Douglas Hofstadter Quotes

Quotes about:

Computers Science Soul

The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.

Douglas Hofstadter

Following, Sentences

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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.

Douglas Hofstadter

Dream, Responsibility, Self

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It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.

Douglas Hofstadter

Science, Order, Eerie

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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.

Douglas Hofstadter

Home, Keys, Brain

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Irrationality is the square root of all evil.

Douglas Hofstadter

Squares, Roots, Evil

"Irrationality is the Square Root of All Evil". Scientific American, 249 (3), September 1983.

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Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law

Douglas Hofstadter

Law, Research, Favourite

Godel, Escher, Bach ch. 5 (1979)

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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.

Douglas Hofstadter

Journey, Self, Maps

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

Douglas Hofstadter

Essence, Facts, Effects

Douglas Hofstadter (2008). “Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern”, p.489, Hachette UK

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I am the thought you are now thinking.

Douglas Hofstadter

Science, Thinking

Douglas R. Hofstadter (1981). “Understanding Understanding”

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. . . all meaning comes from analogies.

Douglas Hofstadter

Analogies

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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.

Douglas Hofstadter

Moving, Levels, Strange

"Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid". Book by Douglas Hofstadter, 1979.

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This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn't.

Douglas Hofstadter

Sentences

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

Douglas Hofstadter

Self, Miracle, Mirages

Douglas R. Hofstadter (2008). “I Am a Strange Loop”, p.363, Basic Books

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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.

Douglas Hofstadter

Real, Steps, Sometimes

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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.

Douglas Hofstadter

Tasks, Done, Surveys

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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.

Douglas Hofstadter

Decision, World, Action

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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.

Douglas Hofstadter

Thinking, Perception, Enemy

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I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.

Douglas Hofstadter

Want

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

Douglas Hofstadter

Lying, Mind, Reader

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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.

Douglas Hofstadter

Believe, Leaving, Brain

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

Douglas Hofstadter

Ideas, Reaching, Importance

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

Douglas Hofstadter

Fighting, Effort, Computer

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

Douglas Hofstadter

Snuff, Chickens, Fishes

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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.

Douglas Hofstadter

People, Soul, Brain

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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.

Douglas Hofstadter

War, Believe, Soul

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Born: February 15, 1945
Occupation: Professor
Cite this Page: Citation

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