Surfaces and Essences

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Surfaces and Essences Page 98

by Douglas Hofstadter


  E/hν (number of blackbody quanta) as analogous to N (number of ideal-gas molecules), 459

  Earth: mapped onto Jupiter, 44–45; pluralization of, 44

  eating, diverse styles of, and zeugmas, 9–10

  eclipse: frame blend used to explain, 367; as a shadow, 204–205

  Eddington, Arthur, 496

  Edison/Franklin analogical conflation, 275

  education and naïve analogies, 389–394, 411–434

  educational system, failures of, 389, 391–394, 410, 412, 414–416, 418, 421

  “ego the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon”, cultural knowledge required to understand, 128

  Ehrenfest, Paul, paradox discovered by, 498

  Eiffel Tower, exploited in caricature analogy, 322–323

  Einstein, Albert, 109, 130, 132, 361: alleged abandonment of own ideas, 461; analogies by, 32, 452–499; as analogous to Ellen Ellenbogen, 468; as analogous to Gerhard Gelenk, 468; attacking fundamental questions, 488; attracting mosquito, 163, 165; belief in thermodynamics as bedrock of physics, 458; black body/ideal gas analogy by, 457–459, 463; deep faith in his own analogies, 459–463; discovering and interpreting E = mc2, 463, 465–485; discovering equivalence principle, 491–495; explanation of gravity by, 18, 489–496; face of, 183–184; finding analogy between gravity and Gauss’s geometry, 498; generalizing via intuition, 473–474, 477, 483, 484; guided by sense of cosmic unity, 468, 473–474, 480, 481, 484, 486, 495, 500, 501; handing weapons to his critics, 460; “happiest thought of my life”, 493–494; inner mental state of, 477–478, 480–481, 483–485, 491, 495, 498; learning to read, 109; likening gravity to fictitious force, 491–492; low-level analogies by, 454–455; magically combining two ideas of Galileo, 492; making an analogy between analogies, 495, 502; misled by his own analogy between gravity and electrostatics, 489–491; missing the analogy of 3-D space to 4-D space-time, 499; as “one smart dude”, 75; Poincaré’s letter of reference for, 501; pondering a rotating disk, 497–498; positing two types of mass, 476; quest for beauty by, 477–478, 485, 495, 500; rapid essence-spotting by, 454, 458, 463, 486, 501; refinding Wien’s analogy, 458; as salient entity, 320; sandwich-like name of, 215; seeing self as donkey, 454; of sex, the, 222; stereotype of, as superlogical thinker having no need to seek analogies, 453, 500; thought experiments by, 487, 491–492, 493–494, 495–496; transformed into world figure, 496; unification as characteristic style of thinking of, 454, 477, 485, 486, 491, 500, 501; word choices by, 454–455

  electric field: due to moving magnet, 493; oscillating in vacuum, 212–213; vanishing thanks to shift of reference frame, 493–494 electromagnetic induction, 493

  electromagnetic waves, 212–213, 455–460, 462, 469–471, 483; see also light

  electromagnetism, as area of physics, 467–468, 485

  elephant in a store window, 298

  elephant in the room situations, 174, 514

  elevators, use of by analogy, 23

  Ellenbogen, Ellen, 463–464

  Ellie, frame blend by, 364–366

  email address/postal address naïve analogy, 385–387

  embarrassed analogy-making computer blurting out apology, 401

  embodiment and analogy-making, 287–289

  emergence of a concept’s essence over time, 200–204

  Emmas, category of, 226–227

  emotions: key role of in encoding and reminding, 169–171; powerfully evoked by analogies, 310–312

  emperors, as translation of cor(o)nets, 379–380

  encoding of experiences: analogies at the very abstract level of, 354; based on features at surface and deeper levels, 163–166; constraints on, 171; in Copycat microdomain, 346–349, 353–354; enigma of, 161, 346. 348; errors caused by, 274–275; implausibility of clairvoyance in, 173–174, 353–354; involving local, global, abstract, and emotional aspects, 161–162, 169–171, 175; as opposed to total rote recording, 172; as unconscious act of selection, 165–166; at various levels of abstraction, 335

  energy: behaving analogously to mass, 472; behaving analogously to strange mass, 479, 484; conservation of, 472; distinction between two varieties of, 480; liquid versus frozen, 480; mutating from one form to another, 479; possessing mass, 471–478, 482, 483–484; potential, 479–480; silently lurking in normal mass, 482, 484

  energy/strange mass analogy, 479–480, 484

  engines: for categorization, 15; for inference, 20; for searching, 25, 115, 220, 402; for translation, 369

  English language: borrowings from French, 122; breakup of siblinghood in, 77; contrasted with Chinese, 12; contrasted with French, 8, 11, 77, 78, 79–80, 81–83, 89, 97, 101, 102, 113, 119–123, 465; contrasted with German, 8–9, 465; contrasted with Indonesian, 77; contrasted with Italian, 8, 11, 89; contrasted with Russian, 9–10

  enrichment via impoverishment, 250

  entropy calculations leading to light quantum, 458

  equals sign: as denoting identity of two items, 407–409; as denoting operation + result, 407–411; invention of, 408; meaning of, in E = mc2, 473

  equations: in advertising, 409–410; asymmetric conception of, 407–411, 474; causal interpretation of, 410–411, 474; as requiring interpretation, 473; turned around, 409–410

  equivalence principle, 491–495; extended, 495–496

  error, as category with blurry boundaries, 41, 281

  errors: caused by real-time categorization pressures, 258, 261; caused by semantic proximity, 270–278; deep problem of explanation of, 264; due to frame blend of physical world with virtual world, 404–407; high-level analogies giving rise to, 268, 274–278, 280; versus children’s semantic approximations, 41, 270; as visible traces of subterranean processes, 259, 261; see also action errors, frame blends, lexical blends, speech errors

  esprit d’escalier as a concept available to francophones but not to anglophones, 121

  “essence”, double meaning of, in French, 291

  essences: compression of situations down to, 261; hidden by surfaces, 114–115; revealed by caricature analogies, 317–318, 320–323, 326–330; revealed by repeated conceptual extensions, 200–204, 255, 295, 397–398

  essence-spotting: in caricature-analogy creation, 321–322, 324–330; by children, 42; in Copycat domain, 350; as crux of intelligence, 125–127, 426–427, 452, 463; in deeply novel situations, as rare gift, 131; by Einstein, 454, 458, 463, 486; implausibility of instant carrying-out of, 173–174; made easy by prior placement of conceptual pitons, 131; role of expertise in, 174; as routine and unseen, 18; as secret of generalization in mathematics, 449; time taken in, 466

  esthetics, in Copycat domain, 349–352, 355–357, 359–360, 353–364; as driving Einstein, 477–478, 485, 495, 500

  “étudiant” as both gendered and generic in one sentence, 194

  Euler, Leonhard, 210, 443, 449

  Eureka moment, 250–252, 300–301

  Europe/Asia analogies, 306–307, 334

  Everest, Mount, 109, 320, 367

  Everett, David, 109

  everyday imagery versus grand historical precedents, 333–335

  everyday life versus book-learning, 391–394

  evolution of a concept as revealing its essence, 202–204

  evolutionary interpretation of the lure of the superficial, 338

  “exactly the same thing”, 143, 152, 153, 346, 347, 358, 364, 379, 399, 407, 495, 520

  expectations embedded in “and” and “but”, 70–75

  experiments on memory retrieval, flaws in, 337–340

  expert knowledge and hierarchical levels of categorization, 236–246

  expert-level versus novice-level categorization, 342–344, 346

  expertise: in everyday life, 344; facilitating essence-spotting, 174; nature of, 238–246; precision and depth as keys to, 246

  experts’ blindness to shallow features, 343–344

  explanatory caricature analogies, 324–330

  exponents/subscripts analogy by Doug, 169–170

  ex post fac
to diagrams of a deep analogy, as casting no light on its creation, 160

  extension versus intension of a category, 55, 244

  extra force to explain anomalous motions in an accelerating frame, 488

  extrapolation of one’s past experiences as an irresistible mental force, 305–307, 310–313

  eyelash/eyelash analogy, 155–156, 517

  —F—

  F = ma, 410, 491

  fables as labels of categories, 111–118

  Fabre, Jean-Henri, 388

  fabric internal to various letter strings, 353–354, 356–357

  facial remindings, 181–184

  fake boat and fake tango category, 521–522

  Falen, James, 315

  Falkland Islands War, Greece’s position in, 332

  false hopes engendered by irresistible analogy, 313

  fame leading to canonization, 221

  familiarity, effects on categorization of, 390–391

  Faraday, Michael, 493; of window-glass making, the, 222

  far-fetched analogies, deliberate search for, as non-recipe for creativity, 251, 452

  fathers encoded as disillusioners, 171

  fatuity, gratuity, and vacuity, 282

  Fauconnier, Gilles, 335, 362–364, 365, 433, 443

  fauxthenticity, concept of, 176–178, 345

  feminine and masculine rhymes, 380–381

  Fenway (dachshund), analogies by, 180

  Fermi, Enrico, 453

  Ferrari, Lodovico, 445

  Ferré, Léo, 221

  Ferro, Scipione del, 438

  Festinger, Leon, 115

  fictitious forces, 488, 491–492

  “fictitious” (negative) numbers, 440

  fields, electric and magnetic: oscillating, 212–213

  fields (mathematical), 447–448

  films of events as constituting episodic memory, 172

  filtering as ongoing perceptual process, 298–299

  fine line separating simple from deep analogies, 45, 142–143

  finger-pointing analogies, 140–143; see also index finger, heart, toe finger-wiggling analogies, 350–351, 515

  Finlay-Freundlich, Erwin, 496

  firewalls protecting us from hackers, spam, and viruses, 396, 398

  first ⇒ last conceptual slippage, 356–357

  first names as defining categories, 226–227

  flashlight, two-headed, 470–471

  fleeting analogies, vanishing before being noticed, 282, 285–286

  floppy-disk icon, outmodedness of, 402

  flow of discourse, psychology reality of, 71

  fluid analogies in the Copycat domain, 348, 350, 352, 357

  fly on screen, removal of using mouse, 405

  Flynn effect on IQ scores, 10–131

  Flynn, James R., 130

  “folder”, old-fashioned definition of, 397

  foot, internal structure of the concept, 51

  forgetfulness, selective, as key ingredient of intelligence, 426–427

  formal knowledge, inadequacy of, 389, 391–394

  formal operations versus mental simulation in math, 424–425, 431

  formulas conflated with understanding, 391–394

  “4 is to 3 as 3 is to 2” proportional analogy, 438, 444

  four-dimensional space: absurdity of, 443; as analogous to three-dimensional space, 444, 453

  “Four score and seven years ago” translation challenge, 368–372

  “Fox and the Grapes”, fable by Æsop, 112–114; see also poems in the text, sour grapes

  fractional dimensions, 444

  frame blends: of American and Chinese cultures, 367–368; of car driving and video-game playing, 405; of cemetery circuit and hotel circuit, 142; of computer world and physical world, 402–407; of conferences, 142; in Copycat domain, 359–360, 363–364; creativity manifested by, 360–364; defined, 358–359; of dominos toppling and countries falling to communism, 335; of drooping cigarette and drooping penis, 362; of emperor Napoleon and emperor penguins, 380; of grocery stores, 23, 156; of lecture hall and professor’s office, 142; in light/sound analogy, 361; of name-change upon marriage and year-change every January, 148; of plate-throwing woman and her mother, 367; in scientific analogies, 360–361; of solar system and atom, 142–143; subjectivity of, 363–364; of there situations, 140–143; of two trains, 140–141; as typical analogies, 364; underlying diagram of ballet-lesson problem, 432–433; in understanding of “dent”, 363; in understanding of films, operas, etc., 361; in understanding of “safe”, 362; used by authors in the text, 366–367; versus analogies, 363–364, 366–367

  frames of reference: absolute, 487; accelerating, 486, 488; indistinguishability of certain, 466–468, 486–487, 492, 494–495; shifts between, 466–468, 469–471, 487–488, 492–494, 495–496, 497–498

  framing of errors as making them easy to see, 262

  Franklin, Benjamin, 109, 275

  freedom-of-speech joke, 358

  “freeing oneself from the known”, chimerical idea of, 313–315

  French Academy (Académie française), 113

  French fries: combined with orange sherbet, 352; portion of, likened to bagels in a batch, 308

  French language: “A rolling stone gathers no moss” in, 102; bilingual data base involving, 372–373; borrowings from English in, 122; compound words in, 87, 89; concept of hair in, 77; concept of sibling in, 77; contrasted with English language, 8, 11, 77, 78, 79–80, 81–83, 89, 97, 101, 102, 113, 119–123, 465; different translations for “time” in, 77–78; “Four score and seven years ago” in, 369–372; grammar of, exploited, for high-quality translation, 376–377; idioms in, 97, 119; “Once bitten, twice shy” in, 105; proverbs in, 101, 106, 109; this book’s realization in, 377–382; zeugmas in, 8, 11–12

  Fresnel, Augustin-Jean, 212

  Freud, Sigmund, 132, 259, 362, 501

  Freudian slips, 259

  friendship crumbling to bits, 133

  fringe members of categories, 14

  Fromkin, Victoria, 259

  frozen assets/liquid assets membrane, breaking of, 476–477

  functional and visual analogies, reinforcing, 277–278

  fund-raising in American universities, 109

  Funes, Ireneo, lacking ability to abstract, 188

  Funk & Wagnalls 1932 dictionary, 201, 396–397

  furniture, fringe members of the category, 528

  —G—

  Galilean relativity, principle of, 466–468, 485, 486, 492

  Galilei, Galileo, 130, 466, 471; compared with two-year-old Lenni, 45; extending the concept Moon, 43–45, 147, 210, 217; hypothetically admiring Einstein, 392; seeing not moons but quote-unquote “Moons”, 64; of the soccer ball, the, 222; using the Tower of Pisa to investigate falling objects, 493, 493; work on sound waves by, 210

  Galois, Évariste: discovery of key link between polynomials and radicals, 446; group theory invented by, 446–447; killed in debate, 274, 448; opening the Pandora’s box of abstraction in mathematics, 448; of tobacco science, the, 222

  Gauss, Karl Friedrich, 498

  Gaussian primes, 448

  gearshift, as perceived by novice versus by expert driver, 340, 343, 344

  Gelenk, Gregorius, 464

  generalization: of Doppler effect, 470; by Einstein, 467–468, 473–474, 484; of Galilean relativity, 467–468, 485; going hand-inhand with abstraction in math, 449; as irresistible drive in mathematics, 444, 447–449; of 3-D space to 4-D space-time, 498–499; of 2-D Gaussian geometry to 4-D geometry, 499; see also category extension

  general relativity, see relativity, general

  genericide, 217–218

  genius: compared with child, 45; irrationality at the core of (Hoffmann), 501; spotting essences of important situations, 452; versus mediocrity, silly stereotype of, 452

  genius of a given language, 120–124

  Gentner, Dedre, 338, 436

  genus versus species, 239, 242

  geometrical interpretation, as
rendering abstract mathematical concepts more real, 443

  George’s thesis advisor, judged by analogy with the reader, 157

  German language, 6, 8, 9, 12, 369; compound words in, 87, 465

  gestalt psychology, 349–350

  “get”, broken into many concepts in French, 80

  Gevrey-Chambertin Premier Cru Les Cazetiers Dominique Laurent 1996, 245, 256

  Ghent, Admiral, definition of intelligence by, 125

  Gibson, James, 278, 345

  Gick, Mary, 436

  gilding the lily in the Copycat domain, 352-353

  gist-finding, see essence-spotting

  gists, sacrificed through wanton acts of abstraction, 107

  “give”, metaphorical use of, 6, 64–65

  glass of water: conflated with one-dollar bill, 280; falling floorwards, 389

  glass on shelf, as multi-categorized by Mr. Martin, 189–191

  Glucksberg, Sam, 228

  God is a sniper category, 168

  Gödel, Kurt, 455

  Goldstone, Robert, lexical blend by, 265

  golf concepts, typical, 49–50

  golf obsession, 301–302

  golfer, as example of concept with halo, 49–50

  Goodman, Nelson, 302

  good taste versus bad taste in the Copycat domain, 349–352, 355–358; see also dizziness

  Google Translate: performance of, 369, 374, 377; techniques employed in, 368–369, 372–374

  “Google” versus “google”, 218

  gotta situations, 42

  grammar: as a domain for analogy-making, 69–70; mastery of, as crucial to translation, 376–377

  “grand”, broken into two concepts in French, 80

  Grand Canyon seen solely as color pattern, 163; see also Danny

  grandmother, as marginal member of category mommy, 36–37

  grandparents ⇒grandchildren conceptual slippage, 276, 356

  grasshopper/human analogy, 387

  gravitation/acceleration analogy, 491–492, 493–494, 496, 499

  gravity: bending light, 496; having only relative existence, 494; as indistinguishable from acceleration, 491–492, 493–494, 496; as needing an explanation, yet unnoticed, 18; propagation of, across space, 489–490

 

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