60 Quotes by Douglas Hofstadter

Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.

Programming in different languages is like composing pieces in different keys, particularly if you work at the keyboard. If you have learned or written pieces in many keys, each key will have its own special emotional aura.

Why is some music so much deeper and more beautiful than other music? It is because form, in music, is expressive–expressive to some strange subconscious regions of our minds. The sounds of music do not refer to serfs or city-states, but they do trigger clouds of emotion in our innermost selves; in that sense musical meaning IS dependent on intangible links from symbols to things in the world–those 'things', in this case, being secret software structures in our minds.

Computers are ridiculous. So is science in general. CHURCH_TURING Thesis, Theodore Rosak VersionThis view is prevalent among certain people who see in anything smacking of numbers or exactitude a threat to human values. It is too bad that they do not appreciate the depth and complexity and beauty involved in exploring abstract structures sch as the human mind, where, indeed, one comes in intimate contact with the ultimate questions of what to be human is.

A computer program can modify itself but it cannot violate its own instructions — it can at best change some parts of itself by *obeying* its own instructions.

And one of my firmest conclusions is that we always think by seeking and drawing parallels to things we know from our past, and that we therefore communicate best when we exploit examples, analogies, and metaphors galore, when we avoid abstract generalities, when we use very down-to-earth, concrete, and simple language, and when we talk directly about our own experience.

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law

(1) Blurting may be considered as the reciprocal substitution of semiotic material (dubbing) for a semiotic dialogical product in a dynamic reflexion.The human-written sentences are numbers (1) to 3; they were drawn from the contemporary journal Art-Language and are -- as far as I can tell-- completely serious efforts among literate and sane people to communicate something to each other.

Since, as is well know, God helps those who help themselves, presumably the Devil helps all those, and only those, who don't help themselves. Does the Devil help himself?