More Than Meets The Eye...

When I was reading this section of the book (111-126) it dealt a lot with how Jumbo takes words and transforms them into other formations of the word. It gets back to my post on anagrams, and how "hot shots" can be perceived as "hots hots." Hofstadter talks about two different transformations in Jumbo. The first one is "entropy-preserving" and the other one is "entropy-increasing." He goes on to define "entropy" as "perceived disorder." So, working by analogy, a person is able to take the latter part of the phrase and make sense of it. For e-preserving, we can assume, without reading ahead that we are trying to keep the perceived disorder in check, and for e-increasing we can say that we want to increase or raise the perceived disorder.

"Cognition equals recognition" (119). This is the thesis that Hofstadter said we are trying to prove, and he goes on to say that there are infinite amounts of ways to write the letter 'A' but we can all recognize it as the letter 'A'. He also goes on to say that there has to be flexibility with Platonic abstraction and a mental representation. In this sense we have the ability to recognize things that we have seen before, and at some level we learned what it was. I always think of the story of the sailor on a foreign island trying to tell the residents of the island that a ship is coming towards the shore. But, since they have never seen a ship, they do not recognize it and think the sailor is crazy.

A side note, this section reminded me of the T.V. shows from my childhood, and how almost everything that I watched had something transform. Such as Transformers (shouldn't have to explain here) to Superman when Clark Kent would run into a phone booth and "transform" into Superman. I just thought that virtually everything that we are exposed to can have an aspect of transformation.

-Bryan