I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [233]
Page 283 a physical vortex, like a hurricane or a whirlpool… See Chapter 22 of [Hofstadter 1985] for a discussion of the abstract essence of hurricanes.
Page 283 every integer is the sum of at most four squares… See [Hardy and Wright] and [Niven and Zuckerman] for this classic theorem, the simplest case of Waring’s theorem.
Page 285 to see that brilliant purple color of the flower… See [Chalmers] for a spirited defense of the notion of qualia, and see [Dennett 1991], [Dennett 1998], [Dennett 2005], and [Hofstadter and Dennett], which do their best to throw a wet blanket on the idea.
Page 287 There is no meaning to the letter “b”… See the dialogue “Prelude… Ant Fugue”
(found in both [Hofstadter 1979] and [Hofstadter and Dennett]) for a discussion of how meanings at a high level can emerge from meaningless symbols at a low level.
Page 293 the notion that consciousness is a novel kind of quantum phenomenon… See [Penrose], which views consciousness as an intrinsically quantum-mechanical phenomenon, and [Rucker], which views consciousness as uniformly pervading everything in the universe.
Page 295 Taoism and Zen long ago sensed this paradoxical state… Far and away the best book I have read on these spiritual approaches to life is [Smullyan 1977], but [Smullyan 1978] and [Smullyan 1983] also contain excellent pieces on the topic. These ideas are also discussed in Chapter 9 of [Hofstadter 1979], but from a skeptical point of view.
Page 296 the story of an “I” is a tale about a central essence… See [Dennett 1992] and [Kent].
Page 298 The…self-pointing loop that the pronoun “I” involves … See [Brinck] and [Kent].
Page 299 This is what John von Neumann unwittingly revealed… See [von Neumann] for a very difficult and [Poundstone] for a very lucid discussion of self-replicating automata.
See Chapters 2 and 3 of [Hofstadter 1985] for a simpler discussion of the same ideas. Chapter 16 of [Hofstadter 1979] carefully spells out the mapping between Gödel’s self-referential construction and the self-replicating mechanisms at the core of life.
Page 300 too marbelous for words… Borrowing a few words from a love song by Johnny Mercer and Richard Whiting, sung in an unsurpassable fashion by Frank Sinatra.
Page 300 with alacrity, celerity, assiduity, vim, vigor, vitality… My father’s friend Bob Herman (a top-notch physicist who famously co-predicted the cosmic background radiation fifteen years before it was observed) loved to recite this riddle, putting on a strong Yiddish accent: “A tramp in the woods happened upon a hornets’ nest. When they stung him with alacrity, celerity, assiduity, vim, vigor, vitality, savoir-faire, and undue velocity, ‘Oh!’, he mused, counting his bumps, ‘If I had as many bumps on the left side of my right adenoid as six and three-quarters times seven-eighths of those between the heel of Achilles and the circumference of Adam’s apple, how long would it take a boy rolling a hoop up a moving stairway going down to count the splinters on a boardwalk if a horse had six legs?’ ” And so I thought I’d give a little posthumous hat-tip to Bob.
Page 305 Dan calls such carefully crafted fables ‘intuition pumps’… Dennett introduced his term “intuition pump”, I believe, in the Reflections that he wrote on John Searle’s “Chinese room” thought experiment in Chapter 22 of [Hofstadter and Dennett].
Page 308 The term Parfit prefers is “psychological continuity”… See [Nozick] for a lengthy treatment of the closely related concept of “closest continuer”.
Page 309 what Einstein accomplished in creating special relativity… See [Hoffmann].
Page 309 what a whole generation of brilliant physicists, with Einstein at their core… See [Pais 1986], [Pais 1991], and [Pullman].
Page 315 just tendencies and inclinations and habits, including verbal ones… See the Prologue for my first inklings of this viewpoint. See also my Achilles–Tortoise dialogue entitled “A Conversation with Einstein’s Brain”, which is Chapter 26 in [Hofstadter and Dennett], for more evolved ideas on it.
Page 320 Dave Chalmers explores