Douglas R. Hofstadter Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 30 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
Famous Quotes By Douglas R. Hofstadter
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
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
This computer-generated pangram contains six a's, one b, three c's, three d's, thirty-seven e's, six f's, three g's, nine h's, twelve i's, one j, one k, two l's, three m's, twenty-two n's, thirteen o's, three p's, one q, fourteen r's, twenty-nine s's, twenty-four t's, five u's, six v's, seven w's, four x's, five y's, and one z. — Douglas R. Hofstadter
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
What gives us word-users the right to make life-and-death decisions concerning other living creatures that have no words? Why do we find ourselves in positions of such anguish (at least for some of us)? In the final analysis, it is simply because might makes right, and we humans, thanks to the intelligence afforded us by the complexity of our brains and our embeddedness in rich languages and cultures, are indeed high and mighty, relative to the "lower" animals (and vegetables). By virtue of our might, we are forced to establish some sort of ranking of creatures, whether we do so as a result of long and careful personal reflections or simply go along with the compelling flow of the masses. Are cows just as comfortably killable as mosquitoes? Would you feel any less troubled by swatting a fly preening on a wall than by beheading a chicken quivering on a block? — Douglas R. Hofstadter
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
Supperational thinkers, by recursive definition, include in their calculations the fact that they are in a group of superrational thinkers. — Douglas R. Hofstadter
We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest. — Douglas R. Hofstadter
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
We human beings are macroscopic structures in a universe whose laws reside at a microscopic level. As survival-seeking beings, we are driven to seek efficient explanations that make reference only to entities at our own level. We therefore draw conceptual boundaries around entities that we easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality. — Douglas R. Hofstadter
And one of my firmest conclusions is that we always think by seeking and drawing parallels to things we know from our past, and that we therefore communicate best when we exploit examples, analogies, and metaphors galore, when we avoid abstract generalities, when we use very down-to-earth, concrete, and simple language, and when we talk directly about our own experience. — Douglas R. Hofstadter
There are those who will immediately be drawn to the idea of pattern-seeking, and — Douglas R. Hofstadter
A term meant to convey a person's inability to make sense of the numbers that run their lives. — Douglas R. Hofstadter
The key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth ... because they live on in a 'second neural home'? ... In the wake of a human being's death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of those who were dearest to them ... Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain ... a collective corona that still glows. — Douglas R. Hofstadter
We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself. — Douglas R. Hofstadter
How gullible are you? Is your gullibility located in some "gullibility center" in your brain? Could a neurosurgeon reach in and perform some delicate operation to lower your gullibility, otherwise leaving you alone? If you believe this, you are pretty gullible, and should perhaps consider such an operation. — Douglas R. Hofstadter
I wish my wish would not be granted! — Douglas R. Hofstadter
[...] provability is a weaker notion than truth — Douglas R. Hofstadter
I would like to understand things better, but I don't want to understand them perfectly. — Douglas R. Hofstadter
A mirror mirroring a mirror — Douglas R. Hofstadter
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
Please, Oh please, publish me in your collection of self-referential sentences! — Douglas R. Hofstadter
Concepts in the brains of humans acquired the property that they could get rolled together with other concepts into larger packets, and any such larger packet could then become a new concept in its own right. In other words, concepts could nest inside each other hierarchically, and such nesting could go on to arbitrary degrees. — Douglas R. Hofstadter
I enjoy acronyms. Recursive Acronyms Crablike "RACRECIR" Especially Create Infinite Regress — Douglas R. Hofstadter
No, no - I think about thinking — Douglas R. Hofstadter
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
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law — Douglas R. Hofstadter
This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance. — Douglas R. Hofstadter
In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. — Douglas R. Hofstadter
What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream"
that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts? — Douglas R. Hofstadter