Gödel, Escher, Bach
* Book: Douglas Hofstadter. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
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Review
Benn Steil:
"Equal parts brain-straining, witty, and epiphanic, “GEB”—as its devotees call it—leveraged math, art, and music to illuminate a remarkable feature of reality. Though systems may appear solid and self-sustaining, they also may contain contradictions that they can never resolve from within.
Consciousness itself is such a system, Hofstadter argued. My brain constructs symbolic representations of the world, and among those symbols is a model of my brain as “myself.” But “I” am not an entity apart from my brain. The idea of “me” emerges from my own brain’s recursive symbolic activity. The self is both real and illusory: a stable experience generated by a process that can never fully explain itself.
This recursive structure, Hofstadter showed, is a source of human creativity and self-awareness. But it can also produce paralysis or collapse. I may fear something, observe that I am fearful, fear that my fearfulness is weakness, and fear that others may disdain me for it. In this case, I will have become trapped in a recursive loop in which my consciousness destabilizes my action."
(https://www.cfr.org/articles/why-rules-based-orders-fail)