Douglas R. Hofstadter > Quotes

“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, Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern

“Meaning lies as much
in the mind of the reader
as in the Haiku.
”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“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, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law”
― 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, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

“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, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“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

“I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern

“This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“The paraphrase of Gödel's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“I can't help but recall, at this point, a horribly elitist but very droll remark by one of my favorite writers, the American "critic of the seven arts", James Huneker, in his scintillating biography of Frédéric Chopin, on the subject of Chopin's étude Op. 25, No. 11 in A minor, which for me, and for Huneker, is one of the most stirring and most sublime pieces of music ever written: “Small-souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should avoid it.”

"Small-souled men"?! Whew! Does that phrase ever run against the grain of American democracy! And yet, leaving aside its offensive, archaic sexism (a crime I, too, commit in GEB, to my great regret), I would suggest that it is only because we all tacitly do believe in something like Hueneker's' shocking distinction that most of us are willing to eat animals of one sort or another, to smash flies, swat mosquitos, fight bacteria with antibiotics, and so forth. We generally concur that "men" such as a cow, a turkey, a frog, and a fish all possess some spark of consciousness, some kind of primitive "soul" but by God, it's a good deal smaller than ours is — and that, no more and no less, is why we "men" feel that we have the perfect right to extinguish the dim lights in the heads of these fractionally-souled beasts and to gobble down their once warm and wiggling, now chilled and stilled protoplasm with limitless gusto, and not feel a trace of guilt while doing so.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid