ZenFix

A strange loop occurs when you move through the levels of a hierarchical system and arrive back where you started.

Douglas Hofstadter uses the concept of self-referential strange loops to explain the emergent property of consciousness in the books – Gödel, Escher, Bach and I Am a Strange Loop.

And yet when I say “strange loop”, I have something else in mind — a less concrete, more elusive notion. What I mean by “strange loop” is — here goes a first stab, anyway — not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop. When a system evolves to a certain level of complexity, we have the emergence of a new system that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts…the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

I think therefore I am…more than a neural network.

I see the Tao symbol (Yin Yang symbol) as an example of a strange loop. We see self-reference because there is Yang in the Yin (white in black) and vice versa. A circular motion is suggested by the symbol which represents a never ending loop of transformation.

Strange loops links:

Arts, Philosophy

    If an infinite number of random universes exist (or will exist) will our present universe repeat itself an infinite number of times?

Superstring theory can be used to describe our 4d universe (three dimensions plus time) as existing on a brane inside a higher dimension space called the bulk. Our universe is just one of an infinite number of bubbles in the 11 dimensional bulk. The collision of 2 bubbles resulted in the big bang and the creation of the universe.

So there must be an exact duplicate of you in another universe and an infinite number of permutations of you.

Parallel Universes BBC

Multiverse Wikipedia

Star Trek Next Generation Episode

Arts, Science

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For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it.

There is, however, a class of fancies of exquisite delicacy which are not thoughts, and to which as yet I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt to language.These fancies arise in the soul, alas how rarely. Only at epochs of most intense tranquility, when the bodily and mental health are in perfection. And at those weird points of time, where the confines of the waking world blend with the world of dreams.

And so I captured this fancy, where all that we see, or seem, is but a dream within a dream.

Edgar Allan Poe.

Narrated by Orson Wells on Tales of Mystery and Imagination by the Alan Parsons Project.

Arts