Douglas Hofstadter Quotes
40 quotes
in 745 categories
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Reductionism is merciless.
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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Irrationality is the square root of all evil
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In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.
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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…
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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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The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.
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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…
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We create an image of who we are inside our self. The image then becomes very deeply entrenched, and it becomes the thing that we…
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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…
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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…
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I am the thought you are now thinking.
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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.…
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You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is…
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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…
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