Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

When the cow gives blood
and the Christ is born
we must all eat sacrifices.
We must all eat beautiful women.

Can a self, a soul, a consciousness, an “I” arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here? If it cannot, then how can we understand this baffling emergence?

Deep down, a human brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles, on a higher level it is a network of abstractions than we call “symbols” The most central complex symbol in your or mine is the one we both call “I”. An “I’ is a strange loop in a brain where symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down, with symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained paradoxical ability to push particles around rather than the reverse.

For each human being, this “I” seems to be the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real – or is our “I” merely a convenient fiction? Does an “I” exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics?

How do we mirror other beings inside our mind? Can many strange loops of different “strengths inhabit one brain? If so, then a hallowed tenet of our culture – that one human brain houses one human soul – is an illusion.

"If you understand this world, this world is just like it is. If you don't understand this world, this world is just like it is."

Gödel was a convinced theist. He rejected the notion that God was impersonal. He believed firmly in an afterlife, stating: “I am convinced of the afterlife, independent of theology. If the world is rationally constructed, there must be an afterlife."[15] He said about Islam: “I like Islam: it is a consistent [or consequential] idea of religion and open-minded."[16]

Albert Einstein was also living at Princeton during this time. Gödel and Einstein subsequently developed a strong friendship, and were known to take long walks together to and from the Institute for Advanced Study. The nature of their conversations was a mystery to the other Institute members. Economist Oskar Morgenstern recounts that toward the end of his life Einstein confided that his "own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely…to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel".[8]

On December 5, 1947, Einstein and Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam, where they acted as witnesses. Gödel had confided in them that he had discovered an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution, one that would allow the U.S. to become a dictatorship. Einstein and Morgenstern were concerned that their friend's unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his chances. Fortunately, the judge turned out to be Phillip Forman. Forman knew Einstein and had administered the oath at Einstein's own citizenship hearing. Everything went smoothly until Forman happened to ask Gödel if he thought a dictatorship like the Nazi regime could happen in the U.S. Gödel then started to explain his discovery to Forman. Forman understood what was going on, cut Gödel off, and moved the hearing on to other questions and a routine conclusion.[9][10]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del

[edit] Themes
GEB contains many instances where objects and ideas speak about or refer back to themselves (cf. recursion and self-reference). For instance, TNT is an illustration of Gödel's incompleteness theorem. There is also a phonograph which destroys itself by playing a record entitled "I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X" (this being an analogy to Gödel's incompleteness theorem), an examination of canon form in music, and a discussion of Escher's lithograph of two hands drawing each other. To describe such self-referencing objects, Hofstadter coins the term "strange loop", a concept he examines in more depth in his follow-up book I Am a Strange Loop.

To escape many of the logical contradictions brought about by these self-referencing objects, Hofstadter discusses Zen koans. He attempts to show the reader how to perceive reality outside the normal confines of their own experience and embrace such paradoxical questions by rejecting the premise — a strategy also called "unasking".