This blog is about is not about a specific topic. This is about anything that I feel like sharing. Anything that enters my consciousness and loops up above a certain level of interestingness will find itself on this blog. Strange Loops is a name inspired by Douglas Hofstadter explanation of how patterns in in-animate matter (meaningless symbols) are what forms the basis of consciousness. Here is how he describes it in “I Am a Strange Loop”.
In I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter defines strange loops as follows:
And yet when I say “strange loop”, I have something else in mind — a less concrete, more elusive notion. What I mean by “strange loop” is — here goes a first stab, anyway — not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop. (pp. 101-102)
