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.
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.
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.
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.
Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level.
In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.
Irrationality is the square root of all evil.
No reference is truly direct – every reference depends on SOME kind of coding scheme. It’s just a question of how implicit it is.
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.
Reductionism is merciless.
Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku.
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.
This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.
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.
The nice thing about having a brain is that one can learn, that ignorance can be supplanted by knowledge, and that small bits of knowledge can gradually pile up into substantial heaps.
The strange flavour of AI work is that people try to put together long sets of rules in strict formalisms which tell inflexible machines how to be flexible.