Hofstadter is so bloody intelligent that it's easy to be blown away by it and just say, "Oh, Mr. Hofstadter, you're so right, I had NEVER noticed that! I think I'll sit around and make recursive acronyms and ambigrams now!" Pshaw.
Hofstadter's a lot better than many AI researchers on this score, but he *STILL* underestimates the degree to which bodies are bound up together with minds. His insistence that perception is bound up with cognition is a step in the right direction but he still falls into the old "mind is software and portable; body is hardware and dispensible" schtick that has plagued AI research since its inception -- in short, the tendency to literalize the "mind as computer" metaphor.
Read him and try to follow everything he is saying and then don't just sit back and accept; *argue* with him; read, for example, the work of George Lakoff, Mark Turner, and Mark Johnson on the embodiment of the mind, or Gilles Fauconnier on analogies and mental spaces, to get some further, less intricately and elegantly expressed, but in some ways more important perspectives on these issues.
To be specific, read GEB and then pick up George Lakoff's _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things_ for a less hip but equally mind-expanding trip through cognitive science.
Read it, finish it, *ARGUE WITH IT* (Score:1)
Hofstadter's a lot better than many AI researchers on this score, but he *STILL* underestimates the degree to which bodies are bound up together with minds. His insistence that perception is bound up with cognition is a step in the right direction but he still falls into the old "mind is software and portable; body is hardware and dispensible" schtick that has plagued AI research since its inception -- in short, the tendency to literalize the "mind as computer" metaphor.
Read him and try to follow everything he is saying and then don't just sit back and accept; *argue* with him; read, for example, the work of George Lakoff, Mark Turner, and Mark Johnson on the embodiment of the mind, or Gilles Fauconnier on analogies and mental spaces, to get some further, less intricately and elegantly expressed, but in some ways more important perspectives on these issues.
To be specific, read GEB and then pick up George Lakoff's _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things_ for a less hip but equally mind-expanding trip through cognitive science.