Douglas Hofstadter Quotes - Page 2

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• 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

• Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Lying, Tangled, Levels

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

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• 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.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Dog, Smart, Stupid

  "'The future is going to be very exciting'". Interview With Ed Pilkington, www.theguardian.com. May 1, 2009.

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• 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.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Memories, Believe, Thinking

  "The Mind Reader". Interview with Deborah Solomon, www.nytimes.com. April 1, 2007.

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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.

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• Reductionism is merciless.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Inspirational, Reductionism

  Douglas R. Hofstadter (2013). “I Am a Strange Loop”, p.48, Basic Books

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• 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.

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

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Focus, Tree, Want

  Douglas R. Hofstadter (2013). “I Am a Strange Loop”, p.27, Basic Books

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• The nice thing about having a brain is that one can learn, that ignorance can be supplanted by knowledge, and that small bits of knowledge can gradually pile up into substantial heaps.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Nice, Ignorance, Brain

  "Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language". Book by Douglas Hofstadter, 1997.

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• 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.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Common Sense, Craziness, Criteria

  30 Copy quote

• 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.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Long, People, Trying

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• 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.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Player, Self, Records

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• 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?

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Clever, Truth, Science

  Douglas Hofstadter (2008). “Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern”, p.85, Hachette UK

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• 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.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Science, Acceptance, Black And White

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• 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.

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• 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).

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Mean, Numbers, Might

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• 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.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Communication, Long, Example

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

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

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Kind, Schemes, Direct

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

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• 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.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Attitude, Space, Trying

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

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• 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.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Important, Lists, Language

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

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• 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).

  Douglas Hofstadter

  New York, Numbers, America

  4 Copy quote

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