Douglas Hofstadter Quotes

In short, there are surprising new structures that looping gives rise to that constitute a new level of reality that could in principle be deduced from the basic loop and its detailed properties, but that in practice have a different kind of “life of their own” and that demand — at least when it comes to extremely finite, simplicity-seeking, pattern-loving creatures like us — a new vocabulary and a new level of description that transcend the basic level out of which they emerge.

in order to see that what they did was “exactly the same thing”, one has to ignore almost all the details of the two situations in order to extract from them one single shared essence.

We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.

If categorization is central to thinking, then what mechanism carries it out? Analogy is the answer.

We live in a state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our own creation — categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers.

By the time we emerge from childhood, we have acquired a reflex-level intuition for where most of our everyday world’s loci of unpredictability lie, and the more unpredictable end of this spectrum simultaneously beckons to us and frightens us. We’re pulled by but fearful of risk-taking. That is the nature of life.

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

"What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" — that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?"

Therefore Godel's theorem had an electrifying effect upon logicians, mathematicians, and philosophers interested in the foundations of mathematics, for it showed that no fixed system, no matter how complicated could represent the complexity of the whole numbers: 0,1,2,3,.....

You can’t go on defending your patterns of reasoning forever, there comes a point where faith takes over.

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.

The nice thing about having a brain is that one can learn, that ignorance can be supplanted by knowledge, and that small bits of knowledge can gradually pile up into substantial heaps.

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

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level