I Am a Strange Loop

atomes crochus, avoir des (“having hooked atoms”), as French for interpersonal chemistry

atoms as abstract entities

audio feedback; pitch of; vanilla loop in

Aurélie, straying wife

Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit (Schweitzer)

Austen, Jane

Austranius

authority, arguments by

Avogadro’s number

awareness: of dance of symbols; levels of, compared; see also consciousness, perception

axioms: analogous to seeds in recursion; as top lines of PM proofs

B

b (Berry’s number)

Babbage, Charles

baby: impoverished perceptual system of; lack of self at birth or conception

Bach, Johann Sebastian; cantata by; organ music by; tricentennial birthday party for

“bachelor”, elusiveness of concept

bad-breath analogy

bandwidth of communication as determinant of degree of interpenetration

banishment of toy guns from household

barber paradox

barberry jelly

“bare” strange loop of selfhood

barking, reverberant

Bartók, Béla; violin concerto # 2

baseball and football sensations swapped

Baskerville, John

basketball: skill in, as part of self-symbol; unpredictability of, when tossed

Beardsley, Dick

beauty, as bedrock cause for humans

“because” coinciding with “although”

Bechet, Sidney

beer cans and ping-pong balls as substrate for thinking

bees, swarm of, opposing caged-bird metaphor

Beethoven, Ludwig van

behaviors, attempted and evaluated

being: in two places at the same time; at two times in the same place

being someone else: economy-class version; with a “foreign accent”

beings: defined as systems having representational universality; modeling other beings

belief: as experienced by a zombie; shared by two people

believability of The True View

Berkeley, University of California at

Bernstein, Jeremy

Berry, G. G.

Berry’s paradox: as breeding ground for Gödel’s theorem; as formalized by Chaitin; as strange-loop candidate

Bierce, Ambrose

“Bigger they are, harder they fall”

bile, single-edged or double-edged

biologists paying attention to informational rather than physical level of genes

birds saved by young Schweitzer

black-and-white smudges: as early teleportation technology; as soul-shards

black-belt maneuver by Gödel

“black holes” in video feedback

bleu blanc rouge (colors of the French flag)

blocked infinite regress

blood, nonexperienced quale of

“blooming, buzzing confusion” (Wm. James)

Bloomington, Indiana

blue humpback

blueprint used in self-replicating machine

blurriness of everyday concepts

boat with endless succession of leaks

bodies vs. souls

body parts initiate self-representation

Bohr atom, as stepping stone en route to quantum mechanics

Bohr, Niels

boiling water, reliability of

Bonaparte, see Napoleon

bon mots: by Carol Hofstadter; by David Moser

“Book of nature written in mathematics” (Galileo)

Boole, George

boot-removal analogy

boundaries between souls, blurriness of

boundaries, macroscopic, as irrelevant to particles

box with flaps making loop

Brabner, George

brain activity: hiddenness of substrate of; modeled computationally; need for high-level view of; obviousness of high-level view of

brain-in-vat scenario

brain research, nature of

brain-scanning gadgets

brain structures

brains: compared to hearts; complexity of, as relevant to consciousness; controlling bodies directly vs. indirectly; eerieness of; evolution of; as fusion of two half-brains; as inanimate; inhabited by more than one “I”; interacting via ideas; main; as multi-level systems; not responsible for color qualia; perceiving multiple environments simultaneously; receiving sensory input directly or indirectly; resembling inert sponges; unlikely substrate for interiority

Braitenberg, Valentino

bread becoming a gun

Brown, Charlie

Brownian motion

Brünn, Austria (birthplace of Kurt Gödel)

buck stopping at “I”

Bugeaud, Yann

bunnies as edible beings

“burstwise advance in evolution” (Sperry)

Bushmiller, Ernie

butterflies: not respecting precinct boundaries; in orchard, as metaphor for human soul

Buzzaround Betty

C

caged-bird metaphor; as analogous to Newtonian physics; hints at wrongness of; as ingrained habit; at level of countries and cultures; metaphors opposed to; normally close to correct; as reinforced by language; temptingness of

Cagey’s doubly-hearable line

cake whose pieces all taste bad, as inferrred by analogy

candles

cantata aria

Cantor, Georg

capital punishment

Capitalized Essences; canceled

careenium; growing up; self-image of; two views of; unsatisfactory to skeptics

Carnap, Rudolf

Carol-and-Doug: as higher-level entity; joint mind of; shared dreads and dreams of

Carolness, survival of

Carol-symbol in Doug’s brain: being vs. representing a person; triggerability of

cars: as high-level objects; pushed around by desires

Cartesian Eggo

Cartesian Ego; as commonsensical view; fading of

Cartesian Ergo

Cartier-Bresson, Henri

Caspian Gemstones, allegory of

casual façade as Searlian ploy

Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger)

categories and symbols; see also repertoires