This book has a nasty habit of mistaking naming for explaining, but it served the purpose of introducing an egghead physicist/mathematician to the messy biological world of neuroscience. If nothing else, its convincing evidence that neuroscience needs theorists.

If (Amount of jargon) > (Space in a human brain),
then FindTheorists.

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I dove into this book excited to learn how the minds of great scientists churn but instead was reminded of the great danger that accompanies reading old science texts – lengthy discussions of crackpot theories (i.e. phrenology) and passionate defenses of well-accepted ideas (i.e. not all mental activity is conscious). Taken as a survey of late 19th/early 20th century thinking on creativity and thought, the book reveals how stubbornly we humans cling to the mech warrior hypothesis of behavior – that every nugget of our activity stems from the conscious control of a homunculus nested in his HQ and peering out of our eyes like little windows on a spaceship. Many psychologists and philosophers quoted by Hadamard actually deny the existence of nontrivial unconscious processing in creative thought. If this doesn’t shock or disgust you and you find yourself sympathizing with this notion, go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

Even so, this short book is worth a skim – the survey questions in the appendix alone are worth the price of admission. Hadamard used these questions to drill all his scientist/mathematician buddies on how they think, imagine, and work. The list is even more than a set of questions though – its a set of suggestions. If you’re as narrow-minded and habituated as I am, you’ll likely discover entirely new ways to approach problem-solving and find yourself exclaiming, “People think like that?!” I highly recommend reading the survey before the book itself, as this will get you thinking ahead of time about how you think and offer more context for understanding and possibly assimilating the habits of Hadamard’s buddies.

The writing (or at least the translation) is also pretty amateurish. Parts of this book read like the dinner table reports of a 4th grader telling his mommy and daddy what all his friends did in class today… except instead of eating boogers and tricking Suzy into thinking she was adopted, Hadamard’s friends invent special relativity, bifurcation theory, and cybernetics.

If you can tolerate or skip the many faults of this early thought experiment on thought, however, you’re sure to not only learn something about the great minds of the late 19th/early 20th century, but your own feeble brain as well.

Book Notes (Warning: not guaranteed to be interpretable to outside eyes):

• Invention is combination followed by selection.
  • Selection is the more difficult step.
  • The selection process seems highly emotional. Understanding the emotional character of selection would teach us much about invention.
• Two benefits of incubation:
  1. reset (replenishment of mental resources)
  2. restart (retract assumptions and avoid mental ruts)
• The incubation paradigm changes the role of the scientist to that of a mental farmer – toil hard in the fields of conscious effort (and failure), then later reap the benefits brought on by subconscious processing.
• Ways mathematical minds may differ:
  • accessibility of thought/depth in unconscious (logical vs. intuitive thinking)
  • narrowness of thought (logical vs. scattered)
  • different auxiliary representations (geometric, verbal, auditory, etc)
• Two kinds of invention:
  1. Set goal, seek means
  2. Discover means, seek application (more common in mathematics)
• I wonder how many grand ideas remain just out of reach in the antechambers of the minds of geniuses, perhaps consciously acknowledged but under-appreciated by them, perhaps tacitly assumed, or perhaps subconscious and nebulous.
• The scientist whose aesthetic sense (passion) draws him to discoveries with profound implications is what we call a genius.

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WARNING: If you’re reading a review of this book, then a friend or random stranger on the street has likely already fell to the ground before you and wailed that the geek prophet has arrived. Any attempt at a thorough description of this incredible (and incredibly strange) mash-up of thoughts on intelligence and meaning is bound to sound like the ravings of a newly-branded cult member, so I’ll just offer a few thoughts.

Come one, come all! for this book has something for everyone. Passages on musical composition, contemporary art, mathematical formalism, programming languages, molecular biology, linguistics, and neurons let musicians, artists, mathematicians, programmers, biologists, linguists, and neuroscientists each briefly take the stage and say, “Hey! I finally understand what’s going on!” This book is the literary equivalent of the board game Cranium; every team member with his or her unique disabilities and talents can have their time to shine. But be forewarned – the “literary egalitarianism” here is not that of Dan Brown’s work (each of us can see the bottom of its shallow depths!); instead, each of us can expect to spend equal periods of time in shifting states of inspiration and confusion (but at different times for each of us). That said, don’t be ashamed to skip a chapter, a hundred pages, or a good third of the book. Few mortals have the fortitude (or sadistic infatuation with abstract mathematics) to endure certain stretches of the book dealing primarily with mathematical formalism.

Yet, if you do endure, this book is an intellectual playground. Not only does Hofstadter pack about two genuinely new ideas onto every page (one per titled section), he also hides a cache of nifty thoughts in the structure of the book itself. The book alternates between fictional allegories introducing ideas and more direct attempts at explanations of them. There’s a lot of mind fuel here so take your time and treat this as a road trip (a meandering, unrushed adventure), not a morning commute (an unreflective race to the finish). [for the record, I spread this book over about 6 months:]

Lastly, two questions you might ask that would prevent you from picking up this 800-page behemoth:

I’ve heard this book is a bit fluffy and “hand-wavy” at times. Is it really the intellectual heavyweight some claim it to be, or is it merely philosophical musings that sound nice but don’t have any extendability?
Hoftstadter is certainly pretty free with his metaphors and analogies, but he’s also honest about his speculation. This book is not attempting to offer unified theories of intelligence or experimental evidence of hard scientific theories; its meant to introduce new ways to think about old problems. Yes, a big part of science is verifying ideas through rigorous experiment, but another equally important part is proposing structure where it is not superficially obvious. “Hand-waviness” is often a lazy and cowardly taunt by those unwilling to leap very far from the established assumptions of their field.

A 30-year old book on brains and AI – are you sure this is still worth reading?
Yes.

Though Hoftstadter has skyrocketed to the top of my fantasy grandfather list, I can’t give a book 5 stars unless it significantly alters the way I act or perceive the world. That said, I’ll give this one 4 stars right now, note four of my favorite themes, and return in a couple weeks/months to see if these ideas are as interwoven into my worldview as I think they have been:

• multi-level meanings
• perversion of the data-program dichotomy (DNA-protein, LISP, etc)
• strange powers of recursion (quining, G-strings, bootstrapping, and Escher)
• meaning as isomorphism

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Dennett’s thought experiments and suggested activities for readers shed light on some fascinating phenomena of consciousness, including sensory dislocation & extension of self to tools and blind spots & the overly assuming nature of vision. This second investigation I found to be a powerful metaphor for much of the simulation that the brain performs in crafting our sensory experience. The discontinuity of consciousness is so striking particularly because of its apparent continuity. The brain doesn’t so much “fill in” the blanks as it ignores their presence. Dennett makes the important point that this absence of representation (ignorance) is not the same as the representation of absence (“filling in”).

The three themes of Dennett’s that resonated most with me were the relationship between time & consciousness, information sharing and information barriers in the brain, and consciousness as cultural software.

1) Noticing the varying speeds of sensory signal propagation outside of the body (light vs. sound vs. chemicals) and the varying speeds of neural signal propagation in the brain, Dennett points out that the “present” for us is really more of a “smear” in time rather than a “point”. He presents his Multiple Drafts Theory of Consciousness to show that in such a situation, different parts of the brain must act on different sets of information and, therefore, there is no single conscious experience. This is perhaps one of the most profound points that Dennett explores and he does so frequently throughout the book. Dennett also points out that temporal order outside the mind need not coincide exactly with temporal order as represented in the mind, though the two are correlated.

2) With so many specialized areas developing at different periods in human evolution, information sharing in the brain can be quite haphazard and arbitrary. The recognition that information may be present in one area of the brain but entirely unaccessible to another area is essential to understanding many functions and quirks of the brain. This is evident in many popular accounts of language disorders but Dennett also explores what this suggests for the evolution of consciousness. He imagines that early man armed with protospeech might have used “vocal autostimulation” (thinking out loud) as a means of bridging missing connections in his thought processes. In other words, if there’s no path from A to B in the brain, there might have been one from A to speech to hearing to B! This clever circuit could then have evolved into silent thought for more privacy and eventually developed into the “mind’s eye” visual experience of modern man. Even within the brain, there are likely many inefficient intermediary representations developed to bridge the internal “communication problem.” Beyond evolutionary explanations, this idea is also highly suggestive of neuroscientific approaches to creativity. Speaking out loud, doodling, and gesturing to oneself may be more than just nervous ticks or distracting habits; they may instead be integral yet inefficient attempts to circumvent the missing information pathways in the brain!

Dennett also includes a list of “primordial facts” that he claims any theory on the evolution of consciousness must explain. I found them insightful and important enough for any neuroscientist that I’ve included them here verbatim:

1. There are reasons to recognize.
2. Where there are reasons, there are points of view from which to recognize or evaluate them.
3. Any agent must distinguish “here inside” from “the external world.”
4. All recognition must ultimately be accomplished by myriad “blind, mechanical” routines.
5. Inside the defended boundary, there need not always be a Higher Executive or General Headquarters.
6. In nature, handsome is as handsome does; origins don’t matter.
7. In nature, elements often play multiple functions within the economy of a single organism.

3) As for the development of consciousness, Dennett proposes that viewing consciousness as cultural software provides an instructive and productive framework. His evidence includes the relatively recent development of consciousness (and therefore the reduced possibility that it is hard-coded). So why does consciousness still seem to be similar across cultures? Hardware biasing – we’re all still working with roughly the same base. Some interesting results of this hypothesis are that some humans may not experience consciousness, particularly babies and special cases of children who developed with very little social contact.

Just as evolution is a difficult topic to write on given that our language is peppered with words conveying “intent”, consciousness often has Dennett tripping over his own words. He fares far better than most, but be forewarned – books on consciousness can’t help but be clumsy.

In addition to being an excellent introduction for me to many theories on consciousness, this book has piqued my interest in the consciousness and cognitive development of children and the general AI framework known as SOAR.

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After reading this book, I found that many word choices I had assumed to be arbitrary in our language indeed convey subtle yet interesting information that often offers a window into our psychology. Pinker’s fascinating examples including the distinction between mass and count nouns, a thorough treatment of “tense” in all its manifestations, the selection of a “reference frame” for a given conversation, and an exploration of implicit metaphors in our language (such as “love is a journey” and “giving is moving”).

As a man who has devoted his life to words, he also knows how to write and this 400+ page tome on linguistics is as readable as the Sunday comics.

The two chapters near the end on baby names and cursing were pop-sci fluff compared to the rest of this rigorous yet readable book and seemed tacked on just to boost popular appeal by offering quotables on sexual innuendo peppered with “fuck”s and “bonk”s. I was a little disappointed by this commercial sell-out, but the book stands as a great introduction to linguistics for those interested in how the mind works.

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