Solomon: Your entry in Wikipedia says that your work has inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence. Hofstadter… - Douglas Hofstadter

Humans are supposedly able to get at the “content” of utterances, being genuine language-users, while apes are not. But ape-language research clearly shows that there is some kind of in-between world, where a certain degree of content can be retrieved by a being with reduced mental capacity. If mental capacity is equated with potential processing depth, then it is obvious why it makes no sense to draw an arbitrary boundary line between the form and the content of a sentence. Form blurs into content as processing depth increases.

In short, nonstop categorization is every bit as indispensable to our survival in the world as is the nonstop beating of our hearts. Without the ceaseless pulsating heartbeat of our “categorization engine”, we would understand nothing around us, could not reason in any form whatever, could not communicate with anyone else, and would have no basis on which to take any action.

"It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of the task
which it is performing, and survey what it has done; it is always looking for,
and often finding, patterns. Now I said that an intelligence canjump out of
its task, but that does not mean that it always will. However, a little prompt-
ing will often suffice. For example, a human being who is reading a book
may grow sleepy. Instead of continuing to read until the book is finished,
he is just as likely to put the book aside and turn off the light. He has
stepped "out of the system" and yet it seems the most natural thing in the
world to us. Or, suppose person A is watching television when person B
comes in the room, and shows evident displeasure with the situation.
Person A may think he understands the problem, and try to remedy it by
exiting the present system (that television program), and flipping the chan-
nel knob, looking for a better show. Person B may have a more radical
concept of what it is to "exit the system"-namely to turn the television off!
Of course, there are cases where only a rare individual will have the vision
to perceive a system which governs many peoples' lives, a system which had
never before even been recognized as a system; then such people often
devote their lives to convincing other people that the system really is there,
and that it ought to be exited from!"