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… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share Image
You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated 'you' makes more decisions,… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share
“It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of the task which it is performing, and survey what it has… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share
Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share
For 13 to be unlucky would require there to be some kind of cosmic intelligence that counts things that humans count and that also… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share
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… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share
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 Copy Share
You can never represent yourself totally … to seek self -knowledge is to embark on a journey which ... will always be incomplete, cannot… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share
The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity. — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share
It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of a task which it is performing and survey what it has… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share
Enormous numbers of people are taken in, or at least beguiled and fascinated, by what seems to me to be unbelievable hocum, and relatively… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share
No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over ... the Zen attitude is that words and… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share
It is perhaps wrong to say that the enemy of enlightenment is logic; rather, it is dualistic, verbal thinking. In fact, it is even… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share
In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share
