I Am a Strange Loop

Page 26 abstractions are central…in the study of the brain… See [Treisman], [Minsky 1986], [Schank], [Hofstadter and FARG], [Kanerva], [Fauconnier], [Dawkins], [Blackmore], and [Wheelis] for spellings-out of these abstract ideas.

Page 27 Just as the notion of “gene” as an invisible entity that enabled… See [ Judson].

Page 27 and just as the notion of “atoms” as the building blocks… See [Pais 1986], [Pais 1991], [Hoffmann], and [Pullman].

Page 28 Turing machines are…idealized computers… See [Hennie] and [Boolos and Jeffrey].

Page 29 In his vivid writings, Searle gives… See Chapter 22 of [Hofstadter and Dennett].

Page 29 one particular can that would “pop up”… In his smugly dismissive review [Searle] of [Hofstadter and Dennett], Searle states: “So let us imagine our thirst-simulating program running on a computer made entirely of old beer cans, millions (or billions) of old beer cans that are rigged up to levers and powered by windmills. We can imagine that the program simulates the neuron firings at the synapses by having beer cans bang into each other, thus achieving a strict correspondence between neuron firings and beer-can bangings. And at the end of the sequence a beer can pops up on which is written ‘I am thirsty.’ Now, to repeat the question, does anyone suppose that this Rube Goldberg apparatus is literally thirsty in the sense in which you and I are?”

Page 30 Dealing with brains as multi-level systems… See [Simon], [Pattee], [Atlan], [Dennett 1987], [Sperry], [Andersen], [Harth], [Holland 1995], [Holland 1997], and the dialogue “Prelude… Ant Fugue” in [Hofstadter 1979] or in [Hofstadter and Dennett].

Page 31 such as a column in the cerebral cortex… See [Kuffler and Nicholls].

Page 31 I once saw a book whose title was “Molecular Gods…” This was [Applewhite].

Page 31 to quote here a short passage from Sperry’s essay… Taken from [Sperry].

Page 32 taken from “The Floor”… See [Edson], which is a thin, remarkably vivid, highly surrealistic, often hilarious, and yet profoundly depressing collection of prose poems.

Page 33 such macroscopic phenomena as friction… A beautiful and accessible account of the emergence of everyday phenomena (such as how paper tears) out of the surrealistically weird quantum-mechanical substrate of our world is given in [Chandrasekhar].

Page 34 quarks, gluons, W and Z bosons… See [Pais 1986] and [Weinberg 1992].

Page 35 Drastic simplification is what allows us to…discover abstract essences… See [Kanerva], [Kahneman and Miller], [Margolis], [Sander], [Schank], [Hofstadter and FARG], [Minsky 1986], and [Gentner et al.].

Page 38 641, say… I chose the oddball integer 641 because it plays a famous role in the history of mathematics. Fermat conjectured that all integers of the form are prime, but Euler discovered that 641 (itself a prime) divides , thus refuting Fermat’s conjecture. See [Wells 1986], [Wells 2005], and [Hardy and Wright].

Page 41 Deep understanding of causality… See [Pattee], [Holland 1995], [Holland 1997], [Andersen], [Simon], and Chapter 26 of [Hofstadter 1985].

Page 45 The Careenium… Chapter 25 of [Hofstadter 1985] is a lengthy Achilles–Tortoise dialogue spelling out the careenium metaphor in detail.

Page 49 The effect…was explained…by Albert Einstein… See [Hoffmann] and [Pais 1986].

Page 49 From this perspective, there are no simmballs, no symbols… This view approaches the extreme reductionist philosophy expressed in [Unger 1979] and also in [Unger 1979].

Page 52 Why does this move to a goal-oriented — that is, teleological — shorthand… See [Monod], [Cordeschi], [Haugeland 1981], and [Dupuy 2000].

Page 53 In the video called “Virtual Creatures” by Karl Sims… This is found easily on the Web.

Page 53 a strong pressure to shift …to the goal-oriented level of cybernetics… See [Dupuy 2000], [Monod], [Cordeschi], [Simon], [Andersen], and Chapter 11 in [Hofstadter and Dennett], which discusses a trio of related “isms” — holism, goalism, and soulism.