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Many People Believe That Our Lives End Not When We Die But When The Very Last Person Who Knew Us Dies. Memory Is Part Of It, Yes, But I Think It's Much More Than Memory.

-Douglas Hofstadter

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Many People Believe That

Douglas Hofstadter

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Many People Believe That Our Lives End Not When We Die But When The Very Last Person Who Knew Us Dies. Memory Is Part Of It, Yes, But I Think It's Much More Than Memory.

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Enormous Numbers Of People Are Taken In, Or At Least Beguiled And Fascinated, By What Seems To Me To Be Unbelievable Hocum, And Relatively Few Are Concerned With Or Thrilled By The Astounding-yet True-facts Of Science, As Put Forth In The Pages Of, Say, Scientific American.

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We Create An Image Of Who We Are Inside Our Self. The Image Then Becomes Very Deeply Entrenched, And It Becomes The Thing That We Attribute Responsibility To - We Say "i", "i" Did This Because "i" Wanted To, Because "i" Am A Good Person Or Because "i" Am A Bad Person. The Loop Is The Fact That We Represent Our Selves, Our Desires, Hopes, Dreads And Dreams: It Is The Way In Which We Conceive Of Ourselves, Rather Than The Way We Conceive Of Mount Everest Or Of A Tree. And I Say It Exists Entirely In The Loop: The Self Is An Hallucination Hallucinated By An Hallucination.

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The Proverbial German Phenomenon Of The Verb-at-the-end About Which Droll Tales Of Absentminded Professors Who Would Begin A Sentence, Ramble On For An Entire Lecture, And Then Finish Up By Rattling Off A String Of Verbs By Which Their Audience, For Whom The Stack Had Long Since Lost Its Coherence, Would Be Totally Nonplussed, Are Told, Is An Excellent Example Of Linguistic Recursion.

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Black And White

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