Douglas Hofstadter quotes

Douglas Hofstadter is an American cognitive scientist and author, renowned for his work on consciousness, analogy, and the nature of mind. His most famous book, "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid," explores deep connections between mathematics, art, and music. He continues to inspire readers and researchers interested in the mysteries of intelligence and self-reference. Here are 37 of his quotes:

Irrationality is the square root of all evil.

Douglas Hofstadter

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

Douglas Hofstadter

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

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

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

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

Douglas Hofstadter

Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level.

Douglas Hofstadter

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Douglas Hofstadter

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

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

Douglas Hofstadter

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

Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.

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

I would like to understand things better, but I don't want to understand them perfectly.

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

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

Reality includes creating every real connection and reference.

Douglas Hofstadter

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

Douglas Hofstadter

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

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

Douglas Hofstadter

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

Douglas Hofstadter

I am not shooting at immortality through my books, no. Nor do I think Chopin was shooting at immortality through his music. That strikes me as a very selfish goal, and I don't think Chopin was particularly selfish. I would also say that I think that music comes much closer to capturing the essence of a composer's soul than do a writer's ideas capture the writer's soul. Perhaps some very emotional ideas that I express in my books can get across a bit of the essence of my soul to some readers, but I think that Chopin's music probably does a lot better job.

Douglas Hofstadter