Douglas Hofstadter Quotes
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Irrationality is the square root of all evil.
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Reductionism is merciless.
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This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.
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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?
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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.
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. . . all meaning comes from analogies.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law
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In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.
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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.
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The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.
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Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level
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This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn't.
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The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.
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In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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