Alternative Structure of the Union
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid was a seminal book for those studying Artificial Intelligence in the late 1980s, early 1990s. It was published in 1979, the year that I graduated from high school. From 1985 - 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev was the leader of the Soviet Union. The title of "President" did not exist in 1985. Gorbachev led the country as General Secretary, which was the highest position of power in the Soviet Union. He later established the office of the President of the Soviet Union in March 1990, becoming the first and only person to hold that title before the country dissolved in 1991.
From the description of the book:
Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of “maps” or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. Gödel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.
ASUs (pages 379 - 386)
An amusing geographical fantasy will give some intuition for this kind of quasi-isomorphism. (Incidentally, this fantasy is somewhat similar to a geographical analogy devised by M. Minsky in his article on "frames", which can be found in P. H. Winston's book The Psychology of Computer Vision.) Imagine that you are given a strange atlas of the USA, with all natural geological features premarked-such as rivers, mountains, lakes, and so on-but with nary a printed word. Rivers are shown as blue lines, mountains by color, and so on.
Now you are told to convert it into a road atlas for a trip which you will soon make. You must neatly fill in the names of all states, their boundaries, time zones, then all counties, cities, towns, all freeways and highways and toll routes, all county roads, all state and national parks, campgrounds, scenic areas, dams, airports, and so on…
All of this must be carried out down to the level that would appear in a detailed road atlas. And it must be manufactured out of your own head. You are not allowed access to any information which would help you for the duration of your task.
You are told that it will pay off, in ways that will become clear at a later date, to make your map as true as you can. Of course, you will begin by filling in large cities and major roads, etc., which you know. And when you have exhausted your factual knowledge of an area, it will be to your advantage to use your imagination to help you reproduce at least the flavor of that area, if not its true geography, by making up fake town names, fake populations, fake roads, fake parks, and so on.
This arduous task will take months. To make things a little easier, you have a cartographer on hand to print everything in neatly. The end product will be your personal map of the "Alternative Structure of the Union"- your own personal "ASU". Your personal ASU will be very much like the USA in the area where you grew up. Furthermore, wherever your travels have chanced to lead you, or wherever you have perused maps with interest, your ASU will have spots of striking agreement with the USA: a few small towns in North Dakota or Montana, perhaps, or the whole of metropolitan New York, might be quite faithfully reproduced in your ASU.
Further Reading:
Searle, J. (1980) Minds, Brains and Programs, THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES 3: 417-457
