Brandon Walowitz

“Our will, quite the opposite of being free, is steady and stable, like an inner gyroscope, and it is the stability and constancy of our non-free will that makes me me and you you, and that also keeps me me and you you. Free Willie is just another blue humpback.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Who or what decreed that the changing pattern that over several decades was variously known as “Ronnie Reagan”, “Ronald Reagan”, “Governor Reagan”, “President Reagan”, and “Ex-President Reagan” was “one single entity”? And if it truly, objectively, indisputably was one single entity no matter how ephemeral and wispy it became, then mightn’t that entity still exist?”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“consciousness is nothing but the upper end of a spectrum of self-perception levels that brains automatically possess as a result of their design. Fancy 100-hunekerand-higher racecar brains like yours and mine have a lot of self-perception and hence a lot of consciousness, while very primitive wind-up rubber-band brains like those of mosquitoes have essentially none of it, and lastly, middle-level brains, with just a handful of hunekers (like that of a two-year-old, or a pet cat or dog) come with a modicum of it. Consciousness is not an add-on option when one has a 100-huneker brain; it is an inevitable emergent consequence of the fact that the system has a sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories. Like Gödel’s strange loop, which arises automatically in any sufficiently powerful formal system of number theory, the strange loop of selfhood will automatically arise in any sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories, and once you’ve got self, you’ve got consciousness. Élan mental is not needed.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“We live in a state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our own creation — categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop