In what 750-page tome do you get fugal themes of formal systems, Tortoise & Mr. Crab, canons of dialog, artificial intelligence, genetics, hardwired behaviors of a wasp, consciousness, records that break record players, & etchings of strange loops?
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
The obvious: a wandering, contrapuntal, conceptual interleaving of the works of mathematician Kurt Gödel, composer J.S. Bach, & artist M.C. Escher.
So, how does a man describe a book that's taken four-years to read? The beauty of the writing is the opened & changed mind of the reader. Questions, anyone?
Formal Systems
Learn TNT, the formal typographic numbering system with the power to blow itself up.
"Some programmers think Ruby is wrong, it's bad, because the programmer can blow it up," PragDave quipped during his talk at the Austin on Rails meeting.
Those high-school geometry axioms & proofs are actually meta-level statements about the system & instances of the system. You might have been taught meta-programming without realizing it.
Meta-Programming
What is data? What is executable code? This border line is a manifestation of early computer systems, where, by mechanical design, data was handled by code.
Now that we have highly abstracted, dynamic languages, such as Ruby:
What happens when the high-level language is powerful enough to reflect on & redefine itself? How do solutions change when the solution-domain expands to include introspection, extension & adaptation of pre-existing elements & structures?
Welcome to the next level:
The Paradigm of Organic Programming
and
The Corollary Paradigm of Whimsical Gem-hued Language Guides.
Recursive Themes
So what happens when you reflect, iterate & transform symbols? Patterns. Iterating structures. Recursive themes.
These are the fundamental building blocks of organisms. There is only structure upon structure upon structure upon structure, ad infinitum. At what point to these reverberant structures become conscious? When does discernment and free will become apparent?
Genetics
Late in G.E.B., we read an illustrative discussion of genetics. Those tangled networks of amino acids act the role of data, program, and factory. Deep cellular mechanisms manufacture proteins with tertiary structure of unexplainable complexity. Higher-level themes emerge from, build & support their ancestral building blocks.
Perhaps the most pervasive concept begins to crystalize:
The Strange Loop
Glossing the Details, Confusing the Reader
Our minds are build to perceive solid, so that we can survive, but the universe is really very very strange, not so solid.
Everything is so complex, we live in a constant state of discernment. Except for yoga. That's when you practice stepping out to the meta, into the infinity beyond senses.
Externals
G.E.B. @ Wikipedia
G.E.B. @ Google Book
G.E.B. @ Book People
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