"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." - Douglas Hofstadter.
Can it be used as an adverb? As in hofstadterially unavailable?
"'This space intentionally left blank' is less immediately provocative but more Hofstadterially confusing." - Chris Charabaruk
Well, it took me longer than i expected to first hear about Hofstadter's Law. I guess any computing project will take twice as long as you think it will — even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Ok now. Are you taking longer than you expect sinking to your head what is "Hofstadterially" and "Hofstadter's law"? Me either! Perhaps this video can help.
source: conferencereport
There is an article in Dennett and Hofstadter's book 'The Mind's Eye' called 'Rediscovering the Mind' by Harold Morowitz which suggests that the move toward reductionist accounts of consciousness, ultimately explainable in terms of the laws of quantum physics, are in fact circular. This was drawing on the relationships which some writers have drawn between consciousness and the quantum world. Basically, the story goes that consciousness is explicable in terms of biology, biology is explicable in terms of chemistry, chemistry in terms of physics, physics in terms of quantum physics, and quantum physics in terms of consciousness. This is obviously a deeply problematic account for all sorts of reasons, not least of which that it indulges in what Murray Gell-Mann calls 'quantum flapdoodle'; deploying quantum wierdness as a kind of universal solvent to explain the otherwise inexplicable. This aside, there is something very attractive about the idea that the various scales of explanation that exist in the physical world, and the different laws that operate at these different scales, eventually meet up at some point, such that the workings of the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small are somehow implicated in one another. This motif features in Primack and Abrams 'View from the Centre of the Universe' under the heading of 'The Cosmic Ouroboros'. My favourite referencing of the idea however turns up in that great film 'The Incredible Shrinking Man'.
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave your comments, questions, and/or tips here.