Copycat Decision Making

In chapter five o Douglas Hofstadter’s book Fluid Concept he details the workings of his copycat program. The copycat architecture he designs is focused not only on discovering mappings between situations but on how it perceives and makes sense of situations it is presented with. Again Hofstadter mentions the vital concept of perception integration into artificial intelligence programming. He also states that the actual process of integrating perception into an artificial intelligence program is extremely difficult. Considering the aspects of copycat that deal with the fluid change between analogies and concepts applied to particular input, it is almost equally difficult to integrate those. Hofstadter describes the ability of the copycat program to do this switching between analogies is an emergence of its component flexible parts, which reminds me of a certain description of human consciousness I have read before. The fluid ability to apply different rules and heuristics to a single situation, within the copycat program, emerges through the flexibility and almost simultaneously productivity of its component parts like the slipnet, coderack, and workspace. I find it very interesting that Hofstadter likens two of these elements to a particular aspect of the human brain such as the slipnet emulating long term memory, the workspace designed to function like working or short term memory, and the coderack which is not directly correlated to a human brain aspect but can be thought of as a storage area where elements are selected by the current processes predictable actions and an element of randomness.


This function of copycat to stochastically (selecting an element through prediction of the current goal with an integration of randomness) select elements from the coderack is intriguing to me. What aspect in our human brain completes this similar function? It doesn’t sound like a subconscious task to me, more like a conscious decision making aspect that involves directly selecting pertinent details to a current situation. Furthermore, what is the main factor that determines the selection of a particular element over another within our mental processes? The answer I believe Hofstadter already described, perception. Perception is vital to the decision process especially when applying multiple heuristics to a single situation and finding the appropriate one. Due to human individuality the different applications and understanding of individual perception can produce multiple distinct workings and solutions to a single problem; this is where the randomness element of the decision making must play a part. Hofstadter has clearly integrated some thought provoking aspects into this copycat program.