Read Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking Online
Authors: Douglas Hofstadter,Emmanuel Sander
Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (76 page)
We are constantly confronted with the new and the unfamiliar, and we deal with it through the help of myriads of analogies. Those same analogies, however, manipulate us, turning us into prisoners of the familiar. The Indian thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti wrote a great deal about how the memory of our past shackles us as we grapple with the present. In his writings, he vaunts the idea of acquiring new perspectives that are
not
shackled by our memory, for in his view the chains of memory do not allow a pure, true, genuine, and deep perception of oneself, of others, of one’s environment, or of situations that one encounters (“That memory is knowledge, that knowledge is going to interfere… — obviously.”). “Freedom from the Known”, the title of one of his most famous works, clearly expresses this viewpoint.
As we have just seen, there are nearly invisible analogies that crop up in the tiniest acts of cognition and there are large analogies that, by staring us in the face, force us to take decisive forks in our lives; moreover, our categories, selectively activated by our momentary concerns and our momentary obsessions, filter our perception of our surroundings and control our thoughts. In fact, it is the known that manipulates us at all times and in all ways. We depend intimately on the known, on both very small and very large scales. And thus there can be no doubt that looking at the world in terms of one’s past experiences is an undeniable fact of human existence. Yes, as Krishnamurti says, we all are shackled by the blinders of our categories; indeed, they follow us like
shadows, acting as indispensable collaborators of our sensory organs and as inseparable partners in our perceptions. In this sense, analogies manipulate us and control us shamelessly, boldly inserting themselves left and right between us and what surrounds us, and even between ourselves and our selves.
Analogy pervades our thoughts from top to bottom, controlling every aspect of our interactions with the world. The fact that it controls us so intimately leads to the inexorable conclusion that we can think only in terms of what we know in some fashion or other. We are like blind people who have always lived among other blind people, unable to imagine the existence of senses beyond touch, smell, hearing, and taste. Even the most daring ideas of science-fiction authors and the wildest visions of surrealistic painters come from combining commonplace concepts from our everyday world; thus, such creators dream up such notions as
a flying three-headed lion
, or
an intelligent lake
, or
a machine that can reverse the direction of time’s flow
, or
an invisible person
, or
a cross between a human and a spider
, or
a person who can see into the future
, or
a new kind of force between particles that creates fabulous amounts of energy
, and so on. The book
Codex Seraphinianus
is an illustrated encyclopedia several hundred pages long that portrays a fictitious world in enormous detail, a world that in nearly every way diverges from our own, but which, at the same time, is constructed entirely from conceptual building blocks that are completely mundane. Even when people reach such high peaks of creativity, they do so totally through their conceptual repertoire that comes from their mundane existence.
Each of us is continually creating extensions of or variations on what we already know, and at the base of this huge edifice lie our most primitive needs. And our constant quest to meet these primitive needs leads us to undertake activities having seemingly unlimited levels of sophistication. The need for food gave rise to
haute cuisine
; the need for warmth gave rise to high fashion; the need for shelter gave rise to architecture; the need to move about gave rise to vehicles of innumerable sorts; the need to mate gave rise to erotic art and innumerable love songs and poems; the need to reproduce gave rise to families and their interactions; the need to exchange goods gave rise to huge networks of interdependent economies; the need to cooperate gave rise to governments; the need to understand the world gave rise to science; the need to communicate gave rise to a thousand constantly-evolving technologies… We humans have created an unlimited cornucopia of elaborate variations on the themes of what we know, but we are incapable of going beyond that.
What, then, is this goal of “freeing oneself from the known”? The known has two closely linked facets: it is a
constraint
, in that it biases our perceptions through the filters it imposes, but it is also a
guide
, in that it offers us the possibility of constantly changing points of view. Like railroad tracks, which give a train the ability to move great distances but also force it to follow the linear path they define, our categories allow us to say and predict a vast variety of things, but since in each case we adopt only one particular point of view, all other points of view are temporarily suppressed.
Stripped of all past experiences, a human being would be incapable of seeing, distinguishing, or understanding anything at all. Seeing the known as an obstacle to human thinking is like seeing tracks as an obstacle to a train’s motion. While this is true
in one sense, since tracks keep trains from wandering all over creation, it is quite absurd in another sense, since trackless trains would go nowhere at all. Likewise, seeing analogy as a manipulative force is correct in one sense, because we are all relentlessly pushed around by our analogies, but it’s absurd in another sense, because without analogies no thinking would be possible at all.
Of course, a seven-year-old girl who is delighted with her brand-new revelation that “shaving cream is like toothpaste” is a prisoner of her prior knowledge: her category of
toothpaste
necessarily biases her perception of her father’s shaving cream. But this “prison” has to be contrasted with the “freedom” that she would enjoy if she had no knowledge of the concept
toothpaste
— or of the concept
white
, or of the concept
cream
, or of the concept
substance
, and so forth.
No one can deny that our knowledge of the world constitutes an extremely tight set of constraints, but it is precisely this set of constraints that imbues our thoughts with their marvelous novelty and freshness. This brings to mind the final four lines of a graceful little ode written by James Falen, a gifted translator of Alexander Pushkin, the great Russian poet whose poetry features constraints of all sorts:
There are magic links and chains
Forged to loose our rigid brains.
Structures, strictures, though they bind,
Strangely liberate the mind.
Hoping to get rid of one’s categories acquired through experience would be like wishing to jump right into the most advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease. We humans have the great luxury of being able to look at our world through all sorts of filters — all manner of categories — but a virgin perception, untainted by any prior concepts, is a chimera. The known, as it is an intrinsic extension to our physiological senses, is part and parcel of our perception. To summarize matters pithily, if, in making one’s way in the world, one were offered the choice between having a backlog of known things to depend on or having nothing known to depend on, it would not be tantamount to a choice between living in chains and living free as a bird, but rather, to a choice between living in a complex maze pervaded by patterns or living in perpetual blindness.
Yes, analogies manipulate us, and yes, we are enchained by them. This is a fact that we simply must recognize. Not only are we prisoners of the known and the familiar, but we are serving a life term. But luckily for us, we have the power to enlarge our prison over and over again, indeed without any limits. Only the known can free us from the known.
HAPTER
6
How We Manipulate Analogies
Emmanuel and Doug have just gone out for their habitual afternoon coffee break. “Two
crèmes
,” says Doug to the server. When the drinks arrive, Doug pours some sugar in his cup, takes the spoon from the saucer, and while stirring, says, “Here in Europe, nobody is surprised to see coffee served in real cups, with real saucers and real metal spoons. It’s par for the course.”
“Sure!” says Emmanuel. “But why would that surprise you?”
“It was like that in the U.S. when I was a grad student,” says Doug nostalgically, “but nowadays, wherever you go, coffee is always served in big tall cardboard or styrofoam cups, and instead of a spoon all you get is a super-thin little wooden or plastic stick. Why doesn’t anyone ever complain? It’s as if, uhh… It’s as if some tourists came to a lake and wanted to rent a rowboat and then, instead of being given oars, they were given a pair of
javelins.
Can you imagine that? And on top of that, imagine that nobody uttered a peep in protest.”
What Doug just came out with is a
caricature analogy
— a very common sort of cognitive act consisting in the dreaming-up of a new situation that differs greatly from the original one, at least on the surface, but which, at a deeper level, is “exactly the same thing”, and which has aspects that cannot help nudging the listener towards the conclusion desired by the speaker. Such a process is generally triggered when one is desirous of sharing a strong personal reaction, such as indignation, to a situation. Often one fears that a direct and straightforward recounting of the situation itself will be too bland to get anyone else to feel one’s intense sense of indignation. And so, dipping judiciously into one’s vast system of categories, one tries to concoct a fictitious situation
in a distant domain yet very much like the situation at hand, sharing a “conceptual skeleton” with it, and hopefully vivid enough to pull listeners in and get them to see the original situation through one’s own eyes. We now illustrate this phenomenon through a series of examples drawn from daily, often quite mundane, interactions.
A scientist seeking a job abroad wrote to a colleague: “I love my country, but doing science here is like playing soccer with a bowling ball.”
Doug said to Carol, “The German word for ‘tortoise’ is ‘Schildkröte’, which literally means ‘shield-toad’.” Quite tickled, Carol replied, “Shield-toads, eh? And I suppose that over there they don’t have
eagles
but
feather-cows
?”
Carol asks Doug, “You don’t have a pen on you, by any chance, do you?” Doug, who makes a point of never being without a pen, replies to his wife’s question just as he has replied to it a hundred times before: “Is the Pope Catholic?”
At a party an adult asks a teen-ager how old she is, and she says, “I’m seventeen.” Her father reminds her that she’s still just sixteen. “Oh, come on, Dad!” she retorts. “My birthday’s just two weeks away!” He counters, “Sure, sweetie. And today’s September 29th. So October has already started, I suppose?”
A journalist asked Paul Newman why he remained faithful to his wife, actor Joanne Woodward. (Their marriage lasted fifty years, until Newman’s death.) He answered, “Why go out for a hamburger when you have steak at home?” And when he was asked why he missed the ceremony in which, in his sixties, he was at long last being awarded an honorary Oscar, Newman explained, “It’s like chasing a beautiful woman for eighty years. Finally she relents, and you say, ‘I’m terribly sorry — I’m tired.’ ”
S. says to her father, “This morning I went to the store with Jack [her brother] and this girl named Jill.” Perplexed, her father replies, “What’s with calling her ‘this girl named Jill’, eh? She’s been over here at least a dozen times, and I always had to drive her home, and each time I spent ten or fifteen minutes talking to her! Don’t you remember all those times? You might as well have said to me, ‘ This morning I went to the store with a guy named Jack…’ ”
A feminist slogan of the eighties said, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
A common bumper sticker on American cars during the Vietnam war said, “Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.”
“Love without jealousy is like a Polish man without a mustache.” — Polish proverb.
A famous physics professor gets an email from a post-doc he’s never heard of. She starts out with “Dear Dan”, and then says that she’s about to submit a “revolutionary” grant proposal and hopes that “Dan” will “come on board” and co-sign it. He is shocked by the note’s presumptuousness, and says, “So if I were the Queen of England, would she have called me ‘Lizzie’?”
A sports announcer was taking contemptuous note of the fact that some people were pushing for chess to become an official Olympic sport. He scoffed, “And so what’s next on the list — Monopoly? Clue? Tic-Tac-Toe?”
A writer about cancer who wanted to make fun of alternative medicine wrote: “A doctor who treats stomach cancer by advocating a diet of special plants is like the captain of the Titanic spending his time rearranging the deck chairs instead of issuing an SOS.”
A physics professor said, “Imagining relativity before the equation
E
=
mc
2
was discovered is like imagining Pisa before the Tower of Pisa had been built.”
Fred: “So did you receive my invite in the mail?” Jim: “Yeah, not only did I get your
in
vite, I already sent you my
ac
cept.”
A teen-ager: “Pay ten dollars to get to see the previews for
Harry Potter
?! No way! I’d rather have my tongue stapled to the wall!”
“So religious fanaticism is going to disappear during this century? Wonderful! And you know what? I have a great bridge I can sell you for just ten dollars!”
M., who’s always loved puns, is annoyed that many bright people ridicule them. She says, “Why do so many thoughtful people hold the art of wordplay in contempt? It’s as if some sport were a lightning rod for vicious mockery by sports lovers. Imagine that every time any pole vaulter gracefully cleared the bar and landed safely in the pit, the announcer were to groan, ‘Grotesque! What a lousy jump! It stank!’, and the crowd were to hiss loudly. Why do so many people do just that every time that they hear a pun, no matter how clever it is?”
A couple introduce their cat Snoopy to a friend, who scratches his head and asks, “Why did you call a female cat ‘Snoopy’? Everyone knows Snoopy is a male beagle!” The wife answers, “It’s because she’s constantly snooping. That’s her signature. Her name has nothing to do with
Peanuts.
The connection never came to our mind!” The friend replies, “Oh, come on! It’s as if you were telling me, ‘When we named our son “Adolf Hitler”, it never crossed our mind that anyone would think of the Nazi Führer!”
A young woman reveals to her brother how badly her fiancé has verbally abused her for years. She tearfully adds, “I’m just so used to it; I’ve never known anything else. Sometimes I really do think I deserve all his insults.” Her brother replies, “That’s crazy. You’re like a whipped dog who accepts cruelty as normal, while all the other neighborhood dogs have kind masters who pet them all the time, and who couldn’t imagine hurting their dog.”
Two friends on a walk notice a café called “The Corkscrew”. Chuckling, one says, “Do you think the same people own a cocktail lounge called ‘The Coffee Grinder’?”
A dad plays blindfold chess with his daughter, beating her in 40 moves. He mutters to a friend, “Oh, I played so badly!” The friend replies, “You remind me of a talking dog who complains that he can’t get rid of all the split infinitives in his speech.”
At a dinner party, P. is sitting next to a doctor who states his view that midwives should all be women, because only women know what it is to give birth. P. reacts, “By that logic, breast-cancer specialists would all have to have had breast cancer, and only someone handicapped could sell wheelchairs. And of course, a bald person couldn’t be a hairdresser.”
Investment guru Warren Buffett commented that the huge profit-making opportunities opened up by the global financial crisis made him feel “like a hungry mosquito at a nudist camp.”
A trouble-shooting site on the Web tries to explain why its Webcam seems so slow. “Why does our video camera run so slowly? Well, the amount of information it has to transmit is very large, and standard telephone lines and an old modem struggle to process all of the data. It’s like trying to route the entire Mississippi River through the plumbing in your house. It just doesn’t fit, but we do our best!”