Best 47 quotes of Douglas Hofstadter on MyQuotes

Douglas Hofstadter

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    Enormous numbers of people are taken in, or at least beguiled and fascinated, by what seems to me to be unbelievable hocum, and relatively few are concerned with or thrilled by the astounding-yet true-facts of science, as put forth in the pages of, say, Scientific American.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    For 13 to be unlucky would require there to be some kind of cosmic intelligence that counts things that humans count and that also makes certain things happen on certain dates or in certain places according to whether the number 13 'is involved' or not (whatever 'is involved' might mean).

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    How gullible are you? Is your gullibility located in some "gullibility center" in your brain? Could a neurosurgeon reach in and perform some delicate operation to lower your gullibility, otherwise leaving you alone? If you believe this, you are pretty gullible, and should perhaps consider such an operation.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    I don't feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    If a mosquito has a soul, it is mostly evil. So I don't have too many qualms about putting a mosquito out of its misery. I'm a little more respectful of ants.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    Irrationality is the square root of all evil.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    It as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of a task which it is performing and survey what it has done.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    It is perhaps wrong to say that the enemy of enlightenment is logic; rather, it is dualistic, verbal thinking. In fact, it is even more basic than that: it is perception.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    I would proclaim that the vast majority of what [say, Scientific American] is true-yet my ability to defend such a claim is weaker than I would like. And most likely the readers, authors, and editors of that magazine would be equally hard pressed to come up with cogent, non-technical arguments convincing a skeptic of this point, especially if pitted against a clever lawyer arguing the contrary. How come Truth is such a slippery beast?

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    Many people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it's much more than memory.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over... the Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    No reference is truly direct — every reference depends on some kind of coding scheme. It's just a question of how implicit it is.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    Perhaps the most concise summary of enlightenment would be: transcending dualism . ... Dualism is the conceptual division of the world into categories ... human perception is by nature a dualistic phenomenon - which makes the quest for enlightenment an uphill struggle, to say the least.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    Perhaps the problem is the seeming need that people have of making black-and-white cutoffs when it comes to certain mysterious phenomena, such as life and consciousness. People seem to want there to be an absolute threshold between the living and the nonliving, and between the thinking and the "merely mechanical," ... But the onward march of science seems to force us ever more clearly into accepting intermediate levels of such properties.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    Reductionism is merciless.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful cannot lead to all truths.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    Some of us, perhaps all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    The key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth... because they live on in a 'second neural home'?... In the wake of a human being's death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of those who were dearest to them... Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain... a collective corona that still glows.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    The paraphrase of Gödel's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    There has to be a common sense cutoff for craziness, and when that threshold is exceeded, then the criteria for publication should get far, far more stringent.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    The strange flavour of AI work is that people try to put together long sets of rules in strict formalisms which tell inflexible machines how to be flexible.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    The Strange Loop phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through levels of some hierarchial system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    We all have heard it claimed that 13 is an 'unlucky number.' Indeed, there are many hotels in America that for this very reason claim not to have a 13th floor, in the sense that there is no button bearing the label '13' in their elevators (I recently stayed in one in New York, in fact).

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    We create an image of who we are inside our self. The image then becomes very deeply entrenched, and it becomes the thing that we attribute responsibility to - we say "I", "I" did this because "I" wanted to, because "I" am a good person or because "I" am a bad person. The loop is the fact that we represent our selves, our desires, hopes, dreads and dreams: it is the way in which we conceive of ourselves, rather than the way we conceive of Mount Everest or of a tree. And I say it exists entirely in the loop: the self is an hallucination hallucinated by an hallucination.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" - that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    You can never represent yourself totally .... to seek self -knowledge is to embark on a journey which ... will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated 'you' makes more decisions, and so forth, 'round and 'round.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    And one of my firmest conclusions is that we always think by seeking and drawing parallels to things we know from our past, and that we therefore communicate best when we exploit examples, analogies, and metaphors galore, when we avoid abstract generalities, when we use very down-to-earth, concrete, and simple language, and when we talk directly about our own experience.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    Computers are ridiculous. So is science in general. CHURCH_TURING Thesis, Theodore Rosak Version This view is prevalent among certain people who see in anything smacking of numbers or exactitude a threat to human values. It is too bad that they do not appreciate the depth and complexity and beauty involved in exploring abstract structures sch as the human mind, where, indeed, one comes in intimate contact with the ultimate questions of what to be human is.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    Do you remember your first sip of beer? Terrible! How could anyone like that stuff? But beer, you reflect, is an acquired taste; one gradually trains oneself—or just comes—to enjoy that flavor. What flavor? The flavor of that first sip? No one could like that flavor! Beer tastes different to the experienced beer drinker. Then beer isn't an acquired tast; one doesn't learn to like that first taste; one gradually comes to experience a different, and likable, taste. Had the first sip tasted that way, you would have liked beer wholeheartedly from the beginning!

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    Everyone knows specific events have a vividness which imprints them so strongly on the memory that they can later be used as models for other events which are like them in some way.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    I am a lifelong lover of form–content interplay, and this book is no exception. As with several of my previous books, I have had the chance to typeset it down to the finest level of detail, and my quest for visual elegance on each page has had countless repercussions on how I phrase my ideas. To some this may sound like the tail wagging the dog, but I think that attention to form improves anyone’s writing. I hope that reading this book not only is stimulating intellectually but also is a pleasant visual experience.

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    INTROSPECTION AND INSANITY: A GODELIAN PROBLEM I think it can have suggestive value to translate Godel's Theorem into other domains, provided one specifies in advance that the translations are metaphorical and are not intended to be taken literally. That having been said, I see two major ways of using analogies to connect Godel's Theorem and human thoughts. One involves the problem of wondering about one's sanity. How can you figure out if you are sane? This is a Strange Loop indeed. Once you begin to question your own sanity, you can get trapped in an ever-tighter vortex of self-fulfilling prophecies, though the process is by no means inevitable. Everyone knows that the insane interpret the world via their own peculiarly consistent logic; how can you tell if your own logic is 'peculiar' or not, given that you have only your own logic to judge itself? I don't see any answer. I am just reminded of Godel's second Theorem, which implies that the only versions of formal number theory which assert their own consistency are inconsistent...

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    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!

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    Douglas Hofstadter

    Since, as is well know, God helps those who help themselves, presumably the Devil helps all those, and only those, who don't help themselves. Does the Devil help himself?