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Reductionism is merciless.

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
Merciless
Inspirational
Reductionism

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Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level
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. . . all meaning comes from analogies.
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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.
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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.
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Irrationality is the square root of all evil.
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It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of a task which it is performing and survey what it has done.
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I am the thought you are now thinking.
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This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.
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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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We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.
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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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The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.
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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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