pgs one one one to one two six.

Hofstadter says that humans do not attend to two rival possibilities to a problem at exactly the same time. He notes the necker cube, vase-face, and other illusions as examples. While we are able to switch between different interpretations of the same stimuli, our perceptive systems don't allow us to use both at the same time. It may be the case, though, and Hofstadter mentions this also, that there is an unfelt parallelism going on behind the scenes -- else, where would any of these thoughts be bubbling up from?

Next, he continues his thoughts of gloms. He says that his program has different kinds of gloms -- one for syllables, vowel/consonant clusters, and others. Each of these can feel "happy" or "sad". According to how a glom feels, it will be more or less likely to be attended to (I visualized a room full of gloms in the form of crying babies for some reason...).

Hofstadter describes different ways that gloms can be arranged and more importantly, transformed. He cites the spoonerism, which is switching the consonants of the first two structures. Another noteworthy technique is exchange of syllables -- where each of the syllables is shuffled around in a different order. And also reversals, kniferisms, and other techniques he thinks would be reasonable to believe each of us might employ while doing a jumble.

A final article in the chapter uses analogies from physical science to describe how Jumbo is able to keep itself self-organizing. The happiness levels of gloms are similar to the statistical mechanics of natural rules. And the words that are formed out of this probabilistic chaos are similar to the macro-level thermodynamics we see as a result. Ideally, AI folks probably want to explain thoughts in terms of the macro-level, excluding the messiness of neurons and chemistry as much as possible. Personally, I don't think this will ever be possible. Why? Because, you can't understand how a cloud acts (how a thought is made, fades, or becomes a memory) without understanding the chemistry of water, heat or understanding how the wind alters the cloud's world.