I Am a Strange Loop
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Saying that studying the brain is limited to the study of physical entities would be like saying that literary criticism must focus on paper and bookbinding, ink and its chemistry, page sizes and margin widths, typefaces and paragraph lengths, and so forth.”
“We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.”
“Some of us, perhaps all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls.”
“Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time intervals.”
“No, no - I think about thinking”
“We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself.”
“It is curious, how one often mistrusts one’s own opinions if they are stated by someone else.”
“Concepts in the brains of humans acquired the property that they could get rolled together with other concepts into larger packets, and any such larger packet could then become a new concept in its own right. In other words, concepts could nest inside each other hierarchically, and such nesting could go on to arbitrary degrees.”
“what happens on the lower level is responsible for what happens on the higher level, it is nonetheless irrelevant to the higher level. The higher level can blithely ignore the processes on the lower level.”
“Where There’s Pattern, There’s Reason The key thought in the preceding few lines is the article of faith that this pattern cannot merely be a coincidence. A mathematician who finds a pattern of this sort will instinctively ask, “Why? What is the reason behind this order?” Not only will all mathematicians wonder what the reason is, but even more importantly, they will all implicitly believe that whether or not anyone ever finds the reason, there must be a reason for it. Nothing happens “by accident” in the world of mathematics.”
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Book Keywords:
kill, war, enemy, soul, structure, forest, trees, thinking, strange-loop, brain
