Douglas Hofstadter, 1985
Basic Books
"To be popular with your fellow man, tell him what he wants to hear."
Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, weary, and reserved. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. You pride yourself on being an independent thinker and do not accept others' opinions without satisfactory proof. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety, and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
"Hey, everybody! I've come up with a really nifty invention. Unfortunately, it has a minor defect—every twelve years or so it will wipe out about as many Americans as the population of San Francisco. But wait a minute! Don't go away! The rest of you will love it, I promise!" Now these statistics are accurate for cars.
[In] books you will find many sentences in this vein: "Man has traditionally been a hunter, and he has kept his females close to the hearth, where they could tend his children."
Lucky's famous speech [in Becket's Waiting for Godot —Think, Pig!]:
"...for reasons unknown but time will tell..."
I have concocted a playful name for this imaginary sphere [the implicit "shere of hypothetical variations"]: I call it the implicosphere, which stands for implicit counterfactual sphere, referring to things that never were but that we cannot help seing anyway. (The word can also be taken as referring to the sphere of implications surrounding a given idea.)
[...] although I find it easier to make my points with somewhat extreme or exotic versions of letters [...], these points hold just as strongly for more conservative letters.
Notice that possession of a distance-from-START-ometer would be tantamount to possession of God's algorithm.
It is easier to find routes out than routes in, even if there are the same number of each.
But eventually, when you put enough feelingless calculations together in a huge coordinated organization, you'll get something that has properties on another level. You can see it—in fact, you have to see it—not as a bunch of little calculations but as a system of tendencies and desires and beliefs and so on. When things get complicated enough, you're forced to change your level of description.
[Each] composer exhibits a "cognitive style" [...]—a musical style. Do we take as a sign of weakness that Mozart did not have the power to break out of his "Mozart rut" and anticipate the patterns of Chopin? [...]
On the contrary. We celebrate individual styles, rather than seeing them negatively, as proofs of inner limits.
Elegance is more than just a frill in life; it is one of the driving criteria behind survival. Elegance is just another way of talking about getting at the essence of situations.
p 601
In fact, a sense of essence, in essence, is in a sense, the essence of sense, in effect.
It is my belief that until AI has stood on its head and is 100 percent bottom-up, it won't achieve the same level or type of intelligence as humans have. To be sure, when that kind of architecture exists, there will still be high-level, global, cognitive events—but they will be epiphenomenal, like those in a brain.
George Boole believed that "the laws of thought" amounted to formal rules for manipulating propositions. [...] I believe it [the Boolean Dream] will turn out to be revealed for what it is: an elegant chimera.
The so-called Central Dogma of molecular biology: "From DNA to RNA to protein." The first conversion is transcription; the second conversion is translation. It is now known that reverse transcription (from RNA to DNA) takes place in certain organisms and viruses, but reverse translation (from protein to RNA) has never been observed. [...] if it were observed, [...] it would entail a full-scale return to the now-discredited Lamarckian ideas about evolution.
"Nobody ever goes there any more because it's always too crowded".
"Those rats—how can they all defect? It makes me so mad! I'm really disappointed in your friends, Doug."
p 750
All it means is that all these heavy-duty rational thinkers are going to see that they are in a symmetric situation, so that whatever reason dictates to one, it will dictate for all. From that point on, the process is very simple. Which is better for an individual if it is a universal choice: C or D? That's all.