Analogy as the Core of Cognition

Success in science is often a matter of finding the right analogies, and the computer gave us a new one.

Nature first created animals such as reptiles with sophisticated senses and sophisticated but relatively rigid behaviors. It then discovered that by adding a memory system and feeding the sensory stream into it, the animal could remember past experiences. When the animal found itself in the same or a similar situation, the memory would be recalled,

Through language one human can invoke memories and create new juxtapositions of mental objects in another human. Language is pure analogy, and through it we can cause other humans to experience and learn about things they may never actually see.

Prediction is the application of invariant memory sequences to new situations. Therefore all cortical predictions are predictions by analogy. We predict the future by analogy to the past.

is where one of the most important ideas in machine learning comes in: analogy.