I Am a Strange Loop Quotes

“In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.”
― Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“A mirror mirroring a mirror”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“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.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“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.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“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.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“No, no - I think about thinking”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“It is curious, how one often mistrusts one’s own opinions if they are stated by someone else.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“We human beings are macroscopic structures in a universe whose laws reside at a microscopic level. As survival-seeking beings, we are driven to seek efficient explanations that make reference only to entities at our own level. We therefore draw conceptual boundaries around entities that we easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“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.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems - vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, sometimes exceedingly beautiful.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“We mortals are condemned not to speak at that level of no information loss. We necessarily simplify, and indeed, vastly so. But that sacrifice is also our glory. Drastic simplification is what allows us to reduce situations to their bare bones, to discover abstract essences, to put our fingers on what matters, to understand phenomena at amazingly high levels, to survive reliably in this world, and to formulate literature, art, music, and science.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“It seems to me, therefore, that the instinctive although seldom articulated purpose of holding a funeral or memorial service is to reunite the people most intimate with the deceased, and to collectively rekindle in them all, for one last time, the special living flame that represents the essence of that beloved person, profiting directly or indirectly from the presence of one another, feeling the presence of that person in the brains that remain, and thus solidifying to the maximal extent possible those secondary personal gemmae that remain aflicker in all these different brains. Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain and who are gathered to remember and reactivate the spirit of the departed, a collective corona that still glows. This is what human love means. The word "love" cannot, thus, be separated from the word "I"; the more deeply rooted the symbol for someone inside you, the greater the love, the brighter the light that remains behind.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Through many types of abstraction and analogy-making and inductive reasoning, and through many long and tortuous chains of citations of all sorts of authorities (which constitute an indispensable pillar supporting every adult’s belief system, despite the insistence of high-school teachers who year after year teach that “arguments by authority” are spurious and are convinced that they ought to be believed because they are, after all, authority figures), we build up an intricate, interlocked set of beliefs as to what exists “out there” — and then, once again, that set of beliefs folds back, inevitably and seamlessly, to apply to our own selves.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“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.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“And that is also the way the human mind works — by the compounding of old ideas into new structures that become new ideas that can themselves be used in compounds, and round and round endlessly, growing ever more remote from the basic earthbound imagery that is each language’s soil.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“We should have great respect for what seem like the most mundane of analogies, for when they are examined, they often can be seen to have sprung from, and to reveal, the deepest roots of human cognition.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Kurt Gödel was the first person to realize and exploit the fact that the positive integers, though they might superficially seem to be very austere and isolated, in fact constitute a profoundly rich representational medium. They can mimic or mirror any kind of pattern.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“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.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“What gives us word-users the right to make life-and-death decisions concerning other living creatures that have no words? Why do we find ourselves in positions of such anguish (at least for some of us)? In the final analysis, it is simply because might makes right, and we humans, thanks to the intelligence afforded us by the complexity of our brains and our embeddedness in rich languages and cultures, are indeed high and mighty, relative to the “lower” animals (and vegetables). By virtue of our might, we are forced to establish some sort of ranking of creatures, whether we do so as a result of long and careful personal reflections or simply go along with the compelling flow of the masses. Are cows just as comfortably killable as mosquitoes? Would you feel any less troubled by swatting a fly preening on a wall than by beheading a chicken quivering on a block?”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“There are those who will immediately be drawn to the idea of pattern-seeking, and”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“if one keeps climbing upward in the chain of command within the brain, one finds at the very top those over-all organizational forces and dynamic properties of the large patterns of cerebral excitation that are correlated with mental states or psychic activity…. Near the apex of this command system in the brain…. we find ideas. Man over the chimpanzee has ideas and ideals. In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burst-wise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell. Who”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Where there's a pattern, there's a reason.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“By the time we emerge from childhood, we have acquired a reflex-level intuition for where most of our everyday world’s loci of unpredictability lie, and the more unpredictable end of this spectrum simultaneously beckons to us and frightens us. We’re pulled by but fearful of risk-taking. That is the nature of life.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“In short, there are surprising new structures that looping gives rise to that constitute a new level of reality that could in principle be deduced from the basic loop and its detailed properties, but that in practice have a different kind of “life of their own” and that demand — at least when it comes to extremely finite, simplicity-seeking, pattern-loving creatures like us — a new vocabulary and a new level of description that transcend the basic level out of which they emerge.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“the smallest integer whose English-language descriptions always use at least thirty syllables. But wait a moment! How many syllables does my italicized phrase contain? Count them — 24. We somehow described b in fewer syllables than its definition allows. In fact, the italicized phrase does not merely describe b “somehow”; it is b’s very definition! So the concept of b is nastily self-undermining. Something very strange is going on.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“An epiphenomenon, as you probably recall from earlier chapters, is a collective and unitary-seeming outcome of many small, often invisible or unperceived, quite possibly utterly unsuspected, events. In other words, an epiphenomenon could be said to be a large-scale illusion created by the collusion of many small and indisputably non-illusory events.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“thus there is something to be gained by not rejecting the term “marble”, even if there is no real marble in the box.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“This creature ascribes its behavior to things it refers to as its desires or its wants, but it can’t say exactly why it has those desires. At a certain point there is no further possibility of analysis or articulation; those desires simply are there, and to the creature, they seem to be the root causes for its decisions, actions, motions. And always, inside the sentences that express why it does what it does, there is the pronoun “I” (or its cousins “me”, “my”, etc.). It seems that the buck stops there — with the so-called “I”.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop