I personally cannot imagine that consciousness will be fully understood
without reference to Godelian strange loops or level-crossing feedback
loops. For that reason, I must say, I have been surprised and puzzled that
the past few years' flurry of books trying to unravel the mysteries of
consciousness almost never mention anything along these lines. Many of
these books' authors have even read and savored GEB, yet nowhere is its
core thesis echoed. It sometimes feels as if I had shouted a deeply cherished
message out into an empty chasm and nobody heard me.
The Earliest Seeds of GEB
Why, one might wonder, if the author's aim was merely to propose a theory
of strange loops as the crux of our consciousness and the source of our
irrepressible "I "-feeling, did he wind up writing such a vast book with so
many seeming digressions in it? Why on earth did he drag in fugues and
canons? Why recursion? And Zen? And molecular biology? Et cetera ...
The truth of the matter is, when I started out, I didn't have the foggiest
idea that I would wind up talking about these kinds of things. Nor did I
dream that my future book would include dialogues, let alone dialogues
based on musical forms. The complex and ambitious nature of my project
evolved only gradually. In broad strokes, it came about this way.
I earlier alluded to my reading, as a teen-ager, of Ernest Nagel and
James R. Newman's little book COde/'s Proof Well, that book just radiated
excitement and depth to me, and it propelled me like an arrow straight into
the study of symbolic logic. Thus, as an undergraduate math major at
Stanford and a few years later, in my short-lived career as a graduate student
in math at Berkeley, I took several advanced logic courses, but to my bitter
disappointment, all of them were arcane, technical, and utterly devoid of
the magic I'd known in Nagel and Newman. The upshot of my taking these
highbrow courses was that my keen teen interest in Godel's wondrous proof
and its "strange loopiness" was nearly killed off. Indeed, I was left with such
a feeling of sterility that in late 1967, almost in desperation, I dropped out
of math grad school in Berkeley and took up a new identity as physics grad
student at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where my once-ardent
fascination with logic and metamathematics went into deep dormancy.
Several years passed, and then one day in May of 1972, while browsing
the math shelves in the University of Oregon bookstore, I stumbled across
philosopher Howard DeLong's superb book A Profile of Mathematical Logic,
took a chance on buying it, and within weeks, myoid love for the great
Godelian mysteries and all they touch on was reawakened. Ideas started
churning around like mad inside my teetering bulb of dread and dream.
Despite this joy, I was very discouraged with the way my physics studies
and my life in general were going, so in July I packed all my belongings into
a dozen or so cardboard boxes and set out on an eastward trek across the
vast American continent in Quicksilver, my faithful 1956 Mercury. Where I
was headed, I wasn't sure. All I knew is that I was looking for a new life.
P-8 Twentieth-anniversary Preface