Reader

“There are many levels in the human mental structure-certainly it is a system which we do not understand very well yet. But there are hundreds of rival theories which tell why people act the way they do, each theory based on some underlying assumptions about how far down in this set of levels various kinds of psychological "forces" are found. Since at this time we use pretty much the same kind of language for all mental levels, this makes for much level-mixing and most certainly for hundreds of wrong theories. For instance, we talk of "drives"-for sex, for power, for fame, for love, etc., etc.-without knowing where these drives come from in the human mental structure. Without belaboring the point, I simply wish to say that our confusion about who we are is certainly related to the fact that we consist of a large set of levels, and we use overlapping language to describe ourselves on all of those levels.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“Just as science is permeated with 'conceptual revolution' on all levels at all times, so the thinking of individuals is shot through and through with creative and new acts. Computer programs today do not yet seem to produce many small creations. Most of what they do is quite 'mechanical' still. That just testifies to the fact that they are not close to simulating the way we think–but they are getting closer.

Perhaps what differentiates highly creative ideas from ordinary ones is some combined sense of beauty, simplicity, and harmony.”
― Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“Why is some music so much deeper and more beautiful than other music? It is because form, in music, is expressive–expressive to some strange subconscious regions of our minds. The sounds of music do not refer to serfs or city-states, but they do trigger clouds of emotion in our innermost selves; in that sense musical meaning IS dependent on intangible links from symbols to things in the world–those 'things', in this case, being secret software structures in our minds.”
― Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“It is extremely interesting, then, to think about the meaning of the word ‘form’ as it applies to constructions of arbitrarily complex shapes. For instance, what is it that we respond to when we look at a painting and feel its beauty? Is if the ‘form’ of the lines and dots on our retina? Evidently it must be, for that is how it gets passed along to the analyzing mechanisms in our heads–but the complexity of the processing makes us feel that we are not merely looking at a two-dimensional surface; we are responding to some sort of inner meaning inside the picture, a multidimensional aspect trapped somehow inside those two dimensions. It is the word ‘meaning’ which is important here. Our minds contain interpreters which accept two-dimensional patterns and then ‘pull’ from them high-dimensional notions which are so complex that we cannot consciously describe them. The same can be said about how we respond to music, incidentally.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid