" Hofstadter notes that to call this a " myth " is not to imply that the idea is simply false.

Hofstadter also noted that " sexual freedom " is a vice frequently attributed to the conspiracist's target group, noting that " very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.

For example, Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter argue that anything capable of passing the Turing test is necessarily conscious, while David Chalmers argues that a philosophical zombie could pass the test, yet fail to be conscious.

Douglas Richard Hofstadter ( born February 15, 1945 ) is an American professor of cognitive science whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics.

Hofstadter is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition which consists of himself and his graduate students, forming the " Fluid Analogies Research Group " ( FARG ).

Both inside and outside his professional work, Hofstadter is driven by the pursuit of beauty.

In particular, Hofstadter claims that our sense of having ( or being ) an " I " comes from the abstract pattern he terms a " strange loop ", which is an abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena as audio and video feedback, and which Hofstadter has defined as " a level-crossing feedback loop ".

Hofstadter is related by marriage to the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould: Hofstadter's paternal aunt Shirley Hofstadter was married to Gould's maternal uncle Herbert Rosenberg.

In the 1982 novel 2010: Odyssey Two, Arthur C. Clarke's first sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 is described by Dr. Chandra as being caught in a " Hofstadter – Möbius loop ".

A typical description of the problem is given in the book Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter

Typical of these references is Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, which accords the paradox a prominent place in a discussion of self-reference.

* The femtometre, a convenient unit of length in dealing with distances inside the atomic nucleus, was coined the " fermi " by Robert Hofstadter in a 1956, and is still a term widely used.

The concept of a strange loop was proposed and extensively discussed by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach, and is further elaborated in Hofstadter's book I Am a Strange Loop, published in 2007.

A strange loop hierarchy, however, is " tangled " ( Hofstadter refers to this as a " heterarchy "), in that there is no well defined highest or lowest level ; moving through the levels, one eventually returns to the starting point, i. e., the original level.

Hofstadter points to Bach's Canon per Tonos, M. C. Escher's drawings Waterfall, Drawing Hands, Ascending and Descending, and the liar paradox as examples that illustrate the idea of strange loops, which is expressed fully in the proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid ( commonly GEB ) is a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter, described by his publishing company as " a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll ".

In response to confusion over the book's theme, Hofstadter has emphasized that GEB is not about mathematics, art, and music but rather about how cognition and thinking emerge from well-hidden neurological mechanisms.

In a dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise, the author hints that there is a contrapunctal acrostic in the chapter that refers both to the author ( Hofstadter ) and Bach.

The character Leonard Hofstadter, featured in the CBS television comedy The Big Bang Theory, is named after Robert Hofstadter.

Hofstadter collects and studies cognitive errors ( largely, but not solely, speech errors ), " bon mots " ( spontaneous humorous quips ), and analogies of all sorts, and his long-time observation of these diverse products of cognition, and his theories about the mechanisms that underlie them, have exerted a powerful influence on the architectures of the computational models developed by himself and FARG members.

Hofstadter expressed doubt about the likelihood of the singularity coming to pass in the foreseeable future.

In 1988 Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos created a docudrama about Hofstadter and his ideas, Victim of the Brain, based on The Mind's I.

It includes interviews with Hofstadter about his work.

As a consequence of his attitudes about consciousness and empathy, Hofstadter has been a vegetarian for roughly half his life.

To escape many of the logical contradictions brought about by these self-referencing objects, Hofstadter discusses Zen koans.

Although Hofstadter claims the idea of translating his book " never crossed mind " when he was writing it, when approached with the idea by his publisher he was " very excited about seeing book in other languages, especially … French ".

Luminaries such as Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, Douglas Hofstadter, Ken Burns, Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, Hunter Thompson, Anne Rice, and Jacques Derrida were apparently interviewed as to their opinions about the film.

Richard Hofstadter, for example, in 1955 wrote that prohibition, " was a pseudo-reform, a pinched, parochial substitute for reform " that " was carried about America by the rural-evangelical virus ".

His dissertation director Merle Curti noted about Hofstadter that: " His position is as biased, by his urban background.

He even employed one, Mike Wallace, to collaborate with him on American Violence: A Documentary History ( 1970 ); about the book, Hofstadter student Eric Foner said that it " utterly contradicted the consensus vision of a nation placidly evolving without serious disagreements ".

Douglas Hofstadter wrote at some length about it.

Richard Hofstadter in 1966 claimed that opposition to conservatism has been common among intellectuals since about 1890.

In this book, Hofstadter jokingly describes himself as " pilingual " ( meaning that the sum total of the varying degrees of mastery of all the languages that he's studied comes to 3. 14159 ...), as well as an " oligoglot " ( someone who speaks " a few " languages ).

Translation between frames of reference — languages, cultures, modes of expression, or indeed between one person's thoughts and another — becomes an element in many of the same concepts Hofstadter has addressed in prior works, such as reference and self-reference, structure and function, and artificial intelligence.

BlooP and FlooP are simple programming languages designed by Douglas Hofstadter to illustrate a point in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach.

* 1916 – Richard Hofstadter, American historian ( d. 1970 )

Richard Hofstadter has traced the sentimental attachment to the rural way of life, which he describes as " a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins.

* Hofstadter, Richard.

The historian Richard Hofstadter addressed the role of paranoia and conspiracism throughout American history in his essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, published in 1964.

Within philosophy familiar names include Daniel Dennett who writes from a computational systems perspective, John Searle known for his controversial Chinese room, Jerry Fodor who advocates functionalism, and Douglas Hofstadter, famous for writing Gödel, Escher, Bach, which questions the nature of words and thought.

Other thinkers, such as Douglas Hofstadter, dismiss this argument as incoherent.

Hofstadter was born in New York City, the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter.

In April 2009 Hofstadter was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Hofstadter has said of himself, " I'm someone who has one foot in the world of humanities and arts, and the other foot in the world of science.

( The term " ambigram " was invented by Hofstadter in 1984 and has since been taken up by many ambigrammists all over the world.

Both in his writing and in his teaching, Hofstadter stresses the concrete, constantly using examples and analogies, and avoids the abstract.

In 1999, the bicentennial year of Russian poet and writer Alexander Pushkin, Hofstadter published a verse translation of Pushkin's classic novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin.

Aside from Eugene Onegin, Hofstadter has translated many other poems ( always respecting their formal constraints ), and two other novels ( in prose ): La Chamade ( That Mad Ache ) by French writer Françoise Sagan, and La Scoperta dell ' Alba ( The Discovery of Dawn ) by Walter Veltroni, the then head of the Partito Democratico in Italy.

Provoked by predictions of a technological singularity ( the hypothetical moment at which artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence ), Hofstadter has both organized and participated in several public discussions of the topic.

Hofstadter was also an invited panelist at the first Singularity Summit, held at Stanford in May 2006.