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… — 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 Image
“It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of the task which it is performing, and survey what it has done; it is always looking for, and often finding, patterns. Now I said that an intelligence canjump out of its task, but that does not mean that it always will. However, a little prompt- ing will… — 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity. — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
