Analogy

Glimmer

Statistical techniques provide an enormously powerful toolset to make predictions about our world. However, these techniques suffer from 'the curse of dimensionality' when applied to natural environments without the benefits of tightly controlled experimental parameters. Brains, on the other hand, operate effectively in often chaotic environments with infinite dimension.

Analogy offers a glimmer of hope in this dilemma.

Support

• "analogy is everything, or very nearly so" Hofstadter
• "Analogy provides an important example of what appears to be a highly general cognitive mechanism that takes specific inputs from essentially any domain that can be represented in explicit propositional form, and operates on them to produce inferences specific to the target domain. At its best, analogy supports transfer across domains between analogs that have little surface resemblance but nonetheless share relational structure, and generates both specific inferences and more general abstractions from as few as two examples." Holyoak & Hummel

Page updated