/lit/ - Literature

>>12005194
>hofstadter is no question some kind of genius, i tried to get through GEB a while ago, i'm sure if i could understand math i would be shilling him like there's no tomorrow. unfortunately i am a complete math brainlet (and, tbqh, a brainlet in general).

Well, brainlet to brainlet (let us celebrate our limits) I don't have the right sort of grey matter for the old numericals either tbqhwyf. For what it's worth I personally found 'I Am A Strange Loop' a much easier read and also a more succinct and less "numbery" explanation of his thesis than GEB. But as I say I'm not a numbers bot.
I'm no expert on him at all just enjoy his ideas so wouldn't be confident to elucidate the finer points and all that. I do like this quote though;

> We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck. What at first is an artificial, alien mannerism slowly fuses into the stuff of our self, like wax melting in the sun, and gradually becomes as much a part of us as ever it was of someone else (though that person may very well have borrowed it from someone else to begin with).

From IAASL.

>>12005490
Thanks for the detailed reply, you sound much more qualified to talk about Hofstadter than I to be frank m80. Appreciate the links and whatnot.

Personally (and this is probably well trod ground for this little experiment you chaps are conducting) I think it's interesting to think about his ideas in terms of the internet. Feels like a nice way of framing it is as a constantly accelerating feedback loop of sorts no? The things it feedbacks upon itself and accelerates being what we as humans feed into it, which obviously relates to Land's ideas about capital processing desire and all that gubbins. If it's possible for consciousness to arise out of self referential feedback loops.. etc

Whilst I'm at it and the associative percussive thinking is happening was wondering if Iain M Banks had been brought up at all in these here threads? I am an unashamed fanboy of his stuff, seems to be the best extrapolated scifi I've read. "The Culture" series is a lovely place to wander around. A quote for adding more frogs eyes to the broth.

>Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms?

From 'Consider Phlebas' I believe.

Anyways just rambling on and dumping brain stuff, that seems to be the game with these threads though no?
Also to enter into the "spirit" of this stream I've added a pic related.