Surfaces and Essences

Surfaces and Essences PDF Author: Douglas Hofstadter
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465018475
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
Shows how analogy-making pervades human thought at all levels, influencing the choice of words and phrases in speech, providing guidance in unfamiliar situations, and giving rise to great acts of imagination.

Surfaces and Essences

Surfaces and Essences PDF Author: Douglas Hofstadter
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465018475
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
Shows how analogy-making pervades human thought at all levels, influencing the choice of words and phrases in speech, providing guidance in unfamiliar situations, and giving rise to great acts of imagination.

I Am a Strange Loop

I Am a Strange Loop PDF Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465030785
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
Argues that the key to understanding ourselves and consciousness is the "strange loop," a special kind of abstract feedback loop that inhabits the brain.

Metamagical Themas

Metamagical Themas PDF Author: Douglas R Hofstadter
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786723866
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 622

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Book Description
Hofstadter's collection of quirky essays is unified by its primary concern: to examine the way people perceive and think.

Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies

Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies PDF Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780140258356
Category : Analogy
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
Hosftadter and his colleagues at The Fluid Analogies Research Group have developed computer models that help describe and explain human discovery, creation and analogical thought. The key issue of perception is investigated through the exploration of playful anagrams, number puzzles, word play and fanciful alphabetical styles, and the result is a survey of cognitive processes. This text presents the results.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Gödel, Escher, Bach PDF Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher: Penguin Group(CA)
ISBN: 9780140289206
Category : Art and music
Languages : en
Pages : 832

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Book Description
'What is a self and how can a self come out of inanimate matter?' This is the riddle that drove Douglas Hofstadter to write this extraordinary book. In order to impart his original and personal view on the core mystery of human existence - our intangible sensation of 'I'-ness - Hofstadter defines the playful yet seemingly paradoxical notion of 'strange loop', and explicates this idea using analogies from many disciplines.

A Palette of Particles

A Palette of Particles PDF Author: Jeremy Bernstein
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674073649
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
From molecules to stars, much of the cosmic canvas can be painted in brushstrokes of primary color: the protons, neutrons, and electrons we know so well. But for meticulous detail, we have to dip into exotic hues—leptons, mesons, hadrons, quarks. Bringing particle physics to life as few authors can, Jeremy Bernstein here unveils nature in all its subatomic splendor. In this graceful account, Bernstein guides us through high-energy physics from the early twentieth century to the present, including such highlights as the newly discovered Higgs boson. Beginning with Ernest Rutherford’s 1911 explanation of the nucleus, a model of atomic structure emerged that sufficed until the 1930s, when new particles began to be theorized and experimentally confirmed. In the postwar period, the subatomic world exploded in a blaze of unexpected findings leading to the theory of the quark, in all its strange and charmed variations. An eyewitness to developments at Harvard University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Bernstein laces his story with piquant anecdotes of such luminaries as Wolfgang Pauli, Murray Gell-Mann, and Sheldon Glashow. Surveying the dizzying landscape of contemporary physics, Bernstein remains optimistic about our ability to comprehend the secrets of the cosmos—even as its mysteries deepen. We now know that over eighty percent of the universe consists of matter we have never identified or detected. A Palette of Particles draws readers into the excitement of a field where the more we discover, the less we seem to know.

The Mind's I

The Mind's I PDF Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780710803528
Category : Artificial intelligence
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description


The Origin of Concepts

The Origin of Concepts PDF Author: Susan Carey
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199838801
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Book Description
New in paperback-- A transformative book on the way we think about the nature of concepts and the relations between language and thought.

Surfaces and Essences

Surfaces and Essences PDF Author: Douglas R Hofstadter
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465021581
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
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.

Brother

Brother PDF Author: David Chariandy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635572002
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
"A brilliant, powerful elegy from a living brother to a lost one, yet pulsing with rhythm, and beating with life." --Marlon James "Highly recommend Brother by David Chariandy--concise and intense, elegiac short novel of devastation and hope." --Joyce Carol Oates, via Twitter WINNER--Toronto Book Award WINNER--Rogers' Writers' Trust Fiction Prize WINNER--Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction In luminous, incisive prose, a startling new literary talent explores masculinity, race, and sexuality against a backdrop of simmering violence during the summer of 1991. One sweltering summer in the Park, a housing complex outside of Toronto, Michael and Francis are coming of age and learning to stomach the careless prejudices and low expectations that confront them as young men of black and brown ancestry. While their Trinidadian single mother works double, sometimes triple shifts so her boys might fulfill the elusive promise of their adopted home, Francis helps the days pass by inventing games and challenges, bringing Michael to his crew's barbershop hangout, and leading escapes into the cool air of the Rouge Valley, a scar of green wilderness where they are free to imagine better lives for themselves. Propelled by the beats and styles of hip hop, Francis dreams of a future in music. Michael's dreams are of Aisha, the smartest girl in their high school whose own eyes are firmly set on a life elsewhere. But the bright hopes of all three are violently, irrevocably thwarted by a tragic shooting, and the police crackdown and suffocating suspicion that follow. Honest and insightful in its portrayal of kinship, community, and lives cut short, David Chariandy's Brother is an emotional tour de force that marks the arrival of a stunning new literary voice.