Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (69 page)
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Authors: Douglas Hofstadter,Emmanuel Sander
D. owns two cars that look very similar. Both are rather old blue Ford station wagons, and each of them was purchased close to the birth of one of his children. For this reason he often calls them “Dannycar” and “Monicar”, which E. finds amusing. One day, as E. and D. are jogging together in a city park, E. asks D. why he bought two cars that look nearly identical, and just as D. has finished answering, they chance upon a woman on their pathway who is walking two black poodles that look very much alike. E. is instantly reminded of D.’s two blue cars. Later that afternoon, E. notices two identical backup disk drives that are sitting near each other on D.’s desk, and they remind him not only of the two station wagons but also of the two poodles. He jokingly suggests to D. that they should be called “Dannydisk” and “Monidisk”.
It’s a Saturday evening, and a Parisian family is enjoying an evening at home. As the youngest son gazes out the window, he makes an odd observation: directly across the street, in the facing apartment, the neighbors have hung up exactly the same chain of lights as is hanging in their own house, a type of decoration that is found in only one store in all of Paris. This greatly surprises everyone, because it’s very disorienting to see a rare object of one’s own in someone else’s house.
The next day the family goes out for brunch together. It’s a cool morning, and the mother has donned a very unusual colored scarf that she bought several years ago and is particularly fond of. As they are eating their meal, she notices a woman at a nearby table who is wearing exactly the same scarf. Without a moment’s hesitation, she is reminded of the two identical chains of lights.
Hopefully, we can agree on at least one thing: that none of these analogies has any lasting intellectual value; indeed, they are all completely useless! After all, what earthly value could it have for you to be reminded of two rather old blue Ford station wagons when you run by two black poodles, or to be reminded of two black poodles when you glance at two identical backup disks? Of what use could it be to you to be reminded of two identical chains of lights when you happen to spot two identical scarves? None of these analogies brings new information or suggests fresh perspectives to the people involved, allowing them to deal more effectively with life. To be sure, all these analogies are perfectly sensible and valid — they even leap out at the eye — but none of them casts any bright light of insight on this complex world, nor do they help us resolve any pressing dilemmas.
It’s an appealing notion that analogies are inevitably produced in the service of some goal, in support of reasoning, in acts of problem-solving, and so forth. But the universe of human thought is also teeming with intimate, private analogies that have no trace of purposiveness, that are utterly unrelated to logic, and that contribute in no way to the solving of any problems that one might be facing.
The mechanism that gives rise to such analogies creates, or brings to mind, a shared category, but not the kind of category that we wish to preserve for a long time. Such categories thus tend to be instantly forgotten unless there’s a special reason not to do so. In the case of the two blue station wagons, the two black poodles, and the two disk drives, the shared category is that of
two very similar-looking items that unexpectedly belong to the same person.
As for the light chains and scarves, the category is
two indistinguishable items owned by different people and observed at the same time.
And finally, the more abstract category
two very similar-looking items whose simultaneous presence is surprising
allows the two sets of analogies to be united in one higher-level category. But no matter how one might choose to group them, these analogies are useless. Our point here, though, is not to focus on their uselessness but to see what they can tell us about the human mind.
The fruitless analogies we’ve been discussing were all quickly discarded. But as in any game of chance, such as a lottery, not only the winner took a chance, but so did every single loser. The point is, we’re constantly noticing odd, random resemblances around us because our brains are always on the lookout for insights into reality, always using the past to try to make sense of the present, always making spontaneous connections, always throwing bottle after bottle overboard in the faint hope that one of them might reach land. Most, of course, sink to the bottom of memory’s ocean and are lost forever. These wasted efforts are the price that we pay for a rare but great success — a ship in trouble saved, a kidnapped passenger rescued, whatever metaphor you prefer. And speaking of ships in trouble, we now present another extended analogy that originated on the high seas and that shows that on occasion, even the most useless and most quickly discarded of analogies can reach certain heights of abstraction.
Thomas has just boarded a plane en route home after a vacation. He pulls out the book his sister has given him,
Hunting Mister Heartbreak
by Jonathan Raban, and starts to read the first chapter. In it, the author tells of taking a freighter, the
Atlantic Conveyor
, from Liverpool to Halifax when he was a young man. One passage describes what the ship’s captain did when he received a report that a hurricane named Helene had been spotted near Bermuda and was heading northwards in the Atlantic on a collision course with the ship’s route in a day or so. He instantly decided to turn the ship southwards so as to skirt the southern edge of hurricane Helene instead of crashing head-on into it. Such a maneuver would cost them a day, but it would keep them out of danger. It worked like a charm and they arrived in Halifax “in one shape” (as someone once said).
Thomas finishes reading
Chapter 1
just before his flight lands. Once he’s off the plane, he heads down the wide concourse toward the baggage claim. It’s not a busy time of day and he’s proceeding at a brisk pace when all at once, to his left, a woman wheeling a suitcase appears out of the blue and walks straight in front of him, cutting across the corridor without at all looking where she is going. In a trice, Thomas makes a deft little swerve leftwards and then swerves back, just barely avoiding a collision with the oblivious woman and her suitcase.
This general sort of avoidance maneuver is a dime a dozen when one is walking down city streets — we adults are all past masters at the everyday sport of “sidewalk squeeze-bys”— and one doesn’t ever give such things the least thought; yet in this case, a shadowy notion flits briefly through Thomas’s mind.
He’s
the freighter
Atlantic Conveyor
and the broad concourse is the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, left is south, right is north, and one second is roughly one day. The sudden appearance of the woman “to the south” is the warning of a hurricane spotted near Bermuda, her blithe crosswise march is the hurricane’s northwards path, and last but not least, Thomas’s deft little dodging maneuver is the captain’s maneuver in dodging Helene. But none of this does he verbalize as such; it’s far from the center of his attention. Indeed, despite its complexity, his analogy was so inconsequential and meaningless that it was about to disappear without a trace, but by chance Thomas noticed it fluttering at the fringes of his consciousness and caught it on the wing just before it sailed out of view forever.
Why would Thomas’s unconscious mind have come up with such an ephemeral and pointless analogy? Not one iota more useful than the analogies of the previous few sections, this momentary likening of an oblivious woman to a threatening hurricane did not help Thomas solve any problem, nor did it help him fathom the motivations of hurried travelers in airport concourses, nor did it yield the least insight into the capricious fury of hurricanes or other violent atmospheric phenomena. At best a cute piece of cognitive fluff, Thomas’ fleeting analogy was entirely purposeless.
After the fact, one might think that this analogy was handed to Thomas on a silver platter. And yet, as obvious as it seems, its emergence was not inevitable but somewhat dicy. One can easily imagine someone else who, having just read the same chapter, steps off the plane and makes a little swerve to dodge someone crossing the concourse, but doesn’t notice any link between their footwork and the just-read passage. And if Thomas hadn’t just read the chapter, he too would merely have lumped his mundane avoidance-maneuver in with all the thousands of mundane avoidance-maneuvers that he routinely makes each month, and the rest of his day’s cognitive activities would not have been in the least affected. In short, Thomas’s analogy, although it had some abstract and subtle qualities, was neither compelling nor significant, and its creation was not an inevitable cognitive event.
If we compare this analogy with the ones discussed in the past few pages, we can say that the analogy between the two “60”’s is the hollowest of all. No insight results from spotting the identity of a friend’s age (in years) and the speed (in miles per hour) of a vehicle. As for the analogies involving cars, poodles, disk drives, chains of lights, and scarves, all these depended on categories such as
two very similar-looking items whose simultaneous presence is surprising.
There is a slight bit of abstraction here but not much complexity. By contrast, in the case of the hurricane and the traveler, we have a scenario involving agents acting in time and space: two entities simultaneously moving in perpendicular directions in a confined region, a sense of calm interrupted by a sudden threat of danger, a quick calculation, a deft sideways maneuver, and a successful avoidance of a collision. This category is complex enough to allow instantiations of
extremely different sorts. But even so, it is just as useless as its predecessors, and Thomas’s analogy nearly poofed out of existence without ever being noticed.
Although these just-discussed fleeting analogies managed to get themselves noticed, myriads of other small and superficial mental comparisons that we routinely make each day as by-products of our ceaseless, frenetic search to make sense of our lives do not ever get noticed as such. No sooner do we come up with them than we unconsciously dismiss them as dull and irrelevant, and they are nipped in the bud: squelched before they are noticed.
Whereas the analogies just presented are of interest to us precisely because of their near-total lack of interest, it’s certainly not the case that all analogies are totally useless. Some analogies are so pervasive that they totally shape our perception of the situations we encounter. This happens when our most basic sensory tools for interacting with the surrounding world become our main gateway, possibly even our unique gateway, to the encoding of situations in memory. Concreteness then merges tightly with abstractness.
To make this idea vivid, let us imagine a small tribe living in a remote region, and let us suppose that in their language there is a word for “stick”, and that this word means not only a piece of a tree but also the abstract concept of
punishment.
Let us further imagine that the word meaning “vine” not only means a dangling plant but also stands for the concept of
friendship
, that the word meaning “water” represents not only the liquid but also the concept of
life
, and so on. Thus the word for
forest
denotes not just a wooded area but also all of humanity, the word for
rain
has a second meaning of
inevitability
, and the word for
mountain
does double duty, sometimes meaning
eternity
.
Would you find this tribe’s confusions between abstract and concrete concepts to be primitive? Would you be startled to find one and the same word used to designate a tangible object and also an intangible notion? Would you be inclined to conclude that this tribe’s members are incapable of distinguishing between the concrete world (that is, what the senses perceive) and the abstract world (that is, the world of pure ideas)? Would you find the tribe’s blendings as strange as, for instance, someone who mixed up visual perception with intellectual understanding?
But then consider a Western observer who declares, “The proposed distinction between concrete visual perception and abstract intellectual understanding is crystal-clear, enlightening, and furnishes a brilliant, luminous perspective. However, it blindly leaves certain facets of the issue in the shadows. Indeed, upon looking at matters more closely, one feels pushed to shift viewpoint concerning the boundary line separating sight from insight, for it appears blurrier than one might suppose, at first glance.”
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.