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 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 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… — 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 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
