Gödel, Escher, Bach An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter

the CltIes represent not only the elementary symbols, such as those for "grass", "house", and "car", but also symbols which get ...

wildly they deviate from them. Dreams are perhaps just such random meanderings about the ASU's of our minds. Locally, they make ...

"Stoliarny Lane" (or "Place"). This was the choice of translator number 2, who gave the translation as "Stoliarny Place". What a ...

mer wrote in a machine language, the other in a compiler language. Are two such programs comparable? Certainly. But how to compa ...

High-Level Comparisons between Brains Now our question must be investigated in the case of brains. In this case, we are asking, ...

kind of goal we will be striving for in a chunked description, then it is easy to see what kinds of troubles we will run up agai ...

whom the work is new. Presumably, a high-level reading of the Crab's brain state would reveal the potential thrill (and conditio ...

explanation of the mechanism which does the perceiving of all the active symbols, if it is not covered by what we have described ...

Subsystems and Shared Code Typical subsystems might be those that represent the people we know intimately. They are represented ...

tions in him of representations in me of representations in him of one thing and another. If mutual friends figured in the tale ...

Of course, this does not elevate consciousness or awareness to any "magical", nonphysical level. Awareness here is a direct effe ...

question: there is, we recognize, an infinity here, but it is not an infinite regress in the bad sense, for it is the questions ...

machine for the purposes of our discllssion, no matter how it was constructed. We should say, rather, that he had C1Tated a mind ...

Aria with Diverse Variations Achilles has been unable to sleep these past few nights. His friend the Tortoise has come over toni ...

play one or another of these thirty variations. Consequently (and somewhat ironically) the variations became attached to the nam ...

that point, the name "Goldberg Variations" will start to shift slightly in meaning, to include not only the known ones, but also ...

Achilles: But please don't let me dIstract you from your story. Tortoise: Oh, yes-as I was saying, in 1742, a certain mathematic ...

Achilles: Very well-but what does "sufficiently large" mean? Tortoise: It means that some finite number of odd numbers may fail ...

Achilles: I think you should call it the "Achilles property". After all, I suggested the problem. Tortoise: I was just about to ...

recognizable property of any even number, since I know how to test for its presence-just embark on a search. It will automatical ...