[b]Douglas Hofstadter
The Strange Loop phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through levels of some hierarchial system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.[/b]
You know, like in Cube.
Perhaps the problem is the seeming need that people have of making black-and-white cutoffs when it comes to certain mysterious phenomena, such as life and consciousness. People seem to want there to be an absolute threshold between the living and the nonliving, and between the thinking and the “merely mechanical.” But the onward march of science seems to force us ever more clearly into accepting intermediate levels of such properties.
Imagine then not actually being dead and not actually being alive.
Enormous numbers of people are taken in, or at least beguiled and fascinated, by what seems to me to be unbelievable hocum, and relatively few are concerned with or thrilled by the astounding-yet true-facts of science, as put forth in the pages of, say, Scientific American.
Not only that but they voted for Trump.
For 13 to be unlucky would require there to be some kind of cosmic intelligence that counts things that humans count and that also makes certain things happen on certain dates or in certain places according to whether the number 13 ‘is involved’ or not.
Not only that but why 13? Why not 17?
The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.
The subjunctive shit for example.
No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over… the Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth.
This being an example of that.