41
" Пытаясь предусмотреть некоторые трудности будущих переводчиков, я, слово за словом, прошелся по книге с красной ручкой и отметил все каламбуры, и акростихи, все словесные перестановки, и переклички далеких отрывков текста: я объяснил трудноуловимые двойные (или тройные, или четверные, или пятерные) значения и указал отрывки, в которых форма отражает содержание; отметил те места книги, в которых сами особенности типографского набора передают важную информацию, посоветовал, какие затруднительные пассажи могут быть облегчены в переводе, а какие необходимо сохранить, и так далее. С этой кропотливой работой я провозился целый год, но делал ее с любовью; так или иначе, она была необходима, чтобы предотвратить катастрофу."
Праздничное предисловие автора к русскому изданию книги «Гёдель, Эшер, Бах» "
― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
43
" For an imperfect but vivid concrete analogue to this curious abstract phenomenon, think of what happens when a TV camera is pointed at a TV screen so as to display the screen on itself (and that screen on itself, etc.)- what in GEB I called a "self-engulfing television", and in my later writings I sometimes call a "level-crossing feedback loop."
When and only when such a loop arises in a brain or in any other substrate, is a person-a unique new "I" - brought into being. Moreover, the more self-referentially rich such a loop is, the more conscious is the self to which it gives rise. Yes, shocking though this might sound, consciousness is not an on/off phenomenon, but admits of degrees, grades, shades. Or, to put it more bluntly, there are bigger souls and smaller souls. "
― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
44
" I would suggest that it is only because we all tacitly do believe in something like Huneker's shocking distinction that most of us are willing to eat animals of one sort or another, to smash flies, swat mosquitos, fight bacteria with antibiotics, and so forth. We generally concur that "men" such as a cow, a turkey, a frog, and a fish all possess some spark of consciousness, some kind of primitive "soul", but by God, it's a good deal smaller than ours is-and that, no more and no less, is why we "men" feel that we have the perfect right to extinguish the dim lights in the heads of these fractionally-souled beasts and to gobble down their once warm and wiggling, now chilled and stilled protoplasm with limitless gusto, and not to feel a trace of guilt while doing so. "
― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
49
" We have seen recursion in the grammars of languages, we have seen recursive geometrical trees, which grow upwards forever, and we have seen one way in which recursion enters the theory of solid state physics. Now we are going to see yet another way in which the whole world is built out of recursion. This has to do with the structure of elementary particles: electrons, protons, neutrons, and the tiny quanta of electromagnetic radiation called "photons". We are going to see that particles are - in a certain sense which can only be defined rigorously in relativistic quantum mechanics- nested inside each other in a way which can be described recursively, perhaps even by some sort of "grammar". "
― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
55
" This is a liberating shift, because it allows one to move to a different level of considering what brains are: as media that support complex patterns that mirror, albeit far from perfectly, the world, of which, needless to say, those brains are themselves denizens- and it is in the inevitable self-mirroring that arises, however impartial or imperfect it may be, that the strange loops of consciousness start to swirl. "
― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
58
" There are many levels in the human mental structure-certainly it is a system which we do not understand very well yet. But there are hundreds of rival theories which tell why people act the way they do, each theory based on some underlying assumptions about how far down in this set of levels various kinds of psychological "forces" are found. Since at this time we use pretty much the same kind of language for all mental levels, this makes for much level-mixing and most certainly for hundreds of wrong theories. For instance, we talk of "drives"-for sex, for power, for fame, for love, etc., etc.-without knowing where these drives come from in the human mental structure. Without belaboring the point, I simply wish to say that our confusion about who we are is certainly related to the fact that we consist of a large set of levels, and we use overlapping language to describe ourselves on all of those levels. "
― Douglas R. Hofstadter , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
