Quotes About Self-reference

This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn't.

One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

The village barber shaves those and only those men who live in the village and do not shave themselves. The village barber is a man and he lives in the village. Consider the question "Who shaves the barber?

Basically, if you want to have a computer system that could pass the Turing test, it as a machine is going to have to be able to self-reference and use its own experience and the sense data that it's taking in to basically create its own understanding of the world and use that as a reference point for all new sense data that's coming in to it.

Computers certainly possess the ability to reason and the capacity for self-reference. And just because they do, their actions are intrinsically inscrutable. Consequently, as they become more powerful and perform a more varied set of tasks, computers exhibit an unpredictability approaching that of human beings. Indeed, by Averroës's standards, they possess the same degree of immortality as humans.

The great thing about 'The Exorcist' is it's dead serious horror. No comedy, no self-reference, it's a documentary style.

a little town on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees there is only one barber. This barber shaves all the men in the town who do not shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself or not?

You can't please everybody all the time, but I think for the most part we tend to maintain a healthy level of self-reference to kind of make sure we continue to push things forward.

I like to refer to myself as 'The George Clooney of the Lane Bryant set.'

All Cretans are liars.

It reminds me of a friend of mine who was very interested in a French philosophy called deconstruction. He advertised to me as one of deconstruction's selling points that deconstruction deconstructs itself. I couldn't help responding, if deconstruction deconstructs itself, why bother reading its long, boring books? Why not go for a jog instead, or reread one of Patrick O'Brian's tremendous tales of the sea?

From the day when battery-run voices began broadcasting old speeches to battery-run listeners, the beast has been talking to itself. Having swallowed everyone and everything outside itself, the beast becomes its own sole frame of reference. It entertains itself, exploits itself and wars on itself. It has reached the end of its Progress, for there is nothing left for it to progress against except itself.

There's always something at least a little smug about self-reference - magazine articles about idealistic journalists, TV shows about TV actors, ironic films within ironic-er films: all this meta-media populated by thinly disguised characters making oblique inside jokes.

Turing showed that just as the uncertainties of physics stem from using electrons and photons to measure themselves, the limitations of computers stem from recursive self-reference. Just as quantum theory fell into self-referential loops of uncertainty because it measured atoms and electrons using instruments composed of atoms and electrons, computer logic could not escape self-referential loops as its own logical structures informed its own algorithms.12

It has no reference to anything other than itself. You can name the notes with the letters of the alphabet if you like but it doesnt change anything. Oddly, they are not abstractions. Is music as we know it complete? In what sense? Are there classes such as major and minor we've yet to discover?

The reference to himself in the third person is indicative of the state of de Valera's ego at this period.

One of the most famous paradoxes ever articulated is often known by the title 'the liar's paradox'. At its simplest you can express it just by saying: 'I am lying'. The liar's paradox is a complicated business, discombobulating to think about because after all, if I'm lying, then my statement 'I am lying' must itself be a lie, unless I was actually telling the truth, in which case I would have been telling a lie.

Recursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes "it" the subject of the text. Minimalism's even worse, emptier, because it's a fraud: it eschews not only self-reference but any narrative personality at all, tries to pretend there "is" no narrative consciousness in its text. This is so fucking American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it. -Interview with Larry McCaffery (1993)

He was becoming aware that there was no such thing as over-the-top with Lawrence Davenport, as long as you were talking to Lawrence Davenport about Lawrence Davenport.

Russell's point is that if the set is a member of itself, then by definition it can't be a member of itself. But if it is not a member of itself, then it is a member of itself. So it is both a member of itself and not a member of itself. And that is a contradiction. This glaring mistake, allegedly, left Frege a broken man.

Native American" is a politically correct creation of clueless white people who feel better using it, when in reality the Native Americans refer to themselves as Indians and snicker at those of us who don't, but I digress).

Robert Burns was never called Rabbie or Robbie—though he did occasionally call himself Spunkie.

When a field becomes too self-referential and cut off from reality, it runs the risk of becoming irrelevant. It is often dissatisfaction with the rigidity of domains that makes great creative advances possible.

Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating.