Richard Hofstadter notes that, as slaves arrived in greater numbers after 1700, white laborers became a " privileged stratum, assigned to lighter work and more skilled tasks ".

Hofstadter — himself very much a big-city person — noted the agrarian ethos was " a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins, however, to call it a myth does not imply falsity, because it effectively embodies the rural values of the American people, profoundly influencing their perception of the correct values, hence their political behavior.

Here, Hofstadter introduces a key concept in understanding Populism: the agrarian myth.

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 passionate about languages.

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.

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 ".

Hofstadter disliked the term, but it was widely applied to his rejection of the Beardian idea that there was a fundamental conflict running throughout American history that pitted economic classes against each other.

However, according to Hofstadter, a formal system will often simply define all of its well-formed formula as theorems.

Douglas Hofstadter, in his Pulitzer prize winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, explains that these " Gödel-statements " always refer to the system itself, similar to the way the Epimenides paradox uses statements that refer to themselves, such as " this statement is false " or " I am lying ".

* 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.

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.

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

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 ).

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.

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