Douglas R. Hofstadter, Ph.D.
College Professor of Cognitive and Computer Science, Indiana University, Bloomington
To any thoughtful person, the singularity idea, even if it seems wild, raises a gigantic, swirling cloud of profound and vital questions about humanity and the powerful technologies it is producing. Given this mysterious and rapidly approaching cloud, there can be no doubt that the time has come for the scientific and technological community to seriously try to figure out what is on humanity's collective horizon. Not to do so would be hugely irresponsible.
Biography
Douglas R. Hofstadter is College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science, and Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology at Indiana University, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. His books include the Pulitzer Prize winning Gödel Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Metamagical Themas, The Mind's I (with Daniel Dennett), Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, Le Ton Beau de Marot, and a verse translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
In addition to his research and writings in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, Hofstadter has contributed to physics and mathematics (in particular the fractal structure generally known as “Hofstadter's butterfly”), has composed music and visual art, and has done poetry translation. He has authored over 50 papers, including “Analogy as the Core of Cognition.”
At the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Hofstadter created with Melanie Mitchell and others a model of high–level perception, Copycat, and several other models of analogy–making and cognition. The Copycat project has since grown into 'Metacat' and 'Magnificat.' Further developments based on the Copycat 'FARGitecture' include SeekWell and SeqSee, which model cognition and analogy in musical and number sequence domains respectively.
The son of Nobel Prize–winning physicist Robert Hofstadter, Hofstadter majored in mathematics at Stanford University and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975. He describes himself as “perpetually in search of beauty.”