Anteater: "...ant colonies are no different from brains in many respects."
Anteater to Achilles in Douglas Hofstadter's "Prelude...Ant Fugue", The Mind's Eye, Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, Basic Books, 1981
having creativity is an automatic consequence of having the proper representation of concepts in a mind. It is not something you add on afterward. It is built into the way concepts are. To spell this out more concretely: If you have succeeded in making an accurate model of concepts, you have thereby also succeeded in making a model of the creative process, and even of consciousness.
...Nothing is a concept except by virtue of the way it is connected up with other things that are also concepts. In other words the property of being a concept is a property of connectivity, a quality that comes from being embedded in a certain kind of complicated network, and from nowhere else. Put this way, concepts sound like structural or even topological properties of vast tangly networks of sticky mental spaghetti.
- Douglas R. Hofstadter in Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern: An Interlocked Collection of Literary, Scientific, and Artistic Studies, Basic Books, 1985
fluidlike properties of thought emerge as a statistical consequence of a myriad tiny, invisible, independent, subcognitive acts taking place in parallel. Concepts have this fluidity, and analogies are the quintessential manifestation of it.
...analogy-making lies at the heart of pattern perception and extrapolation. What could be more obvious? And when this banality is put together with my earlier claim that pattern-finding is the core of intelligence, the implication is clear: analogy-making lies at the heart of intelligence. The act of connecting up two different islands in one's mind is a very simple instance of analogy-making
...Metaphorhically speaking, the ever-growing family of concepts centered on some primary concept is an expanding sphere in a conceptual space shared by many individuals. This kind of communal expanding sphere doesn't exist just in mathematical thinking; in fact, it is an incredibly central aspect of everyday thought, and constitutes, to my mind, the essence of common sense.
...Generalization outwards from a conceptual center is an automatic, unconscious process that pervades thought - indeed it defines thought. It's not as if there is just one rigid propositional or logical structure that captures what we understand when we read in the newspaper about a kidnapping or hear a throwaway remark about dieting. That is as far from the proper image of what thought is as one can get! Rather, all sorts of analogous events and related images from our own lives are activated to different degrees, and commingle and blur with aspects of the event itself to form a very complex, active, fluid structure, whose rules bear very little connection to those of any kind of formalizable logic.
...Fluid conecpts are necessarily, I believe emergent aspects of a complex system; I suspect that conceptual fluidity can only come out of a seething mass of subcognitive activities.
...In the end, what seems to make brains conscious is the special way they are organized - in particular, the high-level structures and mechanisms that come into being. I see two dimensions as critical; (1) the fact that brains possess concepts, allowing complex representational structures to be built that automatically come with associative links to all sorts of prior experiences, and (2) the fact that brains can self-monitor, allowing a complex internal self-model to arise, allowing the system an enormous degree of self-control and open-endedness.
- Douglas Hofstadter and the Fluid Analogies Research Group, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. Basic Books, 1995
Connectionist models are ultimately evolutionary.
- Daniel Dennet in "Intuition Pumps", The Third Culture by John Brockman, Simon and Schuster, 1995