Douglas Hofstadter Quotes

40 quotes in 745 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Reductionism is merciless.
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• Irrationality is the square root of all evil
• In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.
• 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…
• No reference is truly direct—every reference depends on SOME kind of coding scheme. It's just a question of how implicit it is.
• The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• I am the thought you are now thinking.
• 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.…
• 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…
• 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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