What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, … - Douglas Hofstadter

Same topic Authors

Quote of the day

I'm interested in how a person forms her beliefs, how that happens. Beliefs of all kinds make up the animating force in each of us. Without them we would be paralyzed, lifeless - the glove without the hand.

Douglas Hofstadter

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

Same Author Quotes

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

We create an image of who we are inside our self. The image then becomes very deeply entrenched, and it becomes the thing that we attribute responsibility to - we say "I", "I" did this because "I" wanted to, because "I" am a good person or because "I" am a bad person. The loop is the fact that we represent our selves, our desires, hopes, dreads and dreams: it is the way in which we conceive of ourselves, rather than the way we conceive of Mount Everest or of a tree. And I say it exists entirely in the loop: the self is an hallucination hallucinated by an hallucination.

Conceive, Dream, Entrenched, Responsibility, Self

The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.

False, Following, Preceding, Sentences, True

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

The key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth. . . because they live on in a 'second neural home'?. . . In the wake of a human being's death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of those who were dearest to them. . . Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain. . . a collective corona that still glows.

Afterglows, Brain, Home, Keys, Perish, Person