“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
“Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter
“Meaning lies as much
in the mind of the reader
as in the Haiku.”
― 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
“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
“A mirror mirroring a mirror”
― 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
“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
“I enjoy acronyms. Recursive Acronyms Crablike "RACRECIR" Especially Create Infinite Regress”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter
“We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself.”
― Douglas R. 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 R. Hofstadter
“For now, what is important is not finding the answer, but looking for it.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter
“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 R. Hofstadter
“I personally cannot imagine that consciousness will be fully understood without reference to Godelian loops or level-crossing feedback loops.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter
“It is curious, how one often mistrusts one’s own opinions if they are stated by someone else.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter
“If words were nuts and bolts, people could make any bolt fit into any nut: they'd just squish the one into the other, as in some surrealistic painting where everything goes soft. Language, in human hands, becomes almost like a fluid, despite the coarse grain of its components.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter
“It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of the task which it is performing, and survey what it has done; it is always looking for, and often finding, patterns.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter
"The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true."
― Douglas R. Hofstadter
"In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect."
― Douglas R. Hofstadter
"This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn't."
― Douglas R. Hofstadter
" … all meaning comes from analogies."
― 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 R. Hofstadter
"The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity."
― 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 R. Hofstadter
"This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance."
― 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 R. Hofstadter