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Douglas Hofstadter Biography

Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American professor of cognitive science whose research focuses on the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979, won both the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and a National Book Award (at that time called The American Book Award) for Science.[a] His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.

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Douglas Hofstadter Quotes

The strange flavour of AI work is that people try to put together long sets of rules in strict formalisms which tell inflexible machines how to be flexible.

Inflexible, Long, People, Sets, Tell, Trying

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.

Eerie, Lurk, Lurks, Order, Science, Type

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.

Common, Common Sense, Craziness, Criteria, Exceeded, Sense

Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku.

Haiku, Lying, Mind, Reader

. . . all meaning comes from analogies.

Analogies, Meaning

I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.

Want, Understand, Like, Perfectly, Things

Reductionism is merciless.

Inspirational, Merciless, Reductionism

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.

Downwards, Levels, Moving, Occurs, Right, Strange

I don't feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.

Chicken, Chickens, Fishes, Right, Snuff

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.

Evil, Mostly, Qualms About, Soul

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.

Division, Dualistic, Enlightenment, Perception, Struggle

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.

Paraphrase, Player, Records, Self, Theorem

It is perhaps wrong to say that the enemy of enlightenment is logic; rather, it is dualistic, verbal thinking. In fact, it is even more basic than that: it is perception.

Enemy, Enlightenment, Fact, Perception, Thinking

No reference is truly direct—every reference depends on SOME kind of coding scheme. It's just a question of how implicit it is.

Kind, Schemes, Direct, Depends, Implicit, Scheme

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.

Attitude, Matter, Space, Trying, Verbal, Zen

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

Miracle, Miracles, Mirages, Self

What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" -- that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?

Dream, Edson, Fuzzy, Hard, Pairs, Things

I am the thought you are now thinking.

Science, Thinking, Thought

You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained.

Brain, Original, People, Person, Soul

Perhaps the problem is the seeming need that people have of making black-and-white cutoffs when it comes to certain mysterious phenomena, such as life and consciousness. People seem to want there to be an absolute threshold between the living and the nonliving, and between the thinking and the "merely mechanical,". . . But the onward march of science seems to force us ever more clearly into accepting intermediate levels of such properties.

Acceptance, Black And White, Certain, Cutoffs, Problem, Science

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