Douglas Hofstadter: The Nature of Categories and Concepts

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Channel: ccrmalite1

Views: 51,532

Rating: 4.8925371 out of 5

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Id: Kr3QDMkMGmQ

Length: 89min 15sec (5355 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 07 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/moschles]

The golden moment of this lecture happens about 1 hour into the video. Here Hofstadter says American culture is excited by the creation and use of new categories.

Positive and negative feedback.
Vicious circle
self-fulfilling prophecy
famous for being famous
backlash
supply-and-demand
viral video
virtual reality
chat room
data mining
Hail Mary pass
sudden death playoff
ultra marathon
speed dating
multitasking
brainstorming
name-dropping
channel surfing
chick flick
sound bite
buzzword
eye candy
fast food
frequent flyer miles
wind chill factor
outsource
upgrade
fractal shape
breast implant
trophy wife
surrogate mother
first lady
worst-case scenario

It never stops.

[u/Froggie92]

I fucking love Douglas Hofstadter

Heres a link to Analogy as the Core of Cognition

An electron is a wave / particle

She's a bimbo / self-marketing genius

danny at the grand canyon

[u/secret_town]

The best material I've seen (not that I've looked hard, recently) on analogies (or at least, its base, distributed representation) is SHRUTI.

Also, one real criticism, which perhaps I should make to Hofstadter himself (whoa!) - I don't think categories need to be created up-front. I can't make the connection explicitly, but Lawrence Barsalou at Emory University has papers and videos explaining that (as I take it) we don't have abstract properties necessarily pre-categorized, we can dynamically 'simulate' the 'meaning' of something in a totally new context. It's possible that something that makes an impression like 'Danny at the Grand Canyon looking at ants' gets pre-categorized, but, Barsalou (iirc) shows from psychology experiments that /not every analogy you make/ is necessarily due to a pre-categorization.

[u/Marvilloso]

Gotta love Hofstader.