriate use of this idiom amounts to an act of categorization of a certain type of situation that involves seeking a long-term goal. The categorization of such situations is mediated by a spatial analogy in which (a) the goal looming up ahead corresponds to the finish line of a footrace, (b) the various stages of the project that have already been passed through correspond to the distance that has been already covered in the race, (c) the current stage of the project corresponds to the spot where one is right now in the race, and (d) the last few challenging subgoals one still has to accomplish correspond to the final straight 100-meter stretch of an oval-shaped quarter-mile track, which separates a runner from the finish line.

  Is this an embodied metaphor? That is, does it depend on living in the physical world and having a body? The answer would seem to be yes, in the sense that it has to do with having run footraces on tracks, or at least having watched them. But it is also very abstract. Anyone who has run or watched races can easily parlay their concrete experiences into an understanding of all sorts of far more abstract challenges featuring a distantly beckoning goal that will take considerable time and effort to reach. Moreover, there are quite a number of common English idioms that exude something of the same flavor, as is shown by these sentences: “Jones got off to a slow start in his campaign but he sprinted to the finish”, “The architects are in their final spurt now”, “It would be a real shame to give up on my novel now that the finish line is in plain sight”, “A few months ago I was discouraged about my thesis but now I’ve gotten my second wind”, “This project will take a lot of stamina”, “We took a short break from work to catch our breath”, “At last the city council is moving at a good pace”, “She had to jump over a lot of hurdles to get that job”, “If reading this book seems like a marathon, writing it was an ultramarathon”, and so on.

  Although the above sentences all sound quite concrete, they are also all highly abstract, because nearing the completion of a long-term project and finishing an arduous foot
race are similar only on an abstract plane. Indeed, if the expression “heading down the home stretch” denotes from the get-go an abstract category having to do with the achievement of long-term goals, then we see that the human mind depends on abstract categories no less than on concrete ones. On the other hand, if it denotes a concrete category applicable to footraces alone, then we see that the human mind, in linking that concrete category to all sorts of other superficially distant concrete phenomena, reveals a great capacity for abstraction. In either case, abstraction is key, and to leave it out of one’s theory of thinking is to miss the boat by a wide margin.

  Cleanliness is Next to Godliness

  Western culture is pervaded by the notion that to be moral is to be clean. This analogy manifests itself in many ways. For instance, the role of baptism in Christianity is to wash oneself of sin (the Bible exhorts: “Arise and be baptized, and wash away your sins”). Washing oneself plays a similar role in Islam, and Hinduism also sees the purity of the body as being of vital importance. Our everyday language is filled with implicit references to the connection between morality and cleanliness. Thus one can do dirty deeds, have unclean thoughts, use filthy language, be a pig, get dragged through the mud, besmirch someone’s reputation, get one’s foul mouth washed out, and so forth. On the other hand, one can perfectly well have a clean conscience or a spotless past or an unsullied reputation, or one can be unstained and untainted by any allegations.

  In 2006, the psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist undertook an experimental study to test how deeply this analogy is incorporated in people’s psyches at an unconscious level. They showed that it is very deeply rooted, and they dubbed their finding the “Macbeth effect”, after Lady Macbeth, who hoped that she could wash her hands of the murder of Duncan, King of Scotland.

  In an experiment, the psychologists asked subjects to recall some action that the latter had carried out in the past. Half the subjects were told to think about a bad deed they’d done, and the other half were not required to do so. After this part of the experiment, as a separate and presumably unrelated task, all the subjects were asked to fill in the blanks in the following letter-strings, so as to make English words:

  W– – HSH – – ERS – – P

  The “bad-deed” subjects often suggested words that were linked to cleanliness, such as “wash”, “shower”, and “soap”, while the remainder of the subjects tended to suggest words having a more neutral emotional character, such as “wish”, “shaker”, and “step”. It thus appears that thinking about a bad deed activates concepts that are linked to the concept of cleaning oneself (an immediate consequence of the naïve analogy, as an immoral act makes one dirty).

  In another experiment, all subjects were asked to recall some bad deed they had done, and then (through an innocent-seeming maneuver by the experimenter) half of them were given an antiseptic tissue with which to wash their hands. The other half were given no tissue, and thus didn’t wash their hands. Lastly, each subject was asked if they would be willing to give some help to a student who was having trouble. It turned out that those who had not washed their hands were significantly more willing to aid the unknown student than those who had washed their hands. It would thus appear that washing one’s hands makes people feel cleansed of their past sins, diminishing their general sense of responsibility towards others, while people who have freshly recalled some piece of bad behavior but have not been given the chance to “expurgate” it are more inclined to be good samaritans.

  Like many analogies, the association between morality and cleanliness insinuates itself unconsciously, and people tend to think of the tight link between morality and cleanliness as a fact rather than as just a possible way of looking at things. The analogy implies not only that doing a bad deed makes one dirty, but also that bad deeds can be compensated for by washing oneself (and in fact, that good deeds are a kind of soap that will clean one up after one has perpetrated a bad deed). The fact that people usually do not question this point of view prevents them from seeing their personal morals as a set of values that are determined in part by the culture they grew up in, rather than as absolute and eternal values.

  Categories as Blinders

  Calling categories “blinders” is an admission that our categorization mechanisms, which help us navigate fluidly through many a lofty realm of abstraction, can on occasion mislead us, via insufficiently flexible insights. Sometimes such blinders impose a viewpoint on us that just doesn’t dovetail accurately with the situation. Locked in, then, by our overly simplistic perception, we tend to miss things that are totally obvious to people who have categorized the situation in a more fitting manner.

  Such an event befell E., an American philosopher interested in the ancient philosophical doctrine of essentialism, and who was spending some time at a French university. Not long after her arrival, she saw a poster announcing a lecture entitled “Aux sources de l’essence” to be given in two weeks by a Greek geologist. E. was a bit confused by the fact that the lecturer was a geologist rather than a philosopher or a historian, and also by the photo on the poster, which showed several oil rigs pumping away in a desolate desert landscape, but she decided that this was an elegant metaphor for how the fertile human mind, in its perpetual search for essence, probes hidden subterranean zones. In the end it was that photo, plus the speaker’s connection with ancient Greece, that persuaded her to go. When she turned up at the talk, she was delighted that the speaker started out using the oil-rig metaphor front and center, but when, after five minutes had passed, he was still holding forth about oil and oil rigs in the Arabian deserts, as if his ingenious metaphor were more important than the true essence of his talk, E. was confused. But then, all at once, she recalled that the French word “essence”, although it sometimes means what we mean by “essence”, is also the standard term for “gasoline”, and it hit her that the talk’s title must have meant “The Sources of Gasoline” rather than “The Sources of Essence”. Feeling quite sheepish, E. realized that she had read deep metaphorical meaning into the photo where none had been intended.

  Why did it take E. several minutes of the lecture to overcome her original impression? Firstly, the activation of the English word “essence” had given her a mistaken idea of the lecture’s topic, and secondly, the manipulative power of analogy had reinforced this essence idea for the preceding couple of weeks. In fact, E.’s initial interpretation was repeatedly reinforced by the rest of her thought processes. Thus instead of taking seriously her initial doubt, triggered by the photo of oil rigs, and instead of starting to think, “Something smells fishy here”, she embraced the photo as a charming metaphor, letting it buttress and entrench her initial categorization.

  Kind Hearts and Cor(o)nets

  In much the same vein, our friend David Moser, not only an inveterate error-collector and keen observer of cognition but also a sophisticated jazz musician, told us of a phone call he had many years ago, after placing a classified ad in the local paper in order to sell his old cornet. A would-be buyer read the ad, liked what he imagined, and called David up. From David’s point of view, their conversation went like this:

  Caller: Hi — I’m calling about your used cornet.

  David: Yes?

  Caller: It’s only $500?

  David: Right.

  Caller: Well, what’s wrong with it?

  David: Nothing. It’s in good shape.

  Caller: Well, how many miles does it have on it?

  David: Uh, it’s about ten years old.

  Caller: Oh. What color is it?

  David: The usual gold finish. It’s got a few dents in it, but it’s not too tarnished.

  Caller: Is this just a standard cornet or what? Can you describe it?

  David: Well, fairly light, standard bell. It has three spit valves.

  Caller: Can I come over and take it for a spin?

  David: Sure, just call me before you come over.

  This droll double-edged dialogue will m
ost likely remind readers of implausible mistaken-identity scenes in so many plays, movies, and operas, painstakingly concocted by clever script-writers so as to flow seamlessly and make one fall off one’s seat with mirth. In this case, though, the interchange really did take place, with each person hearing the other one’s words as making reasonable sense for quite a while before any red flag was raised.

  For the caller, what was under discussion was, without any doubt, a used Dodge Coronet, and with this “fact” solidly in mind, he was able to fluently integrate David’s comments alluding to the car’s “usual gold finish”, as well as to the odd feature of its “standard bell” (whatever that might be), and even to its “three spit valves”! Perhaps the caller took the “spit valve” allusion as a knowing wink on David’s part — one car expert talking to another — alluding to some technical problem with the valves in a couple of the car’s cylinders. Or perhaps he unconsciously transformed David’s words “three spit valves” into “three split valves” in order to make the unexpected phrase more plausible, as if talk of “split valves” in a car would make perfect sense to any self-respecting American male.

  As for David, he just as clearly had in mind a small trumpet, and wasn’t in the least prepared to think that the caller might not share that image. And so, when the caller asked about the brass instrument’s mileage and color, even inquiring if he could “take it for a spin”, David wasn’t tipped off that something was wrong. To him, these queries, though oddly put, were just fresh, cute metaphors — idiosyncratic ways on the part of the would-be buyer of angling in on the key matter of the condition of David’s cornet.

  To put this in the context of our overarching theme, let us point out that we began with an eager used-car buyer — so eager that he was able to read the printed word “cornet” (with a lowercase “c”) in the newspaper ad as the name of a car — and in his mind this evoked the image of a Dodge Coronet. This was the initial triggering of a category. Once the category was activated, it took charge of the interpretation process, filtering everything in the environment, distorting all the cues and giving rise to reactions that, to someone not biased by the category, would have grown more and more implausible. As it happened, everything collapsed at the end of this phone conversation, just as happened in the case of philosopher E. attending the lecture on “sources of essence”. Slowly, the evidence opposing the entrenched category mounted, and finally it was strong enough that the stubborn initial category was overthrown.