existence: our deep and almost ineradicable sense of possessing a unique
"I"-ness transcending our physical bodies and mysteriously enabling us to
exercise something we call "free will", without ever quite knowing just what
that is. Dan and I used stories and dialogues from a motley crew of
excellent writers, and one of the pleasures for me was that I finally got to see
my Einstein-book dialogue in print, after all.
During the years 1981-1983, I had the opportunity to write a monthly
column for Scientific American, which I called "Metamagical Themas" (an
anagram of "Mathematical Games", the title of the wonderful column by
Martin Gardner that had occupied the same slot in the magazine for the
preceding 25 years). Although the topics I dealt with in my column were,
on their surface, allover the map, in some sense they were unified by their
incessant quest for "the essence of mind and pattern". I covered such things
as pattern and poetry in the music of Chopin; the question of whether the
genetic code is arbitrary or inevitable; strategies in the never-ending battle
against pseudo-science; the boundary between sense and nonsense in
literature; chaos and strange attractors in mathematics; game theory and the
Prisoner's Dilemma; creative analogies involving simple number patterns;
the insidious effects of sexist language; and many other topics. In addition,
strange loops, self-reference, recursion, and a closely related phenomenon
that I came to call "locking-in" were occasional themes in my columns. In
that sense, as well as in their wandering through many disciplines, my
"Metamagical Themas" essays echoed the flavor of GEB.
Although I stopped writing my column in 1983, I spent the next year
pulling together the essays I'd done and providing each of them with a
substantial "Post Scriptum"; these 25 chapters, along with eight fresh ones,
constituted my 1985 book Metama[Sical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind
and Pattern. One of the new pieces was a rather zany Achilles-Tortoise
dialogue called "Who Shoves Whom Around Inside the Careenium?", which
I feel captures my personal views on self, soul, and the infamous "I "-word -
namely, "I"! - perhaps better than anything else I've written - maybe even
better than GEB does, though that might be going too far.
For several years during the 1980's, I was afllicted with a severe case of
"ambigrammitis", which I caught from my friend Scott Kim, and out of
which came my 1987 book Ambigrammi. An ambigram (or an "inversion", as
Scott calls them in his own book, Inversions) is a calligraphic design that
manages to squeeze two different readings into the selfsame set of curves. I
found the idea charming and intellectually fascinating, and as I developed
my own skill at this odd but elegant art form, I found that self-observation
gave me many new insights into the nature of creativity, and so Ambigrammi,
aside from showcasing some 200 of my ambigrams, also features a text - in
fact, a dialogue - that is a long, wandering meditation on the creative act,
centered on the making of ambigrams but branching out to include musical
composition, scientific discovery, creative writing, and so on. For reasons
not worth going into, Ambigrammi: Un microcosmo ideate per lo studio della
creativittl was published only in Italian and by a tiny publisher called Hopeful
Monster, and I regret to say that it is no longer available.Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-19