Who am We?

This . . . This is . . . This is not . . . This is this this is not . . . this is . . . is this . . . not . . . is this?

How you read or interpret “this” depends on how you read it: start slowly, stop, pause and continue. Try it . Marcel Duchamp came up with this. (No, not this, this!)

Sound loopy? I agree, and, may I recommend:

� Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop
� The drawings and prints of M. C. Escher
� Kurt Godel’s On Formally Undecidable Propositions
� Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable
� A good collection of Zen Koans

Smell a rose or two today and see (be). In the words of Gertrude Stein: “A rose is a rose is a rose.” If all else fails, and no amount of roses or words avail, then just laugh, yell, think, scream, and then laugh some more and take a peek in a nearby mirror.

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In his newest book, Douglas Hofstader attempts to define the difficult-to-define, self-aware mind, the “I.” The entire volume comprises his attempt. Not that being difficult-to-define is all bad. Its being difficult-to-define has made possible exclamations like the Firesign Theater’s Radio Theater’s: Who am us, anyway?

At the close of chapter 6 Hofstadter writes:

The depth and complexity of human memory is staggeringly rich. Little wonder, then, that when a human being, possessed of such a rich armamentarium of concepts and memories with which to work, turns its attention to itself, as it inevitably must, it produces a self-model that is extraordinarily deep and tangled. That deep and tangled self-model is what “I”-ness is all about.

Douglas Hofstadter
I Am a Strange Loop

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