> According to Lakoff, an individual's experience and attitude towards sociopolitical issues are influenced by being framed in linguistic constructions. In Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Persian Gulf (1991), he argued that the American involvement in the Persian Gulf War was obscured or "spun" by the metaphors which were used by the first Bush administration to justify it.[3] Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank, the now defunct Rockridge Institute.

I will never not find it amusing how a simple thing like money is obscured or "spun" by a thin veil of pseudointellectual bullshit.

Hoftstader's video is pressumably based on his own book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies".

Very interesting book. You don't really think about how often metaphors are employed in language, and their influence on how we think. The book makes some rather strong claims regarding science and philosophy being misled by metaphorical thinking, but still a good read.

And it's relevant today given how people like to anthropomorphize LLMs, and compare biology to digital machines we make. Of course there are similarities. But the point about metaphorical thinking is we are mislead by treating metaphors as literally true.

Anyway if the stronger claims in the book are at all true, it might impact how an alien species thinks differently than us (given a lot of our metaphors are biologically based). And could present significant difficulties for decoding an alien signal.

Please read Hofstadter and you will know more about truly interesting questions.

Embedding spaces are all about analogy.

I’m confused why there seems to be a dismissal of the most basic ‘strange loop’ of the LLM - the fact that it’s evaluating a context to choose the next word, then reevaluating in a context where that word has been appended.

That always seemed to me like the essence of a Hofstadterish strange loop, so the emergence of Hofstadterish phenomena (self rep, etc) doesn’t seem surprising.

I don't quite know what Aaronson is trying to say.

First, LLM AI systems have incredibly huge blind spots despite their incredible performance on many tasks, so self-reference might be the key to what's missing (or not). For example, an LLM AI just solved Navier Stokes, but could not explain the LEAN proof, while a human could.

Second, Hofstadter had more than one idea about intelligence and the mind (see the OP topic of this HN discussion!), and LLMs are quite on-point regarding analogy-forming.

So it may be well be that self-reference and analogy are both part of intelligence, and self-reference is missing and that is leading to major weaknesses.

Third, Aaronson links to a (paywalled) Hofstadter essay form 2023, which was eons ago in AI, and from the intro it seems to be about the sadness of AI replacing humans, not a disparagement of AI ability.

> Protein folding and narrative/storytelling have strange homology

Hmmmmmm. While I get what you mean, and I don't disagree, please be cautious when making analogies between biological systems and more distant fields.

Yes, folding is driven by hydrophobic collapse due to interactions between residue sidechains. Really, though, we are just describing two 'complex systems', where large numbers of diverse interactions between elements leads to diverse and emergent structures.