This is a brief list of books that have influenced my thinking on my work with reasons why; I’d love to hear from the Lobsters about theirs.
Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a book about looking for the patterns and connections in things.
I swear sentences of the form “GEB is about X” are categorically wrong.
I’d at least allow for their correctness to be highly observer-dependent.
Yes! I think its more interesting to look at it as:
I swear sentences of the form “GEB is about X” reflect most on the person uttering it
Didn’t Hofstadter clarify what GEB was about in the new foreword? IIRC he said it was about “strange” self-referential loops. The three titular examples just happen to be good examples of strange loopiness.
I swear sentences of the form “GEB is about X” are categorically wrong.
I’d at least allow for their correctness to be highly observer-dependent.
Yes! I think its more interesting to look at it as:
Didn’t Hofstadter clarify what GEB was about in the new foreword? IIRC he said it was about “strange” self-referential loops. The three titular examples just happen to be good examples of strange loopiness.