"The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about……" — Douglas Hofstadter
"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 of linguistic recursion."
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Douglas Hofstadter
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40 Quotes by Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Hofstadter has 40 quotes on this site.
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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…
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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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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…
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