Douglas Hofstadter Quotes

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

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.

Context thus changes categorization and can modify how we perceive even the most familiar of items.

Although dictionaries give the impression of analyzing words all the way down to their very atoms, all they do in fact is graze their surfaces.

What is it like to be China? How different from that would it feel to be the United States?

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

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

Meaning lies as much
in the mind of the reader
as in the Haiku.

In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.

"We have seen recursion in the grammars of languages, we have seen recursive geometrical trees, which grow upwards forever, and we have seen one way in which recursion enters the theory of solid state physics. Now we are going to see yet another way in which the whole world is built out of recursion. This has to do with the structure of elementary particles: electrons, protons, neutrons, and the tiny quanta of electromagnetic radiation called "photons". We are going to see that particles are - in a certain sense which can only be defined rigorously in relativistic quantum mechanics- nested inside each other in a way which can be described recursively, perhaps even by some sort of "grammar"."

A computer program can modify itself but it cannot violate its own instructions — it can at best change some parts of itself by *obeying* its own instructions.

"How gullible are you? Is your gullibility located in some "gullibility center" in your brain? Could a neurosurgeon reach in and perform some delicate operation to lower your gullibility, otherwise leaving you alone? If you believe this, you are pretty gullible, and should perhaps consider such an operation."

An interpretation [of a formal system] will be meaningful to the extent that it accurately reflects some isomorphism to the real world.

Consistent or inconsistent, no one is exempt from the mystery of the self. Probably we are all inconsistent. Te world is just too complicated for a person to be able to afford the luxury of reconciling all of his beliefs with each other. Tension and confusion are important in a world where many decisions must be made quickly. Miguel de Unamuno once said, 'If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.' I would say that we all are in the same boast as the Zen master who, after contradicting himself several times in a row, said to the confused Doko, 'I cannot understand myself.

"To paraphrase Descartes again: "I think; therefore I have no access to the level where I sum.