Douglas Hofstadter quotes - page 2

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:

The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.

Douglas Hofstadter

. . . all meaning comes from analogies.

Douglas Hofstadter

It is perhaps wrong to say that the enemy of enlightenment is logic; rather, it is dualistic, verbal thinking. In fact, it is even more basic than that: it is perception.

Douglas Hofstadter

How gullible are you? Is your gullibility located in some "gullibility center" in your brain? Could a neurosurgeon reach in and perform some delicate operation to lower your gullibility, otherwise leaving you alone? If you believe this, you are pretty gullible, and should perhaps consider such an operation.

Douglas Hofstadter

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

Some of us, perhaps all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls.

Douglas Hofstadter

Reductionism is merciless.

Douglas Hofstadter

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

The strange flavour of AI work is that people try to put together long sets of rules in strict formalisms which tell inflexible machines how to be flexible.

Douglas Hofstadter

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

Douglas Hofstadter