We all have heard it claimed that 13 is an 'unlucky number.' Indeed, there are many hotels in America that for this very reason claim not to have a 13th floor, in the sense that there is no button bearing the label '13' in their elevators (I recently stayed in one in New York, in fact).

Douglas Hofstadter

Categorized in : America Numbers New York

We create an image of who we are inside our self. The image then becomes very deeply entrenched, and it becomes the thing that we attribute responsibility to - we say "I", "I" did this because "I" wanted to, because "I" am a good person or because "I" am a bad person. The loop is the fact that we represent our selves, our desires, hopes, dreads and dreams: it is the way in which we conceive of ourselves, rather than the way we conceive of Mount Everest or of a tree. And I say it exists entirely in the loop: the self is an hallucination hallucinated by an hallucination.

Douglas Hofstadter

responsibility self dream

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.

Douglas Hofstadter

eerie order science

The key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth... because they live on in a 'second neural home'?... In the wake of a human being's death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of those who were dearest to them... Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain... a collective corona that still glows.

Douglas Hofstadter

keys brain home

The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.

Douglas Hofstadter

sentences following

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law

Douglas Hofstadter

favourite research law

It is perhaps wrong to say that the enemy of enlightenment is logic; rather, it is dualistic, verbal thinking. In fact, it is even more basic than that: it is perception.

Douglas Hofstadter

perception enemy thinking

You can never represent yourself totally .... to seek self -knowledge is to embark on a journey which ... will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described.

Douglas Hofstadter

maps journey self

Irrationality is the square root of all evil.

Douglas Hofstadter

squares roots evil

In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.

Douglas Hofstadter

mirages miracle self

If a mosquito has a soul, it is mostly evil. So I don't have too many qualms about putting a mosquito out of its misery. I'm a little more respectful of ants.

Douglas Hofstadter

qualms-about soul evil

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.

Douglas Hofstadter

memories believe thinking

You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated 'you' makes more decisions, and so forth, 'round and 'round.

Douglas Hofstadter

decision action world

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.

Douglas Hofstadter

smart stupid dog

There has to be a common sense cutoff for craziness, and when that threshold is exceeded, then the criteria for publication should get far, far more stringent.

Douglas Hofstadter

criteria craziness common-sense

. . . all meaning comes from analogies.

Douglas Hofstadter

analogies

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

Douglas Hofstadter

reader mind lying

Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful cannot lead to all truths.

Douglas Hofstadter

powerful matter giving

In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.

Douglas Hofstadter

effects essence facts

Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level

Douglas Hofstadter

tangled levels lying

We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.

Douglas Hofstadter

focus want tree