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Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter Quotes

Professor

Douglas Hofstadter is an American cognitive scientist and writer renowned for his contributions to cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and literature. His research focuses on the nature of thought, the nature of consciousness, and the cognitive differences between humans and machines.

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Famous Douglas Hofstadter Quotes

“Perhaps the problem is the seeming need that people have of making black-and-white cutoffs when it comes to certain mysterious phenomena, such as life and consciousness. People seem to want there to be an absolute threshold between the living and the nonliving, and between the thinking and the "merely mechanical," ... But the onward march of science seems to force us ever more clearly into accepting intermediate levels of such properties.”

“Enormous numbers of people are taken in, or at least beguiled and fascinated, by what seems to me to be unbelievable hocum, and relatively few are concerned with or thrilled by the astounding-yet true-facts of science, as put forth in the pages of, say, Scientific American.”

People Facts Seems Truth Science Numbers Taken Pages Concerned Enormous Fascinated Unbelievable Publication True Fact

Author:Douglas Hofstadter

“It as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid.”

People Ifs Two Ideas Hard Dog Stupid Figures Smart Very Good Intimate Good Ideas Mixtures Rubbish Smart People Good Food Not Stupid

Author:Douglas Hofstadter

“The strange flavour of AI work is that people try to put together long sets of rules in strict formalisms which tell inflexible machines how to be flexible.”

People Trying Long Together Strange Computer Machines Strict Flexible Flavour

Author:Douglas Hofstadter

“You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained.”

People Persons Soul Dies Brain Imagine Originals Patterns Versions Copies Coarse

Author:Douglas Hofstadter

“Many people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it's much more than memory.”

People Thinking Believe Persons Ends Lasts Dies Memories Our Lives

Author:Douglas Hofstadter

About the Author

Born: February 15, 1945
Known for: Professor
Quotes: 54

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Books & Sources

I Am a Strange LoopRelated source material

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