Description
Book SynopsisHofstadter's collection of quirky essays is unified by its primary concern: to examine the way people perceive and think.
Table of Contents* Introduction Snags and Snarls * On Self-Referential Sentences * Self-Referential Sentences: A Follow-Up * On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures * Nomic: A Self-Modifying Game Based on Reflexivity in Law Sense and Society * World Views in Collision: The Skeptical Inquirer versus the National Enquirer * On Number Numbness * Changes in Default Words and Images, Engendered by Rising Consciousness * A Person Paper on Purity in Language Sparking and Slipping * Pattern, Poetry, and Power in the Music of Frdric Chopin * Parquet Deformations: A Subtle, Intricate Art Form * Stuff and Nonsense * Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity * Metafont, Metamathematics, and Metaphysics Structure and Strangeness * Magic Cubology * On Crossing the Rubicon * Mathematical Chaos and Strange Attractors * Lisp: Atoms and Lists * Lisp: Lists and Recursion * Lisp: Recursion and Generality * Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Spirit and Substrate * Review of Alan Turing: The Enigma * A Coffeehouse Conversation on the Turing Test * On the Seeming Paradox of Mechanizing Creativity * Analogies and Roles in Human and Machine Thinking * Who Shoves Whom Around Inside the Careenium? * Waking Up from the Boolean Dream, or Subcognition as Computation Selection and Stability * The Genetic Code: Arbitrary? * Undercut, Flaunt, Pounce, and Mediocrity: Psychological Games with Numbers * The Prisoners Dilemma Computer Tournaments and the Evolution of Cooperation Sanity and Survival * Dilemmas for Superrational Thinkers, Leading Up to a Luring Lottery * Irrationality Is the Square Root of All Evil * The Tale of Happiton * The Tumult of Inner Voices, or, What is the Meaning of the Word I? * Epilogue
