reply on: How has the meaning of life changed for you as you've gotten older? \ stacker news ~FiresidePhilosophy

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340 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 4 Apr freebie \ parent \ on: How has the meaning of life changed for you as you've gotten older? FiresidePhilosophy

was left with the impression that the meaning of life is kind of self-referential

I got the same impression from Gödel, Escher, Bach.

Unfortunately, I stopped reading it at some point. It's a pretty large book with 777 pages. But I really liked it. Funnily, I bought the book for a very dumb reason in hindsight: I heard it contained a proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorem and thus I started reading it as part of my preparation for an exam about logic. That was definitely neither efficient nor effective but it sucked me in. Maybe it just got too thought-provoking so I forgot to continue it, lol.

I really liked the concept of strange loops and that there were a surprising amount of computer science elements in it:

To describe such self-referencing objects, Hofstadter coins the term "strange loop"—a concept he examines in more depth in his follow-up book I Am a Strange Loop. To escape many of the logical contradictions brought about by these self-referencing objects, Hofstadter discusses Zen koans. He attempts to show readers how to perceive reality outside their own experience and embrace such paradoxical questions by rejecting the premise—a strategy also called "unasking".

Elements of computer science such as call stacks are also discussed in Gödel, Escher, Bach, as one dialogue describes the adventures of Achilles and the Tortoise as they make use of "pushing potion" and "popping tonic" involving entering and leaving different layers of reality. The same dialogue has a genie with a lamp containing another genie with another lamp and so on. Subsequent sections discuss the basic tenets of logic, self-referring statements, ("typeless") systems, and even programming. Hofstadter further creates BlooP and FlooP, two simple programming languages, to illustrate his point.

I think you and @elvismercury would enjoy it. I need to read it from the start again, it's been too long.

6 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 4 Apr

That was definitely neither efficient nor effective but it sucked me in.

Counterpoint: GEB is the most effective / efficient way you can possibly learn about the incompleteness theorem, because it's the most effective way to understand why it could possibly be interesting or pertinent to anything whatsoever. At least, that's how I found it.

I think you and @elvismercury would enjoy it. I need to read it from the start again, it's been too long.

I was just thinking of this, too. The idea I'm toying with is: what if I took an entire year to read this fucking thing all the way through, and do the exercises, etc?

But then I thought: if I was going to devote 300 hours to a project, is this the project?

And then I got depressed and stopped thinking about it.