Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.”
“Please, Oh please, publish me in your collection of self-referential sentences!”
“Supperational thinkers, by recursive definition, include in their calculations the fact that they are in a group of superrational thinkers.”
“This computer-generated pangram contains six a's, one b, three c's, three d's, thirty-seven e's, six f's, three g's, nine h's, twelve i's, one j, one k, two l's, three m's, twenty-two n's, thirteen o's, three p's, one q, fourteen r's, twenty-nine s's, twenty-four t's, five u's, six v's, seven w's, four x's, five y's, and one z.”
“Seeing anything as waves suggests immediate knobs: wavelength, frequency, amplitude, speed, medium, and a host of other basic notions that define the essence of undularity. Seeing anything as particles suggests totally different knobs: mass, shape, radius, rotation, constituents, and a host of other basic notions that define the essence of corpuscularity.”
“What goes hand in hand with the willingness to playfully explore a serendipitous connection is the willingness to censor or curtail an exploration that seems to be leading nowhere.”
“One must distinguish, it seems to me, between “head pattern” and “heart pattern”, or, in more objective-sounding terms, between syntactic pattern and semantic pattern.”
“It is numbers like 545 billion that we are dealing with when we talk about a Defense Department overrun of $750 billion for the next four years. A really fancy single-user computer (the kind I wouldn’t mind having) costs approximately $75,000. With $750 billion to throw around, we could give one to every person in New York City, which is to say, we could buy about ten million of them. Or, we could give $1 million to every person in San Francisco, and still have enough left over to buy a bicycle for everyone in China! There’s no telling what good uses we could put $750 billion to. But instead, it will go into bullets and tanks and fighters and war games and missile systems and jet fuel and marching bands and so on. An interesting way to spend $750 billion, but I can think of better ways.”
“The story of random number generation is itself quite a fascinating one, and would be an entire article in itself.”
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Book Keywords:
history-of-physics, order, subjunctive, chaos, self-reference, supperational, science, philosophy-of-mind, statistical-literacy, self-referential
