Word: escher
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...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...
...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...
...struggle of the mind to fathom the brain it inhabits is the most circular kind of search--the cognitive equivalent of M.C. Escher's lithograph of two hands drawing one another. But that has not stopped us from trying. In the 19th century, German physician Franz Joseph Gall claimed to have licked the problem with his system of phrenology, which divided the brain into dozens of personality organs to which the skull was said to conform. Learn to read those bony bumps, and you could know the mind within. The artificial--and, ultimately, racist--field of craniometry made similar claims...
...desperation Clem undergoes a medical procedure that wipes all traces of Joel from her memory. When Joel finds out about it, he goes to the same doctor to have Clem erased too. It's a love story, but it's also an existential head scratcher, an endless M.C. Escher escalator. Who's to say the doomed lovers haven't fallen in love and broken up before? Maybe they've loved and lost a hundred times before, like the last damn level of a video game they can't beat? The possibility opens up bottomless gulfs of self-doubt...