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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.
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
Thing
Gradually
Ignorance
Bits
Small
Brain
Supplanted
Nice
Heaps
Knowledge
Pile
Learn
Substantial
More quotes by Douglas Hofstadter
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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Reductionism is merciless.
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The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.
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Irrationality is the square root of all evil.
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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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In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.
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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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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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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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I don't feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.
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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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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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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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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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I am the thought you are now thinking.
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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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This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.
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. . . all meaning comes from analogies.
Douglas Hofstadter
