Famous Quotes & Sayings

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 40 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Douglas Hofstadter.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Pinterest Share on Linkedin

Famous Quotes By Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1142161

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1356285

Do you remember your first sip of beer? Terrible! How could anyone like that stuff? But beer, you reflect, is an acquired taste; one gradually trains oneself - or just comes - to enjoy that flavor. What flavor? The flavor of that first sip? No one could like that flavor! Beer tastes different to the experienced beer drinker. Then beer isn't an acquired tast; one doesn't learn to like that first taste; one gradually comes to experience a different, and likable, taste. Had the first sip tasted that way, you would have liked beer wholeheartedly from the beginning! — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1495443

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 2164228

My feeling is that the concept of superrationality is one whose truth will come to dominate among intelligent beings in the universe simply because its adherents will survive certain kinds of situations where its opponents will perish. Let's wait a few spins of the galaxy and see. After all, healthy logic is whatever remains after evolution's merciless pruning. — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 2029106

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 110057

Irrationality is the square root of all evil — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 2190181

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 977851

It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take Hofstadter's Law into account. — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 144241

Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1713697

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1213845

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 951705

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 would like. And most likely the readers, authors, and editors of that magazine would be equally hard pressed to come up with cogent, non-technical arguments convincing a skeptic of this point, especially if pitted against a clever lawyer arguing the contrary. How come Truth is such a slippery beast? — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1254414

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1883725

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 2227201

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. — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 2031200

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1646945

In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect. — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1709679

This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn't. — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 2217491

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1717733

The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers' rigidity. — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1718131

Reductionism is merciless. — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1762016

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1962416

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 2003630

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1464197

I am the thought you are now thinking. — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1457866

All meaning comes from analogies. — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1434913

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1221852

The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true. — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1140714

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1139707

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 1031317

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 attribute responsibility to - we say "I", "I" did this because "I" wanted to, because "I" am a good person or because "I" am a bad person. The loop is the fact that we represent our selves, our desires, hopes, dreads and dreams: it is the way in which we conceive of ourselves, rather than the way we conceive of Mount Everest or of a tree. And I say it exists entirely in the loop: the self is an hallucination hallucinated by an hallucination. — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 936553

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 432665

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. — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 378916

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 334983

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 284153

Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku. — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 216646

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 167858

I don't feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish. — Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 160313

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

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes 123973

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