Douglas Hofstadter Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

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

Douglas Hofstadter
To confront the apparent contradiction head-on, to savor it, to turn it over, to take it apart, to wallow in it, so that in the end the reader may gain new insights into the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the formal and the informal, the animate and the inanimate, the flexible and the inflexible.

Douglas Hofstadter
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.

Douglas Hofstadter
Everybody knows that mathematics is about Miracles, only mathematicians have a name for them: Theorems.

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
Yes, I am a relentless quester after the chief patterns of the universe — central organizing principles, clean and powerful ways to categorize what is "out there."

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

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
We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.

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
In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.

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
One of the basic tenets of Zen Buddhism is that there is no way to characterize what Zen is. No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over. It might seem, then, that all efforts to explain Zen are complete wastes of time. But that is not the attitude of Zen masters and students. For instance, Zen koans are a central part of Zen study, verbal though they are. Koans are supposed to be "triggers" which, though they do not contain enough information in themselves to impart enlightenment, may possibly be sufficient to unlock the mechanisms inside one's mind that lead to enlightenment. But in general, the Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth.

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
Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level

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

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

Douglas Hofstadter
Reality includes creating every real connection and reference.

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
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.

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