I Am a Strange Loop Quotes

“the strange loopiness resides not in the flip due to the word “not”, but in the unexpected, hierarchy-violating twisting-back involving the word “this”.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“we have seen that all meaning is mapping-mediated, which is to say, all meaning comes from analogies.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“other small-souled beings do not perceive a television screen as we do. Although it’s hard for us to imagine, they see the pixels in a raw, uninterpreted fashion, and thus to them a TV screen is as drained of long-ago-and-far-away meanings as is, to you or me, a pile of fall leaves, a Jackson Pollock painting, or a newspaper article in Malagasy”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“why on earth would someone outside the movie feel the sting of a volley of stern rebukes made by someone inside the movie? Ah, well… analogy has force in proportion to its precision and its visibility.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“If two people are romantically involved (or even if they aren’t, but at least one of them feels there’s a potential spark), then almost any conversation between them about any romance whatsoever, no matter who it involves, stands a good chance of being heard by one or both of them as putting a spotlight on their own situation. Such boomeranging-back is almost inevitable because romances, even very good ones, are filled with uncertainty and yearning. We are always on the lookout for clues or insights into our romantic lives, and analogies are among the greatest sources of clues and insights. Therefore, to notice an analogy between ourselves and another couple that is occupying center stage in our conversation is pretty much a piece of cake handed to us on a silver platter.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“But one of my life’s most recurrent theme songs is that we should have great respect for what seem like the most mundane of analogies, for when they are examined, they often can be seen to have sprung from, and to reveal, the deepest roots of human cognition.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“realized that his inchoate dream might be made so precise that it could be spelled out to others, so he started pursuing it in a dogged fashion.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“trillions of silent, synchronized scintillations taking place every second inside a human skull enable a person to think, to perceive, to remember, to imagine, to create, and to feel.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“the medium that remains after all your rigid bans may well turn out to be flexible enough to fashion precisely the items you’ve banned.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“the smallest integer whose English-language descriptions always use at least thirty syllables. But wait a moment! How many syllables does my italicized phrase contain? Count them — 24. We somehow described b in fewer syllables than its definition allows. In fact, the italicized phrase does not merely describe b “somehow”; it is b’s very definition! So the concept of b is nastily self-undermining. Something very strange is going on.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“This creature ascribes its behavior to things it refers to as its desires or its wants, but it can’t say exactly why it has those desires. At a certain point there is no further possibility of analysis or articulation; those desires simply are there, and to the creature, they seem to be the root causes for its decisions, actions, motions. And always, inside the sentences that express why it does what it does, there is the pronoun “I” (or its cousins “me”, “my”, etc.). It seems that the buck stops there — with the so-called “I”.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“thus there is something to be gained by not rejecting the term “marble”, even if there is no real marble in the box.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“An epiphenomenon, as you probably recall from earlier chapters, is a collective and unitary-seeming outcome of many small, often invisible or unperceived, quite possibly utterly unsuspected, events. In other words, an epiphenomenon could be said to be a large-scale illusion created by the collusion of many small and indisputably non-illusory events.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Just as we believe in everyone else’s mortality (again, thanks primarily to arguments from analogy and authority), so we come, eventually, to believe in our own mortality, as well as in the reality of the obituary notices about us that will appear in local papers even though we know we will never be able to flip those pages and read those notices.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Just as we believe in other peoples’ kidneys and brains (thanks almost entirely to arguments from analogy and authority),”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“We’re pulled by but fearful of risk-taking. That is the nature of life.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“The macroscopic world as experienced by humans is, in short, an intimate mixture ranging from the most predictable events all the way to wildly unpredictable ones.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“When we begin to utter a thought, we have no idea what words we will wind up using nor which grammatical pathways we will wind up following, nor can we predict the speech errors or the facts about our unconscious mind that our little slips will reveal. Usually such revelations will make little difference, but once in a while — in a job interview, say — they can have huge repercussions.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“whose perception is limited to the world of everyday macroscopic objects forces us, quite obviously, to function without any reference to entities and processes at microscopic levels. No one really knew the slightest thing about atoms until only about a hundred years ago, and yet people got along perfectly well.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“the high-level outcome is insulated and sealed off from the microscopic level. It is a fact in its own right, at its own level.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“stable statistical consequences.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“what matters is not the detailed laws but merely the fact that they reliably give rise to stable statistical consequences.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“This idea — that the bottom level, though 100 percent responsible for what is happening, is nonetheless irrelevant to what happens — sounds almost paradoxical, and yet it is an everyday truism.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“641 is the prime mover. So I ask: Who shoves whom around inside the domino chainium?”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“The second answer bypasses all the physics of gravity and domino chains and makes reference only to concepts that belong to a completely different domain of discourse. The domain of prime numbers is as remote from the physics of toppling dominos as is the physics of quarks and gluons from the Cold War’s “domino theory” of how communism would inevitably topple country after neighboring country in Southeast Asia. In both cases, the two domains of discourse are many levels apart, and one is purely local and physical, while the other is global and organizational.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“none of which, from their point of view, had the least thing to do with DNA, RNA, and proteins, or with carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, or with photons, electrons, protons, and neutrons, let alone with quarks, gluons, W and Z bosons, gravitons, and Higgs particles.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Just as I feel comfortable referring to “a pile of autumn leaves” without specifying the exact shape and orientation and color of each leaf, so I feel comfortable referring to a gas by specifying just its temperature, pressure, and volume, and nothing else.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Do dreads and dreams, hopes and griefs, ideas and beliefs, interests and doubts, infatuations and envies, memories and ambitions, bouts of nostalgia and floods of empathy, flashes of guilt and sparks of genius, play any role in the world of physical objects? Do such pure abstractions have causal powers? Can they shove massive things around, or are they just impotent fictions? Can a blurry, intangible “I” dictate to concrete physical objects such as electrons or muscles (or for that matter, books) what to do?”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“this teetering bulb of dread and dream”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“There exists within the cranium a whole world of diverse causal forces; what is more, there are forces within forces within forces, as in no other cubic half-foot of universe that we know….”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop