Guffaws

I once while eating a large portion of mashed potatoes and gravy,

began to recite the pledge of allegiance with my mouth particularly full...

 

Hoffstader identifies a cognitive quirk, in attempting to speak, we try to translate the way we think into a way that can be understood by others. We are fortunate that so often, "You know what I mean.", because frequently what comes out of our mouths is not what we mean to say -He calls these word-blends. 

They seem to arise when an idea with two similar references wishes to be expressed. Flight and plane, each serve equally as well in the sentence "No one could get tickets on that [blank]." Both words carry slight differences in nuance.

The best word for the job, one with full expressive power, would be a word that contains the full range of nuance provided by these two words. --And since your brain has learned that the phonological sound of a word is directly associated with it's meaning, this new 'best word' should probably sound like both of them. And we get word blends in speech.

Since our brain has learned that the structure of words is directly associated with meaning, we also get word blends as we wrypen [type/write]. 

Word-blends, or as choreographers call them, mash-ups, combine ideas into single entity's. There is an idea that many of our most popular curse words are in fact, mash ups of many-many ideas, and this is why they have provide a full range of expressive power. 

One word linked to the unification  and expression of all ideas, the word of everything, le mot de tout, das wort alles; the word that embodies everything,  is spoken thus:

Ohm.

-dvn

Perception May Be Subjective:

Perception might be influenced by:

beliefs
goals
and
external conflict.

Optimists live longer,
Arrogant and talented.

Zen masters and Phyrronean skeptics recommend abandoning personal:

beliefs
goals
and
external conflict.

All in light of what you meant,
enlightenment.

D.H. makes a good point, suggesting that we imbue our relationships by re-presenting sensations:

What's up in the sky while you're down on the ground.
Look up to your hero while looking down at his grave.

Perception of a situation can be radically reshaped when necessary.
The new conservatives call each other by the names of the old radicals.

When perception and a situation do not meet flush, which do we try to radically reshape?

My Objectivity:
I feel I am very objective,
so much to the fact that,
if a consensus must be reached,
I routinely offer my point of view
as the standard interpretation.

A cheap tailor in the presence of the naked emperor will tell you, the 20-cent alteration, the "paradigm shift", is often regarded
as the process of viewing the world in a radically different way.

Do you find
that the fact that I can with relative/relevant ease
describe my understanding of DNA in terms of computer code,
a coincidence?

Coincidence is one of those messy relationships not easily represented by our sensations.
Perception of Purpose and Intention
can be radically altered by
constraints of the intellect,
beliefs, goals, and external conflict.

"If one restricts the domain, some understanding may be at our grasp" pg-190.

"If instead of using the [real world], one carefully creates a simpler, {artificial world}
in which to study high level perception, the problems become more (tractable)." -pg190.

Translation by Substitution

If instead of using [Objectivity], one carefully creates a simpler, {subjective experience}
in which to study high level perception, the problems become more (traceable).

Does the translation detract from our previous interpretation?

Our MicroDomain:
Let's put a pretty face on it, and trace it's success back to the features of it's face.
Lets put an ugly face on it, and trace it's failures back to the features of it's face.

D.H. keeps saying that all these poor programs,
only sound like they're supposed to.
What's under the surface of the referenced application isn't applicable.
They're skull-fudging the numbers to win the beauty contest.

"While microdomains may superficially seem less impressive than "real world" domains,
the fact that they are explicitly idealized worlds allows the issues under study to be thrown into clear relief" -pg192.

Can someone explain why the phrase "Prolog with weighting" was stuck in my head the entire time I was reading>?

Preface to a Pray Lewd

The Eliza Effect

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

The man who thinks about the the way machines think like humans, our man, D.H.; raises an interesting distinction. 

"D.H sat typing in the Chinese room where he often spent hours rearranging the letters in his alphabet soup. These New York Times computer programs ain't got a clue. They're not even guessing! Sure they keep spitting out pretty analogies, and sure they even use lots of parenthesis, but encapsulation is no substitute for taking (the red pill)! --------Hasn't anybody read their Camus? Just because these programs walk and talk like our everyday neighbors doesn't mean they don't think like L'Etranger!"

-dvn

Cutting the Cake

It's interesting and it speaks for itself.

That is to say when you read it, it's not supposed to make real sense, the kind in which afterwards you understand it. It's just supposed to make the kind of sense where you go, oh how inventive, how creative, it is sort of messy and it has layers! It's got everything that a program that does the think-like stuff should have, nodes and bricks and links and code-lets.

You get it right? Code-rack cyto-blobs entering the rack of neural-tentacles enabling the vestibule to descend, in a human like fashion over the mortuary where we back track from the binary coffin, 0 = dead 1 = alive. Now comes the interesting part, the program shivers, yep, it actually gets cold. This means it needs to add a theoretical "blanket". It does this with the command... 

add-dosh-dat-blanket-locus-o-axe-shun(linenCloset[quilt, afghan, comforter]).

Well if you don't understand it, you're not on the cusp. The new wave of thinking about thinking about. If you don't get it, you're not cool. You want to be cool right? Well then lets keep at it. Just tolerate the fluffy substance and start to think like Hofstadter, let him influence you, and then maybe you will actually publish something and we can try to guess at what you are talking about.

 Show me some code or preach it on sundays buddy.

-dvn

lost your socks to the sandals salesmen

"The human mind as a stochastic processor"

Pg128

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic

We as humans have a fascination with the concept of randomness.

Some of us are chronic gamblers. We like risky behavior, engage in actions whose consequences are unknown to us at the onset. We make bets and place odds, not just on sanctioned events, but on the daily interactions of self and environment. 

We are guessers and hypothesizers, what better opportunity for our predictive abilities? Where have we a more equal playing field than at a task of determining the outcome of 'random' acts. See we're trying to get good at it. We're trying to become the masters of our stochastic processors. 

Is there a way to do it? 

Randomness = lack of predictability.

We are constantly trying to increase our predicative power. We are waging war on randomness, and yet we value the freedom we seem to imply from its presence in our universe. Is it that one day, the great understanders will come to a realization that they had no choice in realizing?

-dvn

Frank Zappa said that broken hearts are for...

The heart is a pump metaphor.

Hofstader establishes some AI ideals as formalizing thought away from its current medium.
Thought as a platonic ideal is out there. It just happens to currently only manifest in the brain. The holy grail of AI, is to reproduce it outside of the grey-gooey.

The heart is a pump. Who needs hearts when you have pumps?

The artificial heart produces no pulse.
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/17523/

Poe, his pit and his pendulum would have no issue with guilty onomatopoeia.

An issue alarms us, a heart that does not pulse? Still a heart?
A machine that does not respond to adrenaline?
That does not increase in tempo in the presence of a loved one?
Does not deliver more oxygen to the escaping prey?

The heart is more than a pump.
We need more than a pump.
Or our robots will turn against us.

You're supposed to know about...

pg 112
"The internal component tries to summarize how well the glom, as a specific instance of a general concept, realizes the Platonic Ideal."


Platonic Idealism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_idealism

"... the exact philosophical meaning of which is perhaps one of the most disputed questions in higher academic philosophy."

Hofstadter takes it, the cake.

He names his ideas by feeling their functions. Cytoplasm , internal and external happiness, and it reads like pseudo code. He's naming ideas, in such a way that their essence's are encapsulated in their roles.