I Am a Strange Loop Quotes

“microscopic level may well be — or rather, almost certainly is — the wrong level in the brain on which to look, if we are seeking to explain such enormously abstract phenomena as concepts, ideas, prototypes, stereotypes, analogies, abstraction, remembering, forgetting, confusing, comparing, creativity, consciousness, sympathy, empathy, and the like.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“like saying that literary criticism must focus on paper and bookbinding, ink and its chemistry, page sizes and margin widths, typefaces and paragraph lengths, and so forth. But what about the high abstractions that are the heart of literature — plot and character, style and point of view, irony and humor, allusion and metaphor, empathy and distance, and so on? Where did these crucial essences disappear in the list of topics for literary critics?”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Consciousness is the dance of symbols inside the cranium. Or, to make it even more pithy, consciousness is thinking. As Descartes said, Cogito ergo sum.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“In the world of living things, the magic threshold of representational universality is crossed whenever a system’s repertoire of symbols becomes extensible without any obvious limit. This threshold was crossed on the species level somewhere along the way from earlier primates to ourselves.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“My vast episodic memory of my past, together with its counterpart pointing blurrily towards what is yet to come (my episodic projectory, I think I’ll call it), and further embellished by a fantastic folio of alternative versions or “subjunctive replays” of countless episodes (“if only X had happened…”; “how lucky that Y never took place…”, “wouldn’t it be great if Z were to occur…” — and why not call this my episodic subjunctory?), gives rise to the endless hall of mirrors that constitutes my “I”.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

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

“There are shallower aspects of a person and there are deeper aspects, and the deeper aspects are what imbue the shallower ones with genuine meaning.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“In sum, the seemingly sharp distinction between “direct” reference and “indirect” reference is only a matter of degree, not a black-and-white distinction. To repeat, analogy has force in proportion to its precision and visibility.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“In a word, just as provability and truth are the same thing for a mathematician, so are nonprovability and falsity. They are synonymous.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop