Looping The Loop

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There was an interesting discussion on Radio Four this morning, which referenced strange loops. A strange loop, to quote Wikipedia, is: '... a cyclic structure that goes through several levels in a hierarchical system. It arises when, by moving only upwards or downwards through the system, one finds oneself back where one started. Strange loops may involve self-reference and paradox. The concept of a strange loop was proposed and extensively discussed by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach, and is further elaborated in Hofstadter's book I Am a Strange Loop, published in 2007...'

One of those contributing to this morning's discursivities was the mathematician, Marcus du Sautoy, who admitted that he'd tried and failed to read Gödel, Escher, Bach in his youth, and only much later in his career came to realise that the book is a treatise on consciousness and the development of identity, framed in rather elliptic terms via parable and aphorism. This cognitive shift framed a fresh understanding of the text for him, years later. I have to say that the knowledge of this pleases me greatly, as I bought the book back in 1980, when the UK Penguin edition was published, and failed then and have subsequently failed to get to grips with it. I therefore find myself in august company on this one, and now don't feel so bad about my self-perceived failure, and intend to revisit the book in this renewed light.

The thing is that, as was pointed out in the discussion this morning, one can walk the same path through life iteratively, and yet at the conclusion of every single one of those iterations, nothing will be the same, despite the apparent familiarity of the context, as some new experience and knowledge will have been imparted/gleaned in the very process of treading that path. A strange loop. It would seem that Hofstadter was disappointed that his Pulitzer Prize winning tome wasn't better received by the reading public at the time, and so wrote the second in order to 'correct' the situation as he perceived it. It strikes me that, as the presenter of the programme suggested, we all find ourselves in, and indeed are, strange loops, just as Hofstadter and de Sautoy themselves met finally, metaphorically, on a convergent path of understanding.

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