Top 57 Douglas Hofstadter Quotes
#1. If you already know what recursion is, just remember the answer. Otherwise, find someone who is standing closer to Douglas Hofstadter than you are; then ask him or her what recursion is.
Andrew Plotkin
#2. 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
#3. We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. I would like to understand things better, but I don't want to understand them perfectly.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#7. 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
#8. 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 circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#9. what happens on the lower level is responsible for what happens on the higher level, it is nonetheless irrelevant to the higher level. The higher level can blithely ignore the processes on the lower level.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#10. This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#12. It now becomes clear that consistency is not a property of a formal system per se, but depends on the interpretation which is proposed for it. By the same token, inconsistency is not an intrinsic property of any formal system.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#13. In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.
Douglas Hofstadter
#14. Please, Oh please, publish me in your collection of self-referential sentences!
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#15. It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#16. 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
#17. Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time intervals.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#26. It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take Hofstadter's Law into account.
Douglas Hofstadter
#27. 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
#29. Saying that studying the brain is limited to the study of physical entities would be like saying that literary criticism must focus on paper and bookbinding, ink and its chemistry, page sizes and margin widths, typefaces and paragraph lengths, and so forth.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#30. I enjoy acronyms. Recursive Acronyms Crablike "RACRECIR" Especially Create Infinite Regress
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#31. Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#32. 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
#33. We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#34. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers' rigidity.
Douglas Hofstadter
#43. There are those who will immediately be drawn to the idea of pattern-seeking, and
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#45. I don't feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.
Douglas Hofstadter
#47. Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#48. 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
#51. 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
#52. A term meant to convey a person's inability to make sense of the numbers that run their lives.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#53. In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#54. 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
#55. Supperational thinkers, by recursive definition, include in their calculations the fact that they are in a group of superrational thinkers.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#56. 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
#57. 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
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