Gloms are Happy when its Cold

In the last part of the second Chapter, Hofstadter carries on his metaphorically enriched idea of gloms, according to which atomic particles (letters) form weak and strong bonds when given the occasion and develop syllable-like structures and statistically likely word formations. He describes this as a parallel at the bottom, but serial at the very top approach in which particles may bind in no particular but rather random or semi-randomly prioritized order. At the end of such a chain of events stands a word-like top-level glom using all the available particles.

From reading this passage about finding a possible solution to a Jumble, I get the notion, that it is not even important that Jumbo spits out a genuine word but rather delivers something, that humans would recognize as pronounceable and possible word. This "word" is then not correct or incorrect in the absolute sense, but might be subject to simple rearrangements to come up with the right solution. Hofstadter seems to feel that this approach is closer to the way how we ourselves solve Jumbles in our heads: Finding possible subgoals and working on the produced structure from there instead of taking all letters apart completely again and starting from scratch. This sounds like a very clever approach to me.

In particular I liked the metaphorical use of temperature and entropy of the particles and gloms to describe their intrinsic state of being in form of happiness or confidence. Similar to physical particles, gloms bond more loosely or hardly at all bound to each other, but collide very frequently with others when hot and in motion. If being in a stable and promising combination with other particles the glom will cool down and therefore break less easily. All this might really describe possible analogues in our minds.