I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [227]
A more complex variation on this theme involves a population of Sallows-type sentences varying in time. At the outset, they would all be filled with random numbers, but then they would all get updated in parallel. Specifically, each one would replace its wrong inventories by counting letters inside itself and in a few other sentences, and replacing the wrong values by the values just found. Of course, since everything is a moving target, the letter-counts would still be wrong, but hopefully over the course of a long series of such parallel iterations, each sentence would tend, at least on average, to gain greater accuracy, especially concerning itself, and simultaneously to form a small clique of “friends” (sentences that it inventories fairly fully and well), while remaining remote from most members of the population (i.e., representing them at best sparsely and with many errors, or perhaps not even at all). This is a kind of caricature of my ideas about people “living inside each other”, proposed in Chapters 15 through 18.
Page 63 Perhaps there is no harm… Quoted from [Skinner] in George Brabner’s letter.
Page 63 I wrote a lengthy reply to it… This is found in Chapter 1 of [Hofstadter 1985].
Page 68 If dogs were a bit more like robots… As I was putting the finishing touches on these notes, my children and I flew out to California for Christmas break. We were gliding low, approaching the San Jose airport at night, when Danny, who was peering out the window, said to me, “You know what I just saw?” “What?” I replied, having not the foggiest idea. He said, “A parking lot packed with cars whose headlights and taillights were all flashing on and off at random!” “Why were they all doing that?” I asked, a bit densely. Danny instantly supplied the answer: “Their alarm systems were all triggering each other. I know that’s what it was, because I’ve seen fireworks set car alarms off.” Seeing this in my mind’s eye, I grinned from ear to ear with delight and amazement, all the more so since Danny hadn’t read any of my manuscript and had no idea how relevant his sighting of reverberant honking and flashing was to my book — in fact to the chapter that I was writing notes for just then (Chapter 5). Danny’s reverberant parking lot truly put reverberant barking to shame, and what an infernal racket it must have been for people down on the ground! And yet, as observed from above by chance voyeurs in the plane, it was a totally silent, surrealistic vision of robots who had gotten one another all excited, and who certainly weren’t about to calm down, as dogs will. What a stupendous last-minute addition to my book!
Page 69 the amazing visual universe discovered around 1980… See [Peitgen and Richter].
Page 76 winds up triggering a small set… See [Kanerva] and [Hofstadter and FARG].
Page 77 Suppose we begin with a humble mosquito… See [Griffin] and [Wynne]. The latter contains a remarkable account of analogy-making by bees, of all creatures!
Page 80 cars that drive themselves down …highways or across rocky deserts… See [Davis 2006].
Page 82 structure that represents itself (i.e., the dog itself, not the symbol itself !)… This sounds like a joke, but not entirely. When it comes to the self-symbols of humans — their “I” ’s — much of the structure of the “I” involves pointers that point right back at the abstraction “I”, and not just at the body. This is discussed in Chapters 13 and 16.
Page 83 their category systems became arbitrarily extensible… I defend this point of view in [Hofstadter 2001]. For more on human categories, see [Sander], [Margolis], [Minsky 1986], [Schank], [Aitchison], [Fauconnier], [Hofstadter 1997], and [Gentner et al.].
Page 85 memories of episodes can be triggered… See [Kanerva], [Schank], and [Sander].
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