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Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid QUOTES

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid QUOTES

1 " 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 -more evidence of the same? It is not at all easy to draw a sharp line between cases where what is happening could be called “addition”, and where some other word is wanted. If you think about the question, you will probably come up with some criterion involving separation of the objects in space, and making sure each one is clearly distinguishable from all the others. But then how could one count ideas? Or the number of gases comprising the atmosphere? Somewhere, if you try to look it up, you can probably fin a statement such as, “There are 17 languages in India, and 462 dialects.” There is something strange about the precise statements like that, when the concepts “language” and “dialect” are themselves fuzzy. "

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

2 " 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. "

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

3 " 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? "

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

4 " 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. "

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

5 " 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. "

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

6 " The paraphrase of Gödel's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction. "

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

7 " 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? "

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

8 " This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance. "

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

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

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

10 " I wish my wish would not be granted! "

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

11 " I enjoy acronyms. Recursive Acronyms Crablike "RACRECIR" Especially Create Infinite Regress "

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

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

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

13 " 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 be added to it, making each one of us a unique embodiment of this abstract and mysterious quality called 'intelligence. "

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

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

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

15 " 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. "

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

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

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

17 " 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. "

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

18 " 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. "

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

19 " 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. "

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

20 " Meaning lies as much
in the mind of the reader
as in the Haiku. "

― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid