Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

Aimable, the village baker

“alacrity, celerity, assiduity”, etc.

Alfbert, the; dream of

Alf and Bertie’s Posh Shop

algorithmic information theory

Ali, Muhammad

Alienware machine, emulated by Macintosh

Alighieri, Dante

alignment: of PM theorems and code numbers; of truths and PM theorems; of two souls in married couple dedicated to common goals

allegoric license

“Alle Menschen Müssen Sterben” (Bach)

Alzheimer’s disease

ambiguity of operations inside computers

américain, pronunciation of the word in movie

amino acids

amplification of input in audio feedback; saturation of

analogies: central role of, in this book; as fabric of human thought; having force proportional to precision and visibility; index entries for; jumping out automatically; made by bees; as mediating reference; research on; retrieved automatically by new events; rivalry between two similar ones; seen as simmball patterns in the careenium; self-referential; as source of meaning; tossed off effortlessly; trivial-seeming examples; by W. V. O. Quine

analogies, serious examples of: between Alfbert and Whitehead/Russell; between audio and video feedback; between Aurélie and Pomponnette; between the author’s mind and others’ minds; between the author’s view of “I” and quantum mechanics; between beer cans and neurons; between brain and oil refinery; between brains and countries; between brains and PM as substrates for strange loops; between brain structures and genes or atoms; between butterfly swarms and souls; between careenium and brain; between careenium and pinball machine; between cars and dogs; between Chantal looking at movie and Russell looking at Gödel’s formula; between children with muddy boots; between cookies on same plate; between couples; between crystal and orchard; between death and eclipse; between decision-making and political elections; between dedicated machines and music boxes; between dog looking at pixels and Russell looking at Gödel’s formula; between domino chainium and traffic jam; between donning piece of clothing and identifying with someone else; between Doug and Carol; between edibility and provability; between electron clouds and human souls; between entwined video loops and entwined souls; between epiphenomena in brain and in mineral; between formula containing own Gödel number and elephant in matchbox; between gems in Caspian Sea and powers in Fibonacci sequence; between genes and novels; between Gödel’s construction and black-belt judo maneuver; between Gödel number k and Morton Salt can; between Gödel’s strange loop and video feedback; between grapplings with death and beautiful sailboat; between growing soul and accreting planetoid; between Guru and Göru; between heart and brain; between heart-shaped bread and heart on collar; between human soul and train; between “I” and dollar bill; between “I” and either “i” or “Twe”; between “I” and “Epi”; between “I” and video-feedback galaxy; between Imp and KG; between K. Gödel’s article on Principia Mathematica and G. Külot’s review of Prince Hyppia: Math Dramatica ; between Klüdgerot and Kurt Gödel; between Leafpilishness and Consciousness; between learning to be someone else and learning a foreign language; between leg-tingles and ants (and ginger ale); between life and hedge maze; between listener not relating to Bartók and magnetic field not penetrating superconductor; between mosquito and flush toilet; between mosquito and heat-seeking missile; between mosquito and red spot; between naïve careenium and young Doug; between Newtonian physics and naïve view of self; between oneself and others; between pairsons and persons; between Parfit and Einstein; between picket lines in play and outside theater; between pieces of cake; between pixel patterns and events; between PM and sinking boat; between prim numbers and prime numbers; between Principia Mathematica and invaded fortress; between quoted phrases and Gödel numbers; between recursion and plant growth; between recursive sequences of numbers and PM theorems; between robot vehicle and an ant; between Rosalyn Wadhead and Russell and Whitehead; between salt box and picture of salt box; between salt-box picture and Gödel’s self-referential trick; between saucy numbers and unpennable lines in plays; between self-reference and self-replication; between self-symbol and video feedback; between Sluggo dreaming of himself and self-quoting sentence; between “soap digest rack” spelled out in Sanskrit and Gödel’s formula spelled out in PM notation; between souledness and tallness; between Sperry’s and Gödel’s balancing acts; between strange loops and selves; between symbols in brain and books in library; between uninteresting number and Berry’s number; between universal machines and chameleonic integers; between universal machines and people; between unpennable lines and unprovable strings; between unscalability of KJ and unprovability of KG; between video feedback and iteration in complex plane; between windmill and thoughtmill; between Xerxes’ breath and Yolanda’s breath; between Y. Ted Enrustle and Whitehead and Russell

Andromeda galaxy

animacy, found in inanimate substrate

animals: killing of; self-awareness of

another soul, living inside oneself

ant: crossing property lines; rescued; Schweitzer’s personal

Antarctica, reality of

Anterselva di Mezzo

anthropomorphic language, temptation of

ants’ disrespect for property lines

“ants in my leg”

“Anything you can docan do meta”

arbitrarily extensible repertoires of categories see also concepts, symbols

arbitrarily subtle properties of whole numbers; see also universality

arbitrary mapping between stimuli and sensations

Archimedes

arithmetization of PM formulas

Arnheim, Rudi and Mary

Around the World in Eighty Days

arrangement as cause

artificial “I”, still far off

artificial intelligence; see also robots

“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”

atomes crochus, avoir des (“having hooked atoms”), as French for interpersonal chemistry

atoms as abstract entities

audio feedback; pitch of; vanilla loop in

Aurélie, straying wife

Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit (Schweitzer)

Austen, Jane

Austranius

authority, arguments by

Avogadro’s number

awareness: of dance of symbols; levels of, compared; see also consciousness, perception

axioms: analogous to seeds in recursion; as top lines of PM proofs

B

b (Berry’s number)

Babbage, Charles

baby: impoverished perceptual system of; lack of self at birth or conception

Bach, Johann Sebastian; cantata by; organ music by; tricentennial birthday party for

“bachelor”, elusiveness of concept

bad-breath analogy

bandwidth of communication as determinant of degree of interpenetration

banishment of toy guns from household

barber paradox

barberry jelly

“bare” strange loop of selfhood

barking, reverberant

Bartók, Béla; violin concerto # 2

baseball and football sensations swapped

Baskerville, John

basketball: skill in, as part of self-symbol; unpredictability of, when tossed

Beardsley, Dick

beauty, as bedrock cause for humans

“because” coinciding with “although”

Bechet, Sidney

beer cans and ping-pong balls as substrate for thinking

bees, swarm of, opposing caged-bird metaphor

Beethoven, Ludwig van

behaviors, attempted and evaluated