"Perhaps the problem is the seeming need that……" — Douglas Hofstadter
"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 the nonliving, and between the thinking and the "merely mechanical," ... But the onward march of science seems to force us ever more clearly into accepting intermediate levels of such properties."
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Douglas Hofstadter
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40 Quotes by Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Hofstadter has 40 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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Enormous numbers of people are taken in, or at least beguiled and fascinated, by what seems to me to be…
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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…
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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…
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One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented…
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The key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you have absorbed so much of…
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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…
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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…
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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…
See all 40 quotes by Douglas Hofstadter »
More Absolute Quotes
This quote is filed under Absolute Quotes,
one of 1,809 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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I love things that age well - things that don't date, that stand the test of time and that become…
— Giorgio Armani
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Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
— Lord Acton
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A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity,…
— Mikhail Bakunin
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But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and…
— Mikhail Bakunin
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Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
— Henry Adams
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What may seem depressing or even tragic to one person may seem like an absolute scream to another person, especially…
— Dave Barry
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No sex, age, or condition is above or below the absolute necessity of modesty; but without it one vastly beneath…
— Bruce Barton
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Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point…
— Simone de Beauvoir
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It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas…
— Simone de Beauvoir
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The truth, the absolute truth, is that the chief beauty for the theatre consists in fine bodily proportions.
— Sarah Bernhardt
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The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.
— Aneurin Bevan
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Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
— Theodor Adorno
See all 1,809 Absolute Quotes »