Quote

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.

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
Putting
Misery
Evil
Qualms
Littles
Mosquito
Soul
Mosquitoes
Little
Ants
Many
Respectful
Mostly

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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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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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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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Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level
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Reductionism is merciless.
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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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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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The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.
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I don't feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.
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. . . all meaning comes from analogies.
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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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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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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 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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In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.
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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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The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.
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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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