Top 34 Douglas Hofstadter Quotes
#1. You can never represent yourself totally ... to seek self -knowledge is to embark on a journey which ... will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described.
Douglas Hofstadter
#2. 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 no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained.
Douglas Hofstadter
#4. Perhaps the most concise summary of enlightenment would be: transcending dualism ... Dualism is the conceptual division of the world into categories ... human perception is by nature a dualistic phenomenon which makes the quest for enlightenment an uphill struggle, to say the least.
Douglas Hofstadter
#5. It is perhaps wrong to say that the enemy of enlightenment is logic; rather, it is dualistic, verbal thinking. In fact, it is even more basic than that: it is perception.
Douglas Hofstadter
#6. 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 are concerned with or thrilled by the astounding-yet true-facts of science, as put forth in the pages of, say, Scientific American.
Douglas Hofstadter
#7. Since, as is well know, God helps those who help themselves, presumably the Devil helps all those, and only those, who don't help themselves. Does the Devil help himself?
Douglas Hofstadter
#8. There has to be a common sense cutoff for craziness, and when that threshold is exceeded, then the criteria for publication should get far, far more stringent.
Douglas Hofstadter
#9. The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers' rigidity.
Douglas Hofstadter
#10. I don't feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.
Douglas Hofstadter
#12. 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 so forth, 'round and 'round.
Douglas Hofstadter
#15. 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 time Algol was invented.
Douglas Hofstadter
#16. Many people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it's much more than memory.
Douglas Hofstadter
#17. A computer program can modify itself but it cannot violate its own instructions - it can at best change some parts of itself by *obeying* its own instructions.
Douglas Hofstadter
#18. 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
#19. It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of a task which it is performing and survey what it has done ...
Douglas Hofstadter
#21. 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
#22. 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 figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid.
Douglas Hofstadter
#23. Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful cannot lead to all truths.
Douglas Hofstadter
#25. In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.
Douglas Hofstadter
#26. We all have heard it claimed that 13 is an 'unlucky number.' Indeed, there are many hotels in America that for this very reason claim not to have a 13th floor, in the sense that there is no button bearing the label '13' in their elevators (I recently stayed in one in New York, in fact).
Douglas Hofstadter
#27. No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over ... the Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth.
Douglas Hofstadter
#28. For 13 to be unlucky would require there to be some kind of cosmic intelligence that counts things that humans count and that also makes certain things happen on certain dates or in certain places according to whether the number 13 'is involved' or not (whatever 'is involved' might mean).
Douglas Hofstadter
#29. 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 to be flexible.
Douglas Hofstadter
#30. The nice thing about having a brain is that one can learn, that ignorance can be supplanted by knowledge, and that small bits of knowledge can gradually pile up into substantial heaps.
Douglas Hofstadter
#32. It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take Hofstadter's Law into account.
Douglas Hofstadter
#33. 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 started.
Douglas Hofstadter
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