My Subsequent Intellectual Path: Decade II
As I said above, writing, though crucial, was not my only intellectual focus;
research into cognitive mechanisms was an equally important one. My early
hunches about how to model analogy and creativity are actually set forth
quite clearly in GEB's Chapter 19, in my discussion of Bongard problems,
and although those were just the germs of an actual architecture, I feel it is
fair to say that despite many years of refinement, most of those ideas can be
found in one form or another in the models developed in my research
group at Indiana University and the University of Michigan (where I spent
the years 1984-1988, in the Psychology Department).
Mter a decade and a half of development of computer models, the time
seemed ripe for a book that would pull all the main threads together and
describe the programs' principles and performance in clear and accessible
language. Thus over several years, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies took
shape, and finally appeared in print in 1995. In it are presented a series of
closely related computer programs - Seek-Whence, Jumbo, Numbo,
Copycat, Tabletop, and (still in progress) Metacat and Letter Spirit -
together with philosophical discussions that attempt to set them in context.
Several of its chapters are co-authored by members of the Fluid Analogies
Research Group, and indeed FARG gets its proper billing as my collective
co-author. The book shares much with GEB, but perhaps most important of
all is the basic philosophical article of faith that being an "I" - in other
words, possessing a sense of self so deep and ineradicable that it blurs into
causality - is an inevitable concomitant to, and ingredient of, the flexibility
and power that are synonymous with intelligence, and that the latter is but
another term for conceptual flexibility, which in tum means meaningful symbols.
A very different strand of my intellectual life was my deep involvement
in the translation of GEB into various languages, and this led me, perhaps
inevitably, in retrospect, to the territory of verse translation. It all started in
1987 with my attempt to mimic in English a beautiful French miniature by
sixteenth-century French poet Clement Marot, but from there it spun off in
many directions at once. To make a long story short, I wound up writing a
complex and deeply personal book about translation in its most general and
metaphorical sense, and while writing it, I experienced much the same
feeling of exhilaration as I had twenty years earlier, when writing GEB.
This book, Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, winds
through many diverse terrains, including what it means to "think in" a given
language (or a blur of languages); how constraints can enhance creativity;
how meaning germinates, buds, and flowers in minds and might someday
do so in machines; how words, when put together into compounds, often
melt together and lose some or all of their identity; how a language spoken
on a neutron star might or might not resemble human languages; how
poetry written hundreds of years ago should be rendered today; how
translation is intimately related to analogy and to the fundamental human
process of understanding one another; what kinds of passages, if any, are
P-20 Twentieth-anniversary Preface