63 Quotes by Douglas R. Hofstadter

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.

I personally cannot imagine that consciousness will be fully understood without reference to Godelian loops or level-crossing feedback loops.

It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of the task which it is performing, and survey what it has done; it is always looking for, and often finding, patterns.

I don’t feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.

It is curious, how one often mistrusts one’s own opinions if they are stated by someone else.

And that is also the way the human mind works – by the compounding of old ideas into new structures that become new ideas that can themselves be used in compounds, and round and round endlessly, growing ever more remote from the basic earthbound imagery that is each language’s soil.

It sometimes feels as if I had shouted a deeply cherished message out into an empty chasm and nobody heard me.

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.

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.