GEB by Douglas Hofstadter

 P-2 ABOUT: How it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter.
What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is selfless as a stone or puddle?

GEB approaches these questions by slowly building up an analogy that likens inanimate molecules to meaningless symbols, and further likens selves (or "I"s or "souls" if you prefer--whatever it is that distinguishes animate from inanimate matter) to a certain special swirly, twisty, vortex-like, and meaningful patterns that arise only in a particular type of systems of meaningless symbols. It is these strange, twisty patterns that the book spends so much time on because they are little known, little appreciated, counterintuitive and quite filled with mystery. And for reasons that should not be too difficult to fathom, I call such strange, loopy patterns "strange loops" throughout the book, although in later chapters, I also use the phrase "tangled hierarchies" to describe basically the same idea.

[M.C. Escher not "in the loop" at the beginning of the book. Book was at first, Godel's Theorem and the Human Brain. But his amazing pictures illustrated exactly what he was writing about.]

GEB was inspired by my long-held conviction that the "strange loop" notion holds the key to unraveling the mystery that we conscious beings call "being" or "consciousness." I was first hit y this idea when, as a teen-ager, I found myself obsessedly pondering the quintessential strange loop that lies at the core of the proof of Kurt Godel's famous incompleteness theorem in mathematical logic -- a rather arcane place, one might well think to stumble across the secret behind the nature of selves and "i"'s, and yet I practically heard it screaming up at me from the pages of Nagel and Newman that this is what it was all about.

P-3. This preface is not the time and place to go into details--indeed, that's why the tome you're holding was written, so it would be a bit presumptuous of me to think I could outdo its author in just these few pages! -- but one thing has to be said straight off: the Godelian strange loop that arises in formal systems in mathematics i.e., collections of rules for churning out an endless series of mathematical truths solely by mechanical symbol-shunting without any regard to meanings or ideas hidden in the shapes being manipulated) is a loop that allows such a system to "perceive itself," to talk about itself, to become "self-aware", and in a sense it would not be going too far to say that by virtue of having such a loop, a formal system acquires a self.

Meaningless Symbols Acquire Meaning Despite Themselves

What is weird in this is that the formal systems where these skeletal "selves" come to exist are built out of nothing but meaningless symbols. The self, such as it is, arises solely because of a special type of swirly, tangled among the meaningless symbols. But now a confession I am being a bit coy when I repeatedly type the phrase "meaningless symbols" ... because a crucial part of my book's argument rests on teh idea that meaning cannot be kept out of formal systems when sufficiently complex isomorphisms arise. Meanings comes in despite one's best efforts to keep symbols meaningless!

When a system of "meaningless" symbols has pattern in it that accurately track, or mirror, various phenomena in the world, then that tracking or mirroring  imbues the symbols with some degree of meaning-- indeed, suc
h tracking or mirroring is no less and no more than what meaning is. Depending on how complex and subtle and reliable the tracking is, different degrees of meaningfulness arise. ...