Quote

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

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Douglas Hofstadter
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: February 15
Computer Scientist
Philosopher
Physicist
Professor
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Douglas Richard Hofstadter
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Believe
Otherwise
Gullible
Leaving
Located
Consider
Operation
Reach
Delicate
Perhaps
Lower
Pretty
Operations
Neurosurgeon
Brain
Perform
Neurosurgeons
Alone
Center
Gullibility

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We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.
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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.
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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.
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In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.
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. . . all meaning comes from analogies.
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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.
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This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.
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I am the thought you are now thinking.
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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.
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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.
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The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.
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Irrationality is the square root of all evil.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people they're not stupid.
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Reductionism is merciless.
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The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.
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