Douglas Hofstadter Quotes

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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

  51 Copy quote

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

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Following, Sentences

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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

  30 Copy quote

• 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)

  34 Copy quote

• 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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• 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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• 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

  24 Copy quote

• I am the thought you are now thinking.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Science, Thinking

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

  7 Copy quote

• . . . all meaning comes from analogies.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Analogies

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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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• 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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• 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

  32 Copy quote

• 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

  33 Copy quote

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

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Lying, Mind, Reader

  25 Copy quote

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

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Sentences

  7 Copy quote

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

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Want

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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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• 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.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Struggle, Perception, Enlightenment

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

  13 Copy quote

• 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.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Qualms About, Evil, Soul

  31 Copy quote

• 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.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Truth, Taken, Science

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• 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.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Powerful, Giving, Matter

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

  14 Copy quote

• 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?

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Dream, Pedestal, Shells

  "Godel, Escher, Bach". Book by Douglas Hofstadter, observer.com. 1979.

  9 Copy quote

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