I Am a Strange Loop Quotes

“so many people insist on the grandiose adjective, often even finding in it humanity’s crowning glory? What does it gain us, or rather, what would it gain us, if the word “free” were accurate? I honestly do not know. I don’t see any room in this complex world for my will to be “free”. I am pleased to have a will, or at least I’m pleased to have one when it is not too terribly frustrated by the hedge maze I am constrained by, but I don’t know what it would feel like if my will were free. What on earth would that mean? That I didn’t follow my will sometimes? Well, why would I do that? In order to frustrate myself? I guess that if I wanted to frustrate myself, I might make such a choice — but then it would be because I wanted to frustrate myself, and because my meta-level desire was stronger than my plain-old desire. Thus I might choose not to take a second helping of noodles even though I — or rather, part of me — would still like some, because there’s another part of me that wants me not to gain weight, and the weight-watching part happens (this evening) to have more votes than the gluttonous part does. If it didn’t, then it would lose and my inner glutton would win, and that would be fine — but in either case, my non-free will would win out and I’d follow the dominant desire in my brain. Yes, certainly, I’ll make a decision, and I’ll do so by conducting a kind of inner vote. The count of votes will yield a result, and by George, one side will come out the winner. But where’s any “freeness” in all this? Speaking of George, the analogy to our electoral process is such a blatant elephant in the room that I should spell it out. It’s not as if, in a brain, there is some kind of “neural suffrage” (“one neuron, one vote”); however, on a higher level of organization, there is some kind of “desirelevel suffrage” in the brain. Since our understanding of brains is not at the state where I can pinpoint this suffrage physically, I’ll just say that it’s essentially “one desire, n votes”, where n is some weight associated with the given desire. Not all values of n are identical, which is to say, not all desires are born equal; the brain is not an egalitarian society! In sum, our decisions are made by an analogue to a voting process in a democracy. Our various desires chime in, taking into account the many external factors that act as constraints, or more metaphorically, that play the role of hedges in the vast maze of life in which we are trapped. Much of life is incredibly random, and we have no control over it. We can will away all we want, but much of the time our will is frustrated.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“This poignant sight clearly exemplifies will, but is it free will?”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“What makes no sense is to maintain, over and above that, that our wants are somehow “free” or that our decisions are somehow “free”. They are the outcomes of physical events inside our heads! How is that free?”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“In such cases our will alone, though it pushes us, does not get us what we want. It pushes us in a certain direction, but we are maneuvering inside a hedge maze whose available paths were dictated by the rest of the world, not by our wants. And so we move willy-nilly, but not freewilly-nilly, inside the maze. A combination of pressures, some internal and some external, collectively dictates our pathway in this crazy hedge maze called “life”.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Here are a few verbs that come to my mind, listed roughly in descending order of emotionality and sentience: agonize, exult, suffer, enjoy, desire, listen, hear, taste, perceive, notice, consider, reason, argue, claim, believe, remember, forget, know, calculate, utter, register, react, bounce, turn, move, stop. I won’t claim that my extremely short list of verbs is impeccably ordered; I simply threw it together in an attempt to show that there is unquestionably a spectrum, a set of shades of gray, concerning words that do and that do not suggest the presence of feelings behind the scenes. The tricky question then is: Which of these verbs (and comparable adjectives, adverbs, nouns, pronouns, etc.) would we be willing to apply to Dave’s zombie twin in Universe Z? Is there some precise cutoff line beyond which certain words are disallowed? Who would determine that cutoff line?”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Who or what decreed that the changing pattern that over several decades was variously known as “Ronnie Reagan”, “Ronald Reagan”, “Governor Reagan”, “President Reagan”, and “Ex-President Reagan” was “one single entity”? And if it truly, objectively, indisputably was one single entity no matter how ephemeral and wispy it became, then mightn’t that entity still exist?”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“consciousness is nothing but the upper end of a spectrum of self-perception levels that brains automatically possess as a result of their design. Fancy 100-hunekerand-higher racecar brains like yours and mine have a lot of self-perception and hence a lot of consciousness, while very primitive wind-up rubber-band brains like those of mosquitoes have essentially none of it, and lastly, middle-level brains, with just a handful of hunekers (like that of a two-year-old, or a pet cat or dog) come with a modicum of it. Consciousness is not an add-on option when one has a 100-huneker brain; it is an inevitable emergent consequence of the fact that the system has a sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories. Like Gödel’s strange loop, which arises automatically in any sufficiently powerful formal system of number theory, the strange loop of selfhood will automatically arise in any sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories, and once you’ve got self, you’ve got consciousness. Élan mental is not needed.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Dave Chalmers is lying through its teeth, yet without having the foggiest idea it’s lying. Although it believes it is conscious, in truth it is not. Sadly, this Dave is an innocent victim of the illusion of consciousness, which is nothing but a trivial by-product of having a deeply entrenched strange loop in its brain, whereas its isomorphic counterpart in Universe Q, using the same words and intonations, is telling the truth, for he truly is conscious! Why? Because he not only has a strange loop in his brain but also — lucky fellow! — lives in a universe with élan mental.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Oh, it’s because the universe in which Machine Q exists has something extra, on top of the laws of physics, that allows feelings to accompany certain types of physical processes. Even though these feelings don’t have and can’t have any effect on anything physical, they are nonetheless real, and they are really there.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“And yet, something of Jim is surviving strongly — surviving in other brains, thanks to human love. His easy-going sense of humor, his boundless joy at driving the wide open spaces of the prairies, his ideals, his generosity, his simplicity, his hopes and dreams — and (for what it’s worth) his understanding of credit cards. All of these things survive at different levels in many people who, thanks to having interacted with him intimately over many years or decades, constitute his “soular corona” — his wife, his three children, and his many, many friends. Even before Jim’s body physically dies, his soul will have become so foggy and dim that it might as well not exist at all — the soular eclipse will be in full force — and yet despite the eclipse, his soul will still exist, in partial, low-resolution copies, scattered about the globe. Jim’s first-person perspective will flicker in and out of existence in other brains, from time to time. He will exist, albeit in an extremely diluted fashion, now here, now there. Where will Jim be? Not very much anywhere, admittedly, but to some extent he will be in many places at once, and to different degrees. Though terribly reduced, he will be wherever his soular corona is. It is very sad, but it is also beautiful. In any case, it is our only consolation.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“the transition from one pronoun to the other won’t be sharp and sudden; it will be gradual, like the fading of the belief in Cartesian Egos as people grow in sophistication.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“As Dan Dennett points out in Consciousness Explained, an “I” is a little like a bill of paper money — it feels as if it is worth a great deal, but ultimately, it is just a social convention, a kind of illusion that we all tacitly agree on without ever having been asked, and which, despite being illusory, supports our entire economy. And yet the bill is just a piece of paper with no intrinsic worth at all.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“the “I” notion is, fundamentally and in the end, a hallucination. Let’s let Episode III, my teleportation scenario with fresh copies on Venus and Mars and no copy left on Earth, apply to me instead of to Parfit. In that case, each of the new brains — the one on Mars and the one on Venus — is convinced that it is me. It feels just like it always felt to be me. The same old urge to say, “I am here and not there” zooms up in both brains as automatically as when someone taps my knee and my leg jerks upwards. But knee-jerk reflex or not, the truth of the matter is that there is no thing called “I” — no hard marble, no precious yolk protected by a Cartesian eggshell — there are just tendencies and inclinations and habits, including verbal ones. In the end, we have to believe both Douglas Hofstadters as they say, “This one here is me,” at least to the extent that we believe the Douglas Hofstadter who is right now sitting in his study typing these words and saying to you in print, “This one here is me.” Saying this and insisting on its truth is just a tendency, an inclination, a habit — in fact, a knee-jerk reflex — and it is no more than that, even though it seems to be a great deal more than that.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“It has often seemed to me that ultimately, when I am thinking about who my closest friends are, it all comes down to how they are — how they smile, how they talk, how they laugh, how they listen, how they suffer, how they share, and so on. I think to myself that the innermost essence of each friend is made up of thousands of such “how” ’s, and that that collection of “how” ’s is the answer — the full answer — to “Who is this person?”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“there is something it is like to be that machine” (a hard phrase to translate into other languages, by the way).”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“These are shades of gray that create a halo of “possible Dougs” around the Doug that I happen to have become, thanks to a million accidental events that have befallen me over the decades, and thanks to hundreds of particular individuals who happen to have entered my life (and millions of others who never did, not to mention an infinite number of counterfactual individuals who never entered my life!). We don’t normally think of “who/what/how I am” in such shades of gray, but there they are, spelled out a bit, in my case.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“ambigrams”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Yes, I do have this strange faith in my own mind’s correctness. Nature has to be this way, no matter what other people have said before me. I have somehow been given the opportunity to glimpse the inner logic of nature more deeply and more accurately than anyone else before me has. I am unaccountably lucky in this fact, and though I take no personal credit for it, I do wish to publish it so that I may share this valuable vision with others.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Do I really have such deep faith in my own mind’s pathways that I can believe in the bizarre, intuition-defying conclusions I have reached? Am I not being enormously arrogant in rejecting a whole self-consistent web of interlocked ideas that were carefully worked out by two or three centuries’ worth of extraordinary physicists who came before me?”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“To dismantle unconscious beliefs that are so deeply rooted and that have such a degree of primacy in our worldview is an extremely daunting and bold undertaking, comparable in subtlety and difficulty to what Einstein accomplished in creating special relativity (undermining, through sheer logic, our deepest and most unquestioned intuitions about the nature of time), and what a whole generation of brilliant physicists, with Einstein at their core, collectively accomplished in creating quantum mechanics (undermining our deepest and most unquestioned intuitions about the nature of causality and continuity). The new view that Parfit proposes is a radical reperception of what it is to be, and in certain ways it is extremely disturbing. In other ways, it is extremely liberating! Parfit even devotes a page or two to explaining how this radical new view of human existence has freed him up and profoundly changed his attitudes towards his life, his death, his loved ones, and other people in general.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Using such a mind-to-mind metric, I would be very “close” to the person I was yesterday, slightly less close to the person I was two days ago, and so forth. In other words, although there is a great degree of overlap between the individuals Douglas Hofstadter today and Douglas Hofstadter yesterday, they are not identical. We nonetheless standardly (and reflexively) choose to consider them identical because it is so convenient, so natural, and so easy. It makes life much simpler. This convention allows us to give things (both animate and inanimate) fixed names and to talk about them from one day to the next without constantly having to update our lexicon. Moreover, this convention is ingrained in us when we are infants — at about the same Piagetian developmental stage as that in which we learn that when a ball rolls behind a box, it still exists even though it’s not visible, and may even reappear on the other side of the box in a second or two!”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“In other words, although he doesn’t propose anything that would smack of mathematics, Parfit essentially proposes an abstract “distance function” (what mathematicians would call a “metric”) between personalities in “personality space” (or between brains, although at what structural level brains would have to be described in order for this “distance calculation” to take place is never specified, and it is hard to imagine what that level might be).”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“so close to being pure black or white that any hints of grayness remain hidden from view, not only thanks to the obvious external fact that we all have separate physical brains housed in separate skulls, but also thanks to an extensive web of linguistic and cultural conventions that collectively and subliminally insist that we each are exactly one person (this is the “caged-bird metaphor” of Chapter 18, and it’s also the Cartesian Ego notion), and which implicitly discourage us from imagining any kind of blending, overlapping, or sharing of souls.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Our intuitions as we grew up on planet Earth have not prepared us for anything in the least like a nondestructive teleportation scenario, and so we clamor for a simple, straightforward answer, yet somehow we also intuit that none will be forthcoming.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“a careful thinker, he is doing something analogous to what Einstein did when he imagined himself moving at or near the speed of light — he is pushing the limits of classical notions — and, like Einstein, he finds that classical worldviews do not always work in worlds that are very different from those in which they were born and grew.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“The temptation to ask such questions (and to believe that these questions have objectively correct answers) is nearly irresistible, but nonetheless, the nearly universal intuitions that give rise to this temptation are what Parfit is out to crush in his book.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“pumps in the field of philosophy of mind.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“that what we call “consciousness” was a kind of mirage. It had to be a very peculiar kind of mirage, to be sure, since it was a mirage that perceived itself, and of course it didn’t believe that it was perceiving a mirage, but no matter — it still was a mirage.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“fast food” and “clamato juice”, “tackiness” and “wackiness”, “Christmas bonuses” and “customer service departments”, “wild goose chases” and “loose cannons”, “crackpots” and “feet of clay”, “slam dunks” and “bottom lines”, “lip service” and “elbow grease”, “dirty tricks” and “doggie bags”, “solo recitals” and “sleazeballs”, “sour grapes” and “soap operas”, “feedback” and “fair play”, “goals” and “lies”, “dreads” and “dreams”, “she” and “he” — and last but not least, “you” and “I”.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Recall that the intangible, abstract quality of the primality of the integer 641 is what most truly topples hard, solid dominos located in the “prime stretch” of the chainium. This is nothing if not downward causality, and it leads us straight to the conclusion that the most efficient way to think about brains that have symbols — and for most purposes, the truest way — is to think that the microstuff inside them is pushed around by ideas and desires, rather than the reverse.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop