I Am a Strange Loop
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1 - On Souls and Their Sizes
Soul-Shards
What Is It Like to Be a Tomato?
Guinea Pig
Pig
Revulsion, Revelation, Revolution
Reversion, Re-evolution
The Mystery of Inanimate Flesh
Give Me Some Men Who Are Stouter-souled Men
Small-souled and Large-souled Humans
Hattie the Chocolate Labrador
Ollie the Golden Retriever
Where to Draw that Fateful, Fatal Line?
Interiority — What Has it, and to What Degree?
The Gradual Growth of a Soul
Lights On?
Post Scriptum
CHAPTER 2 - This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream
What Is a “Brain Structure”?
A Simple Analogy between Heart and Brain
Can Toilet Paper Think?
The Terribly Thirsty Beer Can
Levels and Forces in the Brain
Who Shoves Whom Around Inside the Cranium?
Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics
Thinkodynamics and Statistical Mentalics
CHAPTER 3 - The Causal Potency of Patterns
The Prime Mover
The Causal Potency of Collective Phenomena
Neurons and Dominos
Patterns as Causes
The Strange Irrelevance of Lower Levels
A Hat-tip to the Spectrum of Unpredictability
The Careenium
Simmballism
Taking the Reductionistic View of the Careenium
Taking a Higher-level View of the Careenium
Who Shoves Whom Around inside the Careenium?
The Dance of the Simmballs
CHAPTER 4 - Loops, Goals, and Loopholes
The First Flushes of Desire
A Soccer Ball Named Desire
The Slippery Slope of Teleology
Feedback Loops and Exponential Growth
Fallacy the First
Fallacy the Second
Feedback and Its Bad Rap
God, Gödel, Umlauts, and Mystery
Savoring Circularity and Self-application
The Timid Theory of Types
Intellectuals Who Dread Feedback Loops
Two Video Voyages, Three Decades Apart
Diary of a Video Trip
Enigmatic, Emergent Reverberation
Feeding “Content” to the Loop
A Mathematical Analogue
The Phenomenon of “Locking-in”
Emergent New Realities of Video Feedback
CHAPTER 6 - Of Selves and Symbols
Perceptual Looping as the Germ of “I”-ness
Varieties of Looping
Reception versus Perception
Mosquito Symbols
Mosquito Selves
An Interlude on Robot Vehicles
Pondering Dogthink
The Radically Different Conceptual Repertoire of Human Beings
Episodic Memory
CHAPTER 7 - The Epi Phenomenon
As Real as it Gets
Concrete Walls and Abstract Ceilings
The Many-faceted Intellectual Grounding of Reality
No Luck, No Soap, No Dice
An Out-of-the-Blue Ode to My Old Friend Epi
No Sphere, No Radius, No Mass
Where the Buck Seems to Stop
The Prime Mover, Redux
God’s Eye versus the Careenium’s Eye
I Am Not God
CHAPTER 8 - Embarking on a Strange-Loop Safari
Flap Loop, Lap Loop
Seeking Strange Loopiness in Escher
Seeking Strange Loops in Feedback
Seeking Strange Loops in the Russellian Gloom
Mr Berry of the Bodleian
I Can’t Tell You How Indescribably Nondescript It Was!
Blurriness Buries Berry
A Peanut-butter and Barberry Sandwich
An Autobiographical Snippet
Idealistic Dreams about Metamathematics
Post Scriptum
CHAPTER 9 - Pattern and Provability
Principia Mathematica and its Theorems
Mixing Two Unlikely Ideas: Primes and Squares
Pattern-hunting
People who Pursue Patterns with Perseverance
Where There’s Pattern, There’s Reason
Sailing the Ocean of Primes and Falling off the Edge
The Mathematician’s Credo
No Such Thing as an Infinite Coincidence
The Long Search for Proofs, and for their Nature
CHAPTER 10 - Gödel’s Quintessential Strange Loop
Gödel Encounters Fibonacci
The Caspian Gemstones: An Allegory
A Tiny Spark in Gödel’s Brain
Clever Rules Imbue Inert Symbols with Meaning
Mechanizing the Mathematician’s Credo
Miraculous Lockstep Synchrony
Flipping between Formulas and Very Big Integers
Very Big Integers Moving in Lock-step with Formulas
Glimmerings of How PM Can Twist Around and See Itself
Prim Numbers
The Uncanny Power of Prim Numbers
Gödelian Strangeness
How to Stick a Formula’s Gödel Number inside the Formula
Gödel’s Elephant-in-Matchbox Trick via Quine’s Analogy
The Trickiest Step
An Elephant in a Matchbox is Neither Fish Nor Fowl
Sluggo and the Morton Salt Girl
CHAPTER 11 - How Analogy Makes Meaning
The Double Aboutness of Formulas in PM
Extra Meanings Come for Free, Thanks to You, Analogy!
Exploiting the Analogies in Everyday Situations
The Latent Ambiguity of the Village Baker’s Remarks
Chantal and the Piggybacked Levels of Meaning
Pickets at the Posh Shop
Prince Hyppia: Math Dramatica
Analogy, Once Again, Does its Cagey Thing
How Can an “Unpennable” Line be Penned?
“Not” is Not the Source of Strangeness
Numbers as a Representational Medium
CHAPTER 12 - On Downward Causality
Bertrand Russell’s Worst Nightmare
A Strange Land where “Because” Coincides with “Although”
Incompleteness Derives from Strength
Bertrand Russell’s Second-worst Nightmare
An Endless Succession of Monsters
Consistency Condemns a Towering Peak to Unscalability
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