Strange Loops

This is a post I wrote two months ago and, it appears, failed to publish. Please delight in the following:

I've been reading (little by very little) Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. It's about...hm. How do I summarize? Well, I've been telling people that it's about the nature and source of sentient intelligence, but I'm not sure how useful that summary is. It'll have to do, I guess. Doug's core argument is that intelligence and/or self-awareness is caused by something called "strange loops," and he goes into extensive detail explaining what he means by that.

Escher, for the uninitiated, was an artist that drew things like neverending staircases, waterfalls that feed themselves, "evolutionary" fractals, and hands that draw themselves out of paper. Gödel was the mathematician that, during his time, broke the brains of all the other mathematicians by sort of inventing the mode of thinking that is necessary to understand "strange loops." And then Bach was possibly the most profoundly brilliant musician ever, and somehow his music directly or indirectly illustrates almost all the principles that Doug feels like talking about.

So I've been reading this book, and then today see this xkcd comic:


There should be a little blurb of text that comes up if you leave your mouse over the image, but if it fails to do so, this is what it says: "If you actually do this, what really happens is Douglas Hofstadter appears and talks to you for eight hours about strange loops." I laughed out loud.