Analogy as the Core of Cognition

The canonical statement of Hofstadter’s life thesis, delivered as a Stanford Presidential Lecture in 2006: analogy-making is not one cognitive skill among many but the engine of thought itself — every concept a bundle of analogies, every perception a slippage between them. Watched beside his 2023 interview on this site, it becomes something else too: the standard against which he would later measure the language models that unsettled him.