63 Quotes by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Saying that studying the brain is limited to the study of physical entities would be like saying that literary criticism must focus on paper and bookbinding, ink and its chemistry, page sizes and margin widths, typefaces and paragraph lengths, and so forth.

No, no - I think about thinking

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.

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems - vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, sometimes exceedingly beautiful.

[...] provability is a weaker notion than truth

To paraphrase Descartes again: "I think; therefore I have no access to the level where I sum.

There can be conceptual skeletons on several different levels of abstraction. For instance, the "isomorphism" between Bongard problems 70 and 71, already pointed out, involves higher-level conceptual skeleton than that needed to solve either problem in isolation.

For now, what is important is not finding the answer, but looking for it.

It now becomes clear that consistency is not a property of a formal system per se, but depends on the interpretation which is proposed for it. By the same token, inconsistency is not an intrinsic property of any formal system.