Word: del
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...book was called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid--Gödel being the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel; Escher, the fantastical Dutch artist M.C. Escher; and Bach, the Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach. The extraordinary mind that braided these three figures together in one book belonged to one Douglas Hofstadter, a physics Ph.D. who was only 34 years old at the time. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for Gödel, Escher, Bach, and it went on to become a cult classic that influenced a generation of thinkers. Since then Hofstadter has published on numerous subjects...
Those themes--recursive loops and the physical origins of consciousness--get braided together in I Am a Strange Loop in unexpected ways. The book returns to a theme that Hofstadter first sounded in Gödel, Escher, Bach: exploring the nature of the human mind through the work of Gödel, who demonstrated in 1931 that conventional mathematics, which we think of as a supremely logical and consistent system, is actually capable of making all sorts of strange, paradoxical, self-referential statements about itself. For example, Gödel discovered there are mathematical statements that, while true, can never be proved...
Hofstadter sees in Gödel's work a structural parallel to the mystery that is the human mind. The brain, which is merely a squishy agglomeration of madly firing neurons, shouldn't by rights be able to think--it shouldn't be able to wake up, twist around, become aware of itself, and in doing so become an "I," but it does. Just like Gödel's mathematics, the mind is a strange, self-referential loop--it's a mirage, Hofstadter writes, but "a very peculiar kind of mirage ... a mirage that perceived itself, and of course it didn...
...those recursive, self-referential arguments Hofstadter is so fond of. When I saw it, I was struck not just by how beautiful it was but also by the fact that I'd seen it before: it was made by my sister, who was so deeply inspired by Gödel, Escher, Bach 28 years ago. Purely by chance, it was given to Hofstadter for Christmas one year, and he photographed it and put the picture in his book. I told Hofstadter, who loves this kind of spectacular oddity--it's evidence, maybe, that something of his mental pattern made...
...Freedom Fighters: The Spanish Civil War on Film.†The film series marks the 71st anniversary of the conflict. Comprised of factual and fictional films, it includes dramatic renderings of the civil war, such as “Pan’s Labyrinth†director Guillermo del Toro’s “El Espinazo del Diablo†(“The Devil’s Backboneâ€) as well as documentaries such as “El Perro Negro: Stories from the Spanish Civil War†and “The Good...