Surfaces And Essences

Author : Douglas Hofstadter
Publisher : Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN 13 : 0465018475
Total Pages : 594 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Surfaces and Essences written by Douglas Hofstadter and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher : Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN 13 : 0465030785
Total Pages : 537 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book I Am a Strange Loop written by Douglas R. Hofstadter and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2007-03-27 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that the key to understanding ourselves and consciousness is the "strange loop," a special kind of abstract feedback loop that inhabits the brain.

Author : Douglas R Hofstadter
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0465021581
Total Pages : 594 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Surfaces and Essences written by Douglas R Hofstadter and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0786723866
Total Pages : 880 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Metamagical Themas written by Douglas R. Hofstadter and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-04 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hofstadter's collection of quirky essays is unified by its primary concern: to examine the way people perceive and think.

Author : Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780140258356
Total Pages : 518 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies written by Douglas R. Hofstadter and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher : Penguin Group(CA)
ISBN 13 : 9780140289206
Total Pages : 832 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Gödel, Escher, Bach written by Douglas R. Hofstadter and published by Penguin Group(CA). This book was released on 2000 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '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.

Author : Jeremy Bernstein
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674073622
Total Pages : 221 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Palette of Particles written by Jeremy Bernstein and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-11 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeremy Bernstein guides readers through high-energy physics from early twentieth-century atomic models to leptons, mesons, quarks, and the newly discovered Higgs boson, drawing them into the excitement of a universe where 80 percent of all matter has never been identified. From molecules to galaxies, the more we discover, the less we seem to know.

Author : Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780140062533
Total Pages : 501 pages
Book Rating : 4.3X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Mind's I written by Douglas R. Hofstadter and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Jason Fulford
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9789081058476
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contains: 3 Books written by Jason Fulford and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jason Fulford: Contains 3 Books is a silver foil-stamped box that, appropriately enough, contains three books by photographer Jason Fulford (born 1973): 'I Am Napoleon', 'Mild Moderate Severe Profound', and '&&'. The culmination of three years and 15 countries' worth of travel around the world undertaken by Fulford as a Guggenheim Fellow, the photographs in these three volumes receive Fulford's trademark elliptical, evocative sequencing, interspersed with texts that alternately explain and confound. 'I Am Napoleon' begins with a prefatory note that can be taken as emblematic of the project as a whole: 'I think any book or picture or composition of any sort, once out into the world, so to say, produces a different effect on each person who seriously tries to follow it. I certainly do not think that the author of it has any monopoly on its interpretation.'

Author : Peter Rowlands
Publisher : World Scientific
ISBN 13 : 9812709150
Total Pages : 738 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Zero to Infinity written by Peter Rowlands and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2007 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unique in its field, this book uses a methodology that is entirely new, creating the simplest and most abstract foundations for physics to date. The author proposes a fundamental description of process in a universal computational rewrite system, leading to an irreducible form of relativistic quantum mechanics from a single operator. This is not only simpler, and more fundamental, but also seemingly more powerful than any other quantum mechanics formalism available. The methodology finds immediate applications in particle physics, theoretical physics and theoretical computing. In addition, taking the rewrite structure more generally as a description of process, the book shows how it can be applied to large-scale structures beyond the realm of fundamental physics. Sample Chapter(s). Chapter 1: Zero (228 KB). Contents: Zero; Why Does Physics Work?; The Emergence of Physics; Groups and Representations; Breaking the Dirac Code; The Dirac Nilpotent; Nonrelativistic Quantum Mechanics and the Classical Transition; The Classical and Special Relativistic Approximations; The Resolution of Paradoxes; Electric, Strong and Weak Interactions; QED and Its Analogues; Vacuum; Fermion and Boson Structures; A Representation of Strong and Weak Interactions; Grand Unification and Particle Masses; The Factor 2 and Duality; Gravity and Inertia; Dimensionality, Strings and Quantum Gravity; Nature''s Code; Nature''s Rule; Infinity. Readership: Researchers in quantum, theoretical and high energy physics.