60 Quotes by Douglas Hofstadter

Language, in human hands, becomes almost like a fluid, despite the coarse grain of its components.

If words were nuts and bolts, people could make any bolt fit into any nut: they'd just squish the one into the other, as in some surrealistic painting where everything goes soft. Language, in human hands, becomes almost like a fluid, despite the coarse grain of its components.

This was a tall order, and one could criticize it on the grounds that it was somewhat circular: how can you justify your methods of reasoning on the basis of those same methods of reasoning? It is like lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Everyone knows specific events have a vividness which imprints them so strongly on the memory that they can later be used as models for other events which are like them in some way.

(On the AI singularity) It's as if you took a lot of 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 and 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.

For 13 to be unlucky would require there to be some kind of cosmic intelligence that counts things that humans count and that also makes certain things happen on certain dates or in certain places according to whether the number 13 'is involved' or not (whatever 'is involved' might mean).

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.

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.

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).