Douglas Hofstadter Quotes

You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained.

Douglas Hofstadter

• People
• Soul
• Brain

• Previous
• Next

Quotes to Explore

• Irrationality is the square root of all evil.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • Evil

• The 'Strange Loop' phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through levels of some hierarchial system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • Moving

• If a mosquito has a soul, it is mostly evil. So I don't have too many qualms about putting a mosquito out of its misery. I'm a little more respectful of ants.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • Soul
  • Evil

• 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.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • Up
  • Small
  • Knowledge

• Reality includes creating every real connection and reference.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • Real
  • Reality
  • Connection

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

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • True

• 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.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • World
  • Nature
  • Struggle

• Solomon: Your entry in Wikipedia says that your work has inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence.Hofstadter: I have no interest in computers. The entry is filled with inaccuracies, and it kind of depresses me.Solomon: So fix it.Hofstadter: The next day someone will fix it back.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • Work
  • Inspired

• You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated 'you' makes more decisions, and so forth, 'round and 'round.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • World

• No reference is truly direct—every reference depends on some kind of coding scheme. It's just a question of how implicit it is.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • Question

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

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • Law

• This type of paradox is quite characteristic of Zen. It is an attempt to 'break the mind of logic'.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • Mind
  • Logic

• Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful—cannot lead to all truths.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • Truth
  • Words
  • Powerful

• Many people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it's much more than memory.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • People
  • Believe
  • Die

• There has to be a common sense cutoff for craziness, and when that threshold is exceeded, then the criteria for publication should get far, far more stringent.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter

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

  

  Douglas Hofstadter

• We all have heard it claimed that 13 is an 'unlucky number.' Indeed, there are many hotels in America that for this very reason claim not to have a 13th floor, in the sense that there is no button bearing the label '13' in their elevators (I recently stayed in one in New York, in fact).

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • America

• I don't feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter

• For 13 to be unlucky would require there to be some kind of cosmic intelligence that counts things that humans count and that also makes certain things happen on certain dates or in certain places according to whether the number 13 'is involved' or not (whatever 'is involved' might mean).

  

  Douglas Hofstadter

• This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn't.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter

• Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • Lies
  • Tangled

• Which statement seems more true: (1) I have a brain. (2) I am a brain.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • True
  • Brain

• You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained.

  

  Douglas Hofstadter
  • People
  • Soul
  • Brain