How "Strange Loops" Ignite Math, Art, & You 

0:00 The Central Idea 3:25 Book Background 6:22 Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem 11:57 M.C. Escher 15:11 Johann Sebastian Bach 19:00 Bringing the 3 Together 21:18 My Meandering Thoughts

The second you said, 'Self-awareness is recursive, like a mental fractal,' you hit on one of the key takeaways of my own work. I've put together a theory, a simple one that's way too long in print, of information/language. It basically proposes that everything we attempt to describe (all concepts) can only be modeled in the same way we'd model a chaotic attractor. However, the method of modeling we use also operates technically chaotically. So you can't escape the chaos, so to speak. So any information system we create (like language) will always be chaotic. It will be recursive, fractal in abstraction, and chaotic in how its information interacts with itself. So after some rumination you get this fractal perspective where you can zoom in and out endlessly, as though you occupied a perpetual Julia set. Which is just to point out the nature of holism and reductionism and how neither seems to end but rather tug at each other. Almost as though that tugging is necessary to create information. Divergence within convergence. But most importantly, this isn't some keener theory. The theory is demonstrable and it has been demonstrated for decades know. We just didn't know what we were looking at. Where people see 'radicalism' and 'extremism' I see somebody trying to, as strange as it seems, represent a chaotic attarctor with an integer dimension (you can't; they're fractal). This seems batty but it results in accurate predictions/interpretations of behavior. Luckily, the ideological radicalism/extremism of modern-day American politics has made this so easy to see now. Where people see authoritarian, libertarian, left, and right, I see Nominal, Ordinal, Interval, and Ratio (Google it) and my explanation, while pretty bizarre ngl, is far more accurate. The theory predicted that politics would begin to split language, that 'woman' would lose definition, and then finally would demonstrate that testing how people define things would determine their 'politics' i.e. how they process information. That last one has yet to come true, but right now 'woman' is demonstrating the divide and sorting people into the precise ideological camps the theory describes: Nominals, Ordinals, Intervals, and Ratios. I'd like to explain this theory to you since I love talking about this with the few people I think can understand it. I'm particularly interested in discussing this topic with you since admittedly, my intellect isn't exactly prime and the math gets beyond me quickly. What I've put together qualifies as a meta theory, so it fuses different forms of analyses and fields of study to show that they share the same application. So I'll point out that, 'The Political Compass is actually mapping an Entropy curve,' and show how they behave the same way then explain why they do. That's the whole of the metatheory, really: mathematical (and physical) concepts that apply to political, linguistic, social, and philosophical areas that most would consider separate. Once I noticed that these patterns were all aspects of chaotic attractors, it all just clicked. So nobody has to be a scholar in any of these areas to notice the pattern I'm describing, both in abstraction but then applied to real life. So you get a model i.e. a set of relationships i.e. a set pattern and then I show you how it comes up in all these other fields that believe they're unrelated. Instead, they're the same field just approached differently. Hence the meta is teased out and that meta would seem to be rooted in chaos. Please leave a reply, if you read this.

In understanding Existential Reality we need to have all the three types of languages. Mathematical language to understand quantity. Qualitative language to understand behaviour and things beyond mathematics. The Causal language whih explains the role purpose and entanglement of all existence. And all these three languages are to be used together and not in isolation. 🙏🙏🙏 Will listen to this episode a few times .Thank you very much for putting it up.

I'm so glad I came across your channel. These are the types of things I'd love to have conversations about but everyone I talk to doesn't express this kind of depth. Anyways thanks for the great content.

Very interesting! As a mathematical artist who follows Escher's work, I'll have to give this one a read.

I think of the loops like playing Swingball with yourself. You affect your own future from your own past, so hit the ball high, and your future self collects the ball from that curve, and hit the ball low, and your future self collects the ball from a different curve. The loop of your own thoughts could be consciousness apart from... computers use loops to so you need something else, and computer loops can create new computer loops... it still doesn't help.

This sounds very good interesting, taking a note of the book in order to read it

I think the strange loop brings to consciousness its counter-intuitive architecture - its strangeness; but a fuller account of consciousness needs to position sensing, feeling, deciding, attending and acting within this loop.

as always great job!

Lovely and poetic re - view. Yes, it took me several go rounds to incorporate Hofstadter's info. Bach - I'd say just feel it, be with how it affects you, and don't worry about any music theory. Godel's Incompleteness theorem: Any set has true axioms that cannot be proven from inside the set. We must go outside the set to prove the extent of true axioms. I like your inclusion of the Mobius strip. The Los Angeles Museum of Science & Industry had an exhibit of a Mobius strip with a train going around - every side. I like to play a joke with Zeno's paradox of going 1/2 way, then 1/2 way infinitum, of eating desert. I'll have 1/2 the first night, then 1/2 the second day, then 1/2 on each successive day, forever! You mentioned it is One of your Ten favorite books. We'd like to hear about the others. Thanks again.

Consciousness as a mental fractal, sounds a lot like scale free intelligence:-) cool

these concepts remind me of the thoughts I had on acid. when I thought about different things I would think though the things I connected to that thing and I would always come back to the thing. everything felt like it looped back to itself.

I never really understood "this statement is false". If the statement should be evaluated as a truth claim, it should be read as "this statement, when evaluated as a truth claim, returns false", and you'll see that it's nonsensical because the sentence doesn't actually contain any truth claim to be evaluated. Otherwise if the statement should be evaluated as an assertion, it should be read as "this statement represents the value false", in which case it's true that the sentence represents the value false, which isn't a contradiction or an invitation to evaluate it as a truth claim. What am I missing here?

23:00 Here’s what closes the gap. All three of those were created by a consciousness. That’s why it tells you about consciousness. Art as an artifact of consciousness… The process of making art as an artifact of creating or making in general…

Life changing ideas. The dialogues of Achilles and the tortoise and Mu. Wow, I'll never forget that feeling of knowing my mind was expanding in real time. Have you checked out, The Mind's I, by Hofstadter and Dennet? I don't agree with everything they propose, but it's great, tough stuff to chew on.

C'était vraiment très intéressant 👍

Loveeeee thisss!!!

The whole Russel Paradox / “this statement is false” affair has always sounded so inconsequential to me, like an idea a Philosophy 101 freshman would say. Yet it’s held up as some astounding 20th century realization. It’s all so bizarre and trivial really. I think I had a similar idea to Russel back in 6th grade or something. It’s just cringe to me

His book describes complex adaptive systems and these are conscious

when I was 5 or 6 I remember experiencing this loopyness. The only way I have been able to describe it is "like a moving tesseract". I wasn't feeling v.good and perhaps I passed out... or almost died who knows! But I remember the feeling of being huge but also tiny at the same time.. I remember the feeling of being both on the inside whilst being on the outside at the same time. The experience has perplexed me ever since and I've been searching for the vocabulary to describe it... and to find people who have experienced it also. It was a dark space, peaceful, I didn't feel alone there, I felt like someone was there with me... maybe I entered the void. I'd be grateful if anyone who experienced something similar would share their thoughts by replying to this comment. I'm curious...

Thanks for your effort with this channel, very useful and helpful content, in fact, good enough, that perhaps you do not need to be quite so apologetic and self-effacing.

This is Neoplatonic!

After reading the book, I have a big dissatisfaction. The theses put forward resemble the fundamental axioms of philosophy trying to explain the origin and functioning of consciousness.

Torus

Correct, ant colonies and beehives are conscious. Not the ants, not the bees, but the ant colonies and the beehives

This is all fairy dust. Glitter. When are we going yo get serious?

By definition a paradox does not establish meaning. It is self referentially asemantic. It is decoupled from anything that would let it yield meaning. _Gödel, Escher, Bach_ is hippie nonsense. Time wasted on it could be better applied to expanding your semantic web to wisdom.