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.
Early life and education
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.
Academic career
Hofstadter is College of Arts and
Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana
University in 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 appointed to the Indiana University's Computer Science
Department faculty 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]
Hofstadter's 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.[4][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. FARG models also have 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.
Provoked by predictions of a technological singularity (the
hypothetical moment at which artificial intelligence will surpass
human intelligence), Hofstadter has both organized and participated in
several public discussions of the topic. At Indiana University in 1999
he organized such a symposium, and in April of 2000, he organized a
larger symposium entitled "Spiritual Robots" at Stanford University,
in which he moderated a panel consisting of Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec,
Kevin Kelly, Ralph Merkle, Bill Joy, Frank Drake, John Holland, John
Koza. Hofstadter was also an invited panelist at the first
"Singularity Summit," held at Stanford in May 2006. Hofstadter
expressed doubt about the likelihood of the singularity coming to pass
in the foreseeable future.[11][12][13][14][15][16]
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.[17]
Public image
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."[18][19] 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."[20]
Replying to following question by Deborah Solomon in Questions for
Douglas Hofstadter: "Your entry in Wikipedia says that your work has
inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial
intelligence." He replied "The entry is filled with inaccuracies, and
it kind of depresses me." When asked why he didn't fix it, he replied,
"The next day someone will fix it back."[21]
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.[22]
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.[23]
Columnist
When Martin Gardner retired from
writing his "Mathematical Games" column for Scientific American
magazine, Hofstadter succeeded him in 1981-1983 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.[24] 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.[25]
Personal
Hofstadter was married to Carol Ann
Brush. They met in Bloomington, and 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 — glioblastoma multiforme — 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.[26] 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.)[27]
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.[28]
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 leitmotifs 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).[29][30]
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.[31]
The dedication for I Am A Strange Loop is: "To my sister Laura, who
can understand, and to our sister Molly, who cannot." Hofstadter
explains in the Preface that his younger sister Molly never developed
the ability to speak or understand language.
Published works
Books
The books published by Hofstadter are
(the ISBNs refer to paperback editions, where available):
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (ISBN 0-465-02656-7)
Metamagical Themas (ISBN 0-465-04566-9) (collection of Scientific
American columns and other essays, all with postscripts)
Ambigrammi: un microcosmo ideale per lo studio della creatività (in
Italian only) ISBN 88-7757-006-7
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (ISBN 0-465-02475-0)
Rhapsody on a Theme by Clement Marot. The Grace A. Tanner Lecture in
Human Values, 1995. (Published 1996)
Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (ISBN
0-465-08645-4)
Eugene Onegin: A Novel Versification (ISBN 0-465-02094-1)
I Am a Strange Loop (ISBN 0-465-03078-5) (2007)
Papers
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
lattice, 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. 185-215.
Hofstadter wrote over 50 papers that were published through the Center
for Research on Concepts and Cognition [32]
Involvement in other books
Hofstadter wrote forewords for or edited the following books:
Sparse Distributed Memory by Pentti Kanerva (Bradford Books/MIT Press,
1988). (ISBN 0262111322)
The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (co-edited
with Daniel Dennett) (ISBN 0-465-03091-2 and ISBN 0-553-01412-9) (ISBN
0-553-34584-2) 1981
Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. (Preface)
Gödel's Proof (2002 revised edition) by Ernest Nagel and James R.
Newman, edited by Hofstadter (ISBN 0-8147-5816-9). Hofstadter claimed
the book (originally published in 1958) was highly influential to his
thinking during his early years.
Who invented the computer? The legal battle that changed computing
history. (2003) by Alice Rowe Burks.
Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker by Christof Teuscher
(Editor)
Jason Salavon: Brainstem Still Life (ISBN 981-05-1662-2) 2004
(Introduction)
Masters of Deception: Escher, Dali & the Artists of Optical Illusion
2004 by Al Seckel. Hofstadter wrote the foreword.
King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry by
Siobhan Roberts, Walker and Company, 2006. Hofstadter wrote the
foreword. |