Douglas Hofstadter

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.

"Now what is "music"–a sequence of vibrations in the air, or a succession of emotional responses in the brain?"

The mathematician's sense of tension is intimately related to his sense of beauty, and is what makes mathematics worthwhile doing.

Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time intervals.

[M]eaning is part of an object to the extent that it acts upon intelligence in a predictable way.

Computers are ridiculous. So is science in general. CHURCH_TURING Thesis, Theodore Rosak Version
This view is prevalent among certain people who see in anything smacking of numbers or exactitude a threat to human values. It is too bad that they do not appreciate the depth and complexity and beauty involved in exploring abstract structures sch as the human mind, where, indeed, one comes in intimate contact with the ultimate questions of what to be human is.

The key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth... because they live on in a 'second neural home'?... In the wake of a human being's death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of those who were dearest to them... Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain... a collective corona that still glows.

Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.

"the Godelian strange loop that arises in formal systems in mathematics (i.e., collections of rules for churning out an endless series of mathematical truths solely by mechanical symbol-shunting without any regard to meanings or ideas hidden in the shapes being manipulated) is a loop that allows such a system to "perceive itself", to talk about itself, to become "self-aware", and in a sense it would not be going too far to say that by virtue of having such a loop, a formal system acquires a self."

It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of the task which it is performing, and survey what it has done; it is always looking for, and often finding, patterns.

Supperational thinkers, by recursive definition, include in their calculations the fact that they are in a group of superrational thinkers.

At the outset, there is a concrete situation with concrete components, and thus it is perceived as something unique and cleanly separable from the rest of the world. After a while, though — perhaps a day later, perhaps a year — one runs into another situation that one finds to be similar, and a link is made.

Perhaps the most concise summary of enlightenment would be: transcending dualism. … Dualism is the conceptual division of the world into categories … human perception is by nature a dualistic phenomenon—which makes the quest for enlightenment an uphill struggle, to say the least.

The perception of an isomorphism between two known structures is a significant advance in knowledge-and I claim that it is such perceptions of isomorphism which create meanings in the minds of people.

Why is it that we would use the very same word to denote two different levels on a ladder of abstraction?