Comment by killerstorm
2 hours ago
When my daughter was 6 months old, she once pointed at a towel and said "P". Apparently she recognize Winnie the Pooh from a book she saw earlier.
If you think about it, this requires recognizing something common in things which are very different: e.g. book and towel have different texture and color, and you somehow need to separate what's depicted from the background. So that's pretty much innate, core brain function. I mean, any animal with vision can recognize an object from the background - otherwise vision is useless. But for humans (and some animals) this translates to depiction of object on a flat surface very easily.
So, yeah, analogies-all-the-way-down seems plausible. Even object-vs-background and depiction-vs-paper is itself an analogy.
Well, recognizing (recalling) Pooh on a towel as being the same as a picture of Pooh in book can also just be regarded as generalization, same as recognizing that someone looking left is the same person as them looking right, etc.
Our cortex (all of it - visual, auditory, association. motor..) is remarkably simple and regular - it's six layers of neurons with a specific circuit design, that appears to make it a predictor, with top down predictions meeting bottom up sensory feedback. As noted, it makes a ton of sense that evolution would have equipped us with a predictor (and the more powerful the better). Prediction directly supports reasoning and planning (multi-step what-if prediction).
So, my question for Hofstader, or you, would be given that the brain seems to be literally built for prediction, then what is to be gained by regarding this as analogy making instead? Is there any evidence for this? Even as a philosophical viewpoint, doesn't that make for very convoluted explanations of simple things like reasoning and language? (I explained prediction-based reasoning above in one sentence - the analogy-based explanation takes a whole dense book!).
One could certainly use the language of analogies to describe perception (Pooh's ears on the towel are analogous to his ears in the book, etc), but what is the benefit of doing so, rather than the simpler view of this just being generalization (which is specifically what the animal needs), and where is the evidence in the brain?
"Generalization" is rather unspecific.
Analogy-making points to more specific mechanism: ability to identify features within representations, and modulating associative lookup using those features. I.e. it's not as simple as D(x, y) i.e. distance between embeddings, but something like D(f(x), f(y)) where f projects representation to a specific feature space.
The evidence can be found e.g. in LLM interpretability - people were able to identify features as something concrete. Also in our cognition - we can tell _how_ two things are similar, or find Y similar to Y in context of F.
"Prediction" by itself seems like a black box: if we are trying to predict sensory input, that gives no explanation to our ability to focus on specific details, or explains why some prediction failures are more likely, etc. OTOH if we say that cortex might be 'disassembling' sensory signal into high-level features and is trying to predict those (features themselves might be identified as "something useful for prediction", i.e. something which explains a lot of variance), it's much easier to connect low-level "prediction" to our high-level cognition.