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
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.
In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.
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.
We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.
The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.
. . . all meaning comes from analogies.
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).
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.
This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.
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.