From the Preface to the Twentieth-anniversary

How it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle? What is an “I”, and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, “teetering bulbs of dread and dream”…?

GEB approaches these questions by slowly building up an analogy that likens inanimate molecules to meaningless symbols, and further likens selves (or “I”s or “souls”, if you prefer - whatever it is that distinguishes animate from inanimate matter) to certain special swirly, twisty, vortex-like, and meaningful patterns that arise only in particular types of systems of meaningless symbols.

The Gödelian strange loop that arises in formal systems in mathematics (i.e., collections of rules for churning out an endless series of mathematical truths solely by mechanical symbol-shunting without any regard to meanings or ideas hidden in the shapes being manipulated) is a loop that allows such a system to “perceive itself”, to talk about itself, to become “self-aware”, and in a sense it would not be going too far to say that by virtue of having such a loop, a formal system acquires a self.

Meaning cannot be kept out of formal systems when sufficiently complex isomorphisms arise. Meaning comes in despite one’s best efforts to keep symbols meaningless!

Link to the Amazon Page of the Original Book

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