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
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.
In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.
. . . all meaning comes from analogies.
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.
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.
I am the thought you are now thinking.
The paraphrase of Gödel's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction.
This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn't.
No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over ... the Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth.
It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of a task which it is performing and survey what it has done...
The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.
I don't feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.