…but, I decided to pregame our journey’s beginning tomorrow by reading the Preface to the Twentieth-Anniversary edition of GEB. Just having finished it, I can tell you that the prospect of attacking the book’s main text is both exciting and terrifying.

There are three things, coming out of the Preface, that I want share before we get going:

1. Hofstadter talks a lot about “strange loops” in these opening pages and how they are related to an idea that he thinks arises out of Godel’s work- namely, that the “I” arises out of meaning made by finding patterns in a system of otherwise meaningless symbols (incidentelly, please feel free to correct me if this point is crude or flat out incorrect- I’m having a great deal of trouble wrapping my head around it). Turning this thought over in my mind, I began to think of it in terms of one of my great passions, both academically and recreationally- the superhero comic book. I’ll develop this thought more thoroughly later but, essentially, the mainstream superhero comic book is simply a series (in fact, several different sorts of series) of inherently meaningless symbols out of which arise patterns which create meaning- the only reason that, for instance, the Bat Signal is effective is because when Commisioner Gordon points at the sky, Batman shows up. This becomes particularly interesting when talking about characters whose symbols are taken from elsewhere and are meaningful not only through their association with that character but also with whatever pattern from whence their meaning originally comes. In other words, Captain America (whose spandex is literally referred to as “the flag” in the comics) might have something really interesting to say about GEB.

2. Something else I saw as I was reading (in a manner not dissilimair from the way Hofstadter talks about M.C. Escher entering the work) were ideas that I had been dealing with in a class I just took on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics. Again, this is a thought that needs further developing, but I have a feeling that concepts like Aristotelian motion are going to be a useful lens through which to view some things that we come across. Interestingly, Hofstadter himself seems to implicitly reject the notion of being-at-work-staying-itself in the preface’s final section.

3. The following dialogue comes from the Coen Brothers’ film A Serious Man, which I saw earlier today:

Clive Park: Uh, Dr. Gopnik, I believe the results of physics mid-term were unjust.
Larry Gopnik: Uh-huh, how so?
Clive Park: I received an unsatisfactory grade. In fact: F, the failing grade.
Larry Gopnik: Uh, yes. You failed the mid-term. That’s accurate.
Clive Park: Yes, but this is not just. I was unaware to be examined on the mathematics.
Larry Gopnik: Well, you can’t do physics without mathematics, really, can you?
Clive Park: If I receive failing grade I lose my scholarship, and feel shame. I understand the physics. I understand the dead cat.
Larry Gopnik: You understand the dead cat? But… you… you can’t really understand the physics without understanding the math. The math tells how it really works. That’s the real thing; the stories I give you in class are just illustrative; they’re like, fables, say, to help give you a picture. An imperfect model. I mean - even I don’t understand the dead cat. The math is how it really works. (via IMDB)