Name: surfaces and essences
SKU: 3123982
Price: 29.70 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
ISBN: 9780465018475

Type

Physical Book

Author

Douglas R. Hofstadter

Emmanuel Sander

Publisher

Basic Books

Language

English

Pages

464

Format

Hardcover

Dimensions

24.1x19.5x4.9 cm

Weight

1.01 kg.

ISBN

9780465018475

ISBN13

9780465018475

Synopsis "surfaces and essences"

Analogy is the core of all thinking. This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize -- winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over thirty years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making complex ideas vivid, he has partnered with Sander to put forth a highly novel perspective on cognition. We are constantly faced with a swirling and intermingling multitude of ill-defined situations. Our brain's job is to try to make sense of this unpredictable, swarming chaos of stimuli. How does it do so? The ceaseless hail of input triggers analogies galore, helping us to pinpoint the essence of what is going on. Often this means the spontaneous evocation of words, sometimes idioms, sometimes the triggering of nameless, long-buried memories. Why did two-year-old Camille proudly exclaim, I undressed the banana!? Why do people who hear a story often blurt out, Exactly the same thing happened to me! when it was a completely different event? How do we recognize an aggressive driver from a split-second glance in our rearview mirror? What in a friend's remark triggers the offhand reply, That's just sour grapes? What did Albert Einstein see that made him suspect that light consists of particles when a century of research had driven the final nail in the coffin of that long-dead idea? The answer to all these questions, of course, is analogy-making -- the meat and potatoes, the heart and soul, the fuel and fire, the gist and the crux, the lifeblood and the wellsprings of thought. Analogy-making, far from happening at rare intervals, occurs at all moments, defining thinking from top to toe, from the tiniest and most fleeting thoughts to the most creative scientific insights. Like Gö, Escher, Bach before it, Surfaces and Essences will profoundly enrich our understanding of our own minds. By plunging the reader into an extraordinary variety of colorful situations involving language, thought, and memory, by revealing bit by bit the constantly churning cognitive mechanisms normally completely hidden from view, and by discovering in them one central, invariant core -- the incessant, unconscious quest for strong analogical links to past experiences -- this book puts forth a radical and deeply surprising new vision of the act of thinking.

Douglas R. Hofstadter

(Author)

View Author's Page

Douglas R. Hofstadter was born in New York in 1945 and is the son of Robert Hofstadter, Nobel Prize in Physics in 1961. He studied mathematics at Stanford and physics at the University of Oregon. He was a professor of cognitive sciences at the University of Michigan until 1988 and, currently, at Indiana University, where he also directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. His work Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979) became a spectacular success in the United States shortly after its release, even before receiving the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1980 and the American Book Award that same year; readers and critics around the world welcomed the book with identical enthusiasm. Hofstadter has also published The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (1981), in collaboration with philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, and Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (1985), among other works, as well as an English translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

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