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ce6fabe
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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.
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science
order
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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bcff095
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Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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9463053
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How gullible are you? Is your gullibility located in some "gullibility center" in your brain? Could a neurosurgeon reach in and perform some delicate operation to lower your gullibility, otherwise leaving you alone? If you believe this, you are pretty gullible, and should perhaps consider such an operation."
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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3f6c30a
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A mirror mirroring a mirror
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strange-loop
self-referential
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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b11652a
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The paraphrase of Godel's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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e10edc0
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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.
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structure
thinking
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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245ba74
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What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" -- that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?"
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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95fc3fd
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I would like to understand things better, but I don't want to understand them perfectly.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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64265be
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This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.
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generality
prototypes
specificity
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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d617314
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People enjoy inventing slogans which violate basic arithmetic but which illustrate "deeper" truths, such as "1 and 1 make 1" (for lovers), or "1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 1" (the Trinity). You can easily pick holes in those slogans, showing why, for instance, using the plus-sign is inappropriate in both cases. But such cases proliferate. Two raindrops running down a window-pane merge; does one plus one make one? A cloud breaks up into two clouds..
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truth
mathematics
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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22d5c73
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Some of us, perhaps all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls.
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war
kill
soul
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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197cfc6
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provability is a weaker notion than truth
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truth
gödel-s-incompleteness-theorem
mat
proof
mathematics
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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cbb67ab
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I wish my wish would not be granted!
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strange-loop
self-referential
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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abacc7c
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We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.
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trees
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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a0592d5
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I can't help but recall, at this point, a horribly elitist but very droll remark by one of my favorite writers, the American "critic of the seven arts", James Huneker, in his scintillating biography of Frederic Chopin, on the subject of Chopin's etude Op. 25, No. 11 in A minor, which for me, and for Huneker, is one of the most stirring and most sublime pieces of music ever written: "Small-souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, shoul..
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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bca8462
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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.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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388866a
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No, no - I think about thinking
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thinking
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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19609a1
|
Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time intervals.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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dd3464b
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We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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f71e102
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I enjoy acronyms. Recursive Acronyms Crablike "RACRECIR" Especially Create Infinite Regress" --
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strange-loop
self-referential
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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cf7cf3e
|
Please, Oh please, publish me in your collection of self-referential sentences!
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self-referential
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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199daf6
|
For now, what is important is not finding the answer, but looking for it.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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1713e1e
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Supperational thinkers, by recursive definition, include in their calculations the fact that they are in a group of superrational thinkers.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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6fbb909
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This computer-generated pangram contains six a's, one b, three c's, three d's, thirty-seven e's, six f's, three g's, nine h's, twelve i's, one j, one k, two l's, three m's, twenty-two n's, thirteen o's, three p's, one q, fourteen r's, twenty-nine s's, twenty-four t's, five u's, six v's, seven w's, four x's, five y's, and one z.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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b2b9ad5
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It is curious, how one often mistrusts one's own opinions if they are stated by someone else.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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fb56911
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Concepts in the brains of humans acquired the property that they could get rolled together with other concepts into larger packets, and any such larger packet could then become a new concept in its own right. In other words, concepts could nest inside each other hierarchically, and such nesting could go on to arbitrary degrees.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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e8a2690
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What does it matter if two brains are isomorphic, or quasi-isomorphic, or not isomorphic at all? The answer is that we have an intuitive sense that, although other people differ from us in important ways, they are still 'the same' as we are in some deep and important ways. It would be instructive to be able to pinpoint what this invariant core of human intelligence is, and then to be able to describe the kinds of 'embellishments' which can ..
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science
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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91bfe57
|
I personally cannot imagine that consciousness will be fully understood without reference to Godelian loops or level-crossing feedback loops.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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2fef7f1
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But finally I realized that to me, Godel and Escher and Bach were only shadows cast in different directions by some central solid essence. I tried to construct the central object, and came up with this book.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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d028768
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what happens on the lower level is responsible for what happens on the higher level, it is nonetheless irrelevant to the higher level. The higher level can blithely ignore the processes on the lower level.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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769b209
|
There are those who will immediately be drawn to the idea of pattern-seeking, and
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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182ddcb
|
To paraphrase Descartes again: "I think; therefore I have no access to the level where I sum."
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i-think
think
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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b3fb19c
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What gives us word-users the right to make life-and-death decisions concerning other living creatures that have no words? Why do we find ourselves in positions of such anguish (at least for some of us)? In the final analysis, it is simply because might makes right, and we humans, thanks to the intelligence afforded us by the complexity of our brains and our embeddedness in rich languages and cultures, are indeed high and mighty, relative to..
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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ca4e480
|
Through many types of abstraction and analogy-making and inductive reasoning, and through many long and tortuous chains of citations of all sorts of authorities (which constitute an indispensable pillar supporting every adult's belief system, despite the insistence of high-school teachers who year after year teach that "arguments by authority" are spurious and are convinced that they ought to be believed because they are, after all, authori..
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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03bfe95
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if one keeps climbing upward in the chain of command within the brain, one finds at the very top those over-all organizational forces and dynamic properties of the large patterns of cerebral excitation that are correlated with mental states or psychic activity.... Near the apex of this command system in the brain.... we find ideas. Man over the chimpanzee has ideas and ideals. In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea,..
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |
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edcfb3f
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We have a very hard time "seeing" our cognitive activity because it is the medium in which we swim. The attempt to put our finger on what counts in any given situation leads us at times to making connections between situations that are enormously different on their surface and at other times to distinguishing between situations that on first glance seem nearly identical. Our constant jockeying back and forth among our categories runs the ga..
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Douglas R. Hofstadter |