Metamagical Themas 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

“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

“Please, Oh please, publish me in your collection of self-referential sentences!”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

“Supperational thinkers, by recursive definition, include in their calculations the fact that they are in a group of superrational thinkers.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

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

“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, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

“Seeing anything as waves suggests immediate knobs: wavelength, frequency, amplitude, speed, medium, and a host of other basic notions that define the essence of undularity. Seeing anything as particles suggests totally different knobs: mass, shape, radius, rotation, constituents, and a host of other basic notions that define the essence of corpuscularity.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern

“One must distinguish, it seems to me, between “head pattern” and “heart pattern”, or, in more objective-sounding terms, between syntactic pattern and semantic pattern.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern

“It is numbers like 545 billion that we are dealing with when we talk about a Defense Department overrun of $750 billion for the next four years. A really fancy single-user computer (the kind I wouldn’t mind having) costs approximately $75,000. With $750 billion to throw around, we could give one to every person in New York City, which is to say, we could buy about ten million of them. Or, we could give $1 million to every person in San Francisco, and still have enough left over to buy a bicycle for everyone in China! There’s no telling what good uses we could put $750 billion to. But instead, it will go into bullets and tanks and fighters and war games and missile systems and jet fuel and marching bands and so on. An interesting way to spend $750 billion, but I can think of better ways.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern

“The middle position is calculated by averaging all claims together, both outrageous and sensible, and the louder the claim, the more it will count. Politically savvy people learn this early and make it their credo; idealists learn this late and refuse to accept it.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

“What goes hand in hand with the willingness to playfully explore a serendipitous connection is the willingness to censor or curtail an exploration that seems to be leading nowhere.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern

“Humans are supposedly able to get at the “content” of utterances, being genuine language-users, while apes are not. But ape-language research clearly shows that there is some kind of in-between world, where a certain degree of content can be retrieved by a being with reduced mental capacity. If mental capacity is equated with potential processing depth, then it is obvious why it makes no sense to draw an arbitrary boundary line between the form and the content of a sentence. Form blurs into content as processing depth increases.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

“I had presented a “tower of power”—that is, an infinitely tall tower of separate Lisp definitions, one for each power, connecting it to the preceding power.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern

“The story of random number generation is itself quite a fascinating one, and would be an entire article in itself.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern