The nice thing about having a brain is that one can learn, that ignorance can be supplanted by knowledge, and that small bits of knowledge can gradually pile up into substantial heaps. Douglas Hofstadter More Quotes by Douglas Hofstadter More Quotes From 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. Douglas Hofstadter soul brain people The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion. Douglas Hofstadter communication example long This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance. Douglas Hofstadter reaching importance ideas 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. Douglas Hofstadter trying long people I am the thought you are now thinking. Douglas Hofstadter science thinking One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented. Douglas Hofstadter lists language important It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take Hofstadter's Law into account. Douglas Hofstadter expect you always law
