Douglas Hofstadter Quotes

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.

"I enjoy acronyms. Recursive Acronyms Crablike "RACRECIR" Especially Create Infinite Regress"

"I would suggest that it is only because we all tacitly do believe in something like Huneker's shocking distinction that most of us are willing to eat animals of one sort or another, to smash flies, swat mosquitos, fight bacteria with antibiotics, and so forth. We generally concur that "men" such as a cow, a turkey, a frog, and a fish all possess some spark of consciousness, some kind of primitive "soul", but by God, it's a good deal smaller than ours is-and that, no more and no less, is why we "men" feel that we have the perfect right to extinguish the dim lights in the heads of these fractionally-souled beasts and to gobble down their once warm and wiggling, now chilled and stilled protoplasm with limitless gusto, and not to feel a trace of guilt while doing so."

We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself.

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,.....

in fact we all know many more categories than we know words.

Godel showed how a statement about any mathematical formal system (such as the assertion that Principia Mathematica is contradiction-free) can be translated into a mathematical statement inside number theory (the study of whole numbers). In other words, any metamathematical statement can be imported into mathematics, and in its new guise the statement simply asserts (as do all statements of number theory) that certain whole numbers have certain properties or relationships to each other. But on another level, it also has a vastly different meaning that, on its surface, seems as far removed from a statement of number theory as would be a sentence in a Dostoevsky novel.

What does it matter if two brains are isomorphic, or quasi-isomorphic, or not isomorphic at all? The answer is that we have an intuitive sense that, although other people differ from us in important ways, they are still 'the same' as we are in some deep and important ways. It would be instructive to be able to pinpoint what this invariant core of human intelligence is, and then to be able to describe the kinds of 'embellishments' which can be added to it, making each one of us a unique embodiment of this abstract and mysterious quality called 'intelligence.

For Kant, analogy was the wellspring of all creativity, and Nietzsche gave a famous definition of truth as “a mobile army of metaphors”.

"There can be conceptual skeletons on several different levels of abstraction. For instance, the "isomorphism" between Bongard problems 70 and 71, already pointed out, involves higher-level conceptual skeleton than that needed to solve either problem in isolation."

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.

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

If the meanings of true and false were switched, this sentence wouldn't be false.

I am not shooting at immortality through my books, no. Nor do I think Chopin was shooting at immortality through his music. That strikes me as a very selfish goal, and I don't think Chopin was particularly selfish. I would also say that I think that music comes much closer to capturing the essence of a composer's soul than do a writer's ideas capture the writer's soul. Perhaps some very emotional ideas that I express in my books can get across a bit of the essence of my soul to some readers, but I think that Chopin's music probably does a lot better job (and the same holds, of course, for many composers). I personally don't have any thoughts about "shooting for immortality" when I write. I try to write simply in order to get ideas out there that I believe in and find fascinating, because I'd like to let other people be able share those ideas. But intellectual ideas alone, no matter how fascinating they are, are not enough to transmit a soul across brains. Perhaps, as I say, my autobiographical passages — at least some of them — get tiny shards of my soul across to some people. But such autobiographical story-telling is not nearly as effective a means of soul-transmission as is living with someone you love for many years of your lives, and sharing profound life goals with them — that's for sure!

It now becomes clear that consistency is not a property of a formal system per se, but depends on the interpretation which is proposed for it. By the same token, inconsistency is not an intrinsic property of any formal system.