No one knows where the borderline between non-intelligent behavior and intelligent behavior lies; in fact, to suggest that a sharp borderline exists … - Douglas Hofstadter

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No one knows where the borderline between non-intelligent behavior and intelligent
behavior lies; in fact, to suggest that a sharp borderline exists is probably silly. But
essential abilities for intelligence are certainly:
to respond to situations very flexibly;
to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances;
to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages;
to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a
situation;
to find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them;
to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities may link them;
to synthesize new concepts by taking old them together in new ways; to come up
with ideas which are novel.

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About Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is a mathematician, cognitive scientist, and Pulitzer Prize winning author.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Native Name: Douglas Richard Hofstadter
Alternative Names: Douglas R. Hofstadter
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Additional quotes by Douglas Hofstadter

"We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but that are as real as any genuine marble when we're not looking for them. Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems — vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful. [...] What one gives up on is a childlike sense that things are exactly as they appear, and that our solid-seeming, marble-like "I" is the realest thing in the world; what one acquires is an appreciation of how tenuous we are at our cores, and how wildly different we are from what we seem to be."

"In the thirty-first year, however, Godel published his paper, which in some ways utterly demolished Hilbert's program. This paper revealed not only that there were irreparable "holes" in the axiomatic system proposed by Russell and Whitehead, but more generally, that no axiomatic system whatsoever could produce all number-theoretical truths, unless it were an inconsistent system! And finally, the hope of proving the consistency of a system such as that presented in P.M. was shown to be vain: if such a proof could be found using only methods inside P.M., then — and this is one of the most mystifying consequences of Godel's work — P.M. itself would be inconsistent!"

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