Douglas Hofstadter

Everyday approximately two million people fly in the United States. This huge industry helps drive $1.5 trillion dollars annually and supplies the United States with more than 11 million jobs (Partnering in Safety & Security). Even with this huge amount of revenue for the industry, many airlines struggle with profitability. There are multiple reasons that airlines struggle with profitability. According to the Harvard Business Review, the biggest reasons that airlines struggle with profitability…

The importance of individuality has been something not just emphasized by human beings but is deemed a part of human nature. But what really makes a person who they are? Is it the color of one 's hair or the contour of his or her face? Along with these genetic traits, comes numerous individual similarities with parents such as interests and even a person 's accent. This idea of individuality, or also known as the self, is the personality and ideas that are in each individual that separate them…

Lastly the mechanical theory created by Henri Bergson, breaks down repetition and why machine like characteristics turn out to be laughable. Most comic characters depend for their laughs on enduring personality traits: Take Homer Simpson's inability to anticipate consequences — "Doh!" — or Austin Powers' single-minded sex-drive. The French philosopher Henri Bergson believed that it is inadaptability or rigidity — the repetitive nature of our personalities— that is the source of humor. If this…

[4] The author Douglas Hofstadter views the world as an entity in essence that is ruled by the collaboration of arts and science, a “musico-logical offering”, a three-dimensional golden braid that incorporates Kurt Gödel’s mathematical logics, M. C. Escher’s paradoxical paintings, and J. S. Bach’s metaphorical compositions (Hofstadter 3). Mathematics is the basis for logical reasoning, music speaks a universal language, and…

Philosophy,” he argues that the link between the consumption of meat by individuals is directly, regardless of how minimally, linked to the killing of and harm done to animals in the future of the meat industry (Singer, 2). In “I Am a Strange Loop,” Douglas Hofstadter examines the manner in which humans examine the value and consciousness…

Anti-intellectualism was first proposed in an American historian Hofstadter Richard's book "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life". As Anti-intellectualism has different forms in different countries, he did not give a precise definition for "anti-intellectualism". However, he mentioned a rough definition for it: Anti-intellectualism is hostility to and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals, and intellectualism commonly expressed as deprecation of education and philosophy, and the dismissal of art…

In 1950, Alan Turing published his groundbreaking work “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which said that all digital computers, regardless of how they are put together, are equivalent in their computing abilities (442). This breakthrough in computer science has since fostered immense intellectual growth in artificial intelligence. For more than half a century, scientists have been working toward creating machines that are intelligent in the same way human beings are intelligent. Scholars…

In Programming The Post-Human: Computer science redefines “life,” Ellen Ullman uses captivating, argumentative, and reflective language in order to convey the complications of making an intellectual, sentient machine and explores the unanswered, unconventional questions about humans themselves to computer enthusiasts and thinkers. Her use of questions to captivate and engage readers is noteworthy. Likewise, observations, comparisons, contrasts, and analogies support to make her argument. Careful…

In “A conversation with Einstein’s Brain,” written by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, the authors write about a conversation occurring between tortoise and Achilles in which they discuss about a book containing all of the neurons and pathways symbolized by abbreviations and words. These fully functional neurons written as abbreviations represent Einstein’s brain, and thus, the book is Einstein’s brain. During the conversation, Achilles struggles to understand the concept. Thus,…