Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter

Author:Douglas Hofstadter [Hofstadter, Douglas and Sander, Emmanuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465021581
Publisher: Basic Books

What is San Francisco’s Loveliest Spot?

Union Square? Chinatown? Twin Peaks? The Great Highway? The Cliff House? Pacific Heights? The Golden Gate Bridge? Fisherman’s Wharf? Golden Gate Park? The Presidio? The Marina? The Palace of the Legion of Honor? The Top of the Mark? Coit Tower? The Ferry Building? Lake Merced? West Portal? Russian Hill?

Surely, for a non-resident of the City, one of the above would fill the bill, but a true San Franciscan sees things differently. Finding a place to park one’s car in the City without worrying about getting an astronomical fine or having to go pick it up at the pound can verge on the miraculous, especially in certain areas and at certain times of day. Thus it is not infrequent that one finds oneself driving up and down steep hills, back and forth on broad avenues, crisscrossing one’s prior pathway umpteen times in desperate search of a parking spot, knowing full well that the likelihood of finding one is microscopic. This plight is so common and so upsetting that San Francisco drivers tend to be powerfully drawn to vacant parking places, finding high esthetic value in simple concrete rectangles as long as it is legal to park in them. The rarity of such a spot turns it into a precious entity.

It’s not uncommon to hear one local say to another, as they walk down the street, “Just look at that beautiful spot! Wow!” The intimate relationship that San Francisco drivers have with untaken parking spaces thus engenders the category of lovely spots. As anyone who’s driven in the City can testify, spotting a lovely spot when one doesn’t need to park in it always evokes a tempting counterfactual scenario of chancing upon exactly that empty spot just when one needs it desperately, and thus a sense of “if only” or “too bad” is triggered.

The abstract category of lovely spots deeply affects how these people perceive the physical spot. This example shows how powerfully categories impose a view of the world. If Kazimir Malevich’s famous White Square on White Background is a member of the category works of art, then surely Market Street’s Gray Rectangle on Gray Background is a member of the category lovely spots. The intense feeling of longing that the gray rectangle inspires in so many people shows how irresistible is the psychological force that pushes for categorizing it in that fashion. And yet such a categorization, for all its emotional intensity, doesn’t drive people into paroxysms of irrationality. So far as we know, no one has yet succumbed to the siren song of a lovely spot by suddenly throwing their Saturday-evening plans out the window, screeching to a halt, and parking their car then and there, fatally seduced by the lovely spot that was winking at them.

Certain categorizations, however, have very powerful influences on our thought and behavior. For example, people’s perception of the October 11th crash was very different from what it would have been had the event occurred a few years earlier.

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