List of Douglas Hofstadter Quotes

We All Have Heard It Claimed That 13 Is An 'unlucky Number.' Indeed, There Are Many Hotels In America That For This Very Reason Claim Not To Have A 13th Floor, In The Sense That There Is No Button Bearing The Label '13' In Their Elevators (i Recently Stayed In One In New York, In Fact).

One Of The Most Important And Fascinating Of All Computer Languages Is Lisp (standing For "list Processing"), Which Was Invented By John Mccarthy Around The Time Algol Was Invented.

The Proverbial German Phenomenon Of The Verb-at-the-end About Which Droll Tales Of Absentminded Professors Who Would Begin A Sentence, Ramble On For An Entire Lecture, And Then Finish Up By Rattling Off A String Of Verbs By Which Their Audience, For Whom The Stack Had Long Since Lost Its Coherence, Would Be Totally Nonplussed, Are Told, Is An Excellent Example Of Linguistic Recursion.

We Don't Want To Focus On The Trees (or Their Leaves) At The Expense Of The Forest.

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.

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.

No Reference Is Truly Direct — Every Reference Depends On Some Kind Of Coding Scheme. It's Just A Question Of How Implicit It Is.

The Entire Effort Of Artificial Intelligence Is Essentially A Fight Against Computers’ Rigidity.

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.

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.

I Don't Feel I Have The Right To Snuff The Lives Of Chicken And Fish.

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.