Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadteris an American professor of cognitive science whose research focuses on the sense of "I", consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979. It won both the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and a National Book Awardfor Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth15 February 1945
CountryUnited States of America
One could probably liken the task of improvising a six-part fugue to the playing of sixty simultaneous blindfold games of chess, and winning them all
Since most women are kind of different from the top-model image, there is a constant losing battle of self-image, ... It's damaging when every woman that's portrayed in the media or who are on the covers of magazines are part of a stereotypical form of beauty, whereas the average woman is not.
It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take Hofstadter's Law into account.
It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.
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.
We create an image of who we are inside our self. The image then becomes very deeply entrenched, and it becomes the thing that we attribute responsibility to - we say "I", "I" did this because "I" wanted to, because "I" am a good person or because "I" am a bad person. The loop is the fact that we represent our selves, our desires, hopes, dreads and dreams: it is the way in which we conceive of ourselves, rather than the way we conceive of Mount Everest or of a tree. And I say it exists entirely in the loop: the self is an hallucination hallucinated by an hallucination.
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law
In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.
Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level
In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.
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.
Irrationality is the square root of all evil
You can never represent yourself totally .... to seek self -knowledge is to embark on a journey which ... will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described.
No reference is truly direct—every reference depends on SOME kind of coding scheme. It's just a question of how implicit it is.