Hofstadter Douglas Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Irrationality is the square root of all evil — Douglas 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

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

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

Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level — Douglas Hofstadter

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

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

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

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

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

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

We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest. — Douglas R. Hofstadter

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

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

A term meant to convey a person's inability to make sense of the numbers that run their lives. — Douglas R. Hofstadter

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

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

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

All meaning comes from analogies. — Douglas Hofstadter

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

Reductionism is merciless. — Douglas Hofstadter

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

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

We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself. — Douglas R. Hofstadter

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 Hofstadter — Lauren Redniss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance. — 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

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

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

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

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

No, no - I think about thinking — Douglas R. Hofstadter

I enjoy acronyms. Recursive Acronyms Crablike "RACRECIR" Especially Create Infinite Regress — 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

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

Please, Oh please, publish me in your collection of self-referential sentences! — Douglas R. Hofstadter

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

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

A mirror mirroring a mirror — Douglas R. Hofstadter

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

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

There are those who will immediately be drawn to the idea of pattern-seeking, and — Douglas R. Hofstadter

[...] provability is a weaker notion than truth — 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

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

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

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

I would like to understand things better, but I don't want to understand them perfectly. — Douglas R. Hofstadter

Douglas R. Hofstadter, an American researcher, speculates that the human mind has consciousness because it has the capability of self-reference. Since we can think about ourselves and think about ourselves thinking about ourselves, etc., we are capable of feeling that we are an "I". Contrast that with what we have learned in this chapter. This chapter tries to show that the computer's ability to perform self-reference is the cause of its limitations. Can we say that self-reference in computers brings limitations while in humans it causes consciousness? Perhaps. — Noson S. Yanofsky

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

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

In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. — Douglas R. Hofstadter