Metamagical Themas

Douglas Hofstadter

Short Contents

Long Contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on the Cover
Introduction

Section I: Snags and Snarls

1. On Self-Referential Sentences
2. Self-Referential Sentences: A Follow-Up
3. On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures
4. Nomic: A Self-Modifying Game Based on Reflexivity in Law

Section II: Sense and Society

5. World Views in Collision: The Skeptical Inquirer versus the National Enquirer
6. On Number Numbness
7. Changes in Default Words and Images, Engendered by Rising Consciousness
8. A Person Paper on Purity in Language

Section III: Sparking and Slipping

9. Pattern, Poetry, and Power in the Music of Frederic Chopin
10. Parquet Deformations: A Subtle, Intricate Art Form
11. Stuff and Nonsense
12. Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity
13. Metafont, Metamathematics, and Metaphysics

Section IV: Structure and Strangeness

14. Magic Cubology
15. On Crossing the Rubicon
16. Mathematical Chaos and Strange Attractors
17. Lisp: Atoms and Lists
18. Lisp: Lists and Recursion
19. Lisp: Recursion and Generality
20. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

Section V: Spirit and Substrate

21. Review of Alan Turing.- The Enigma
22. A Coffeehouse Conversation on the Turing Test
23. On the Seeming Paradox of Mechanizing Creativity
24. Analogies and Roles in Human and Machine Thinking
25. Who Shoves Whom Around Inside the Careenium?
26. Waking Up from the Boolean Dream, or, Subcognition as Computation

Section VI: Selection and Stability

27. The Genetic Code: Arbitrary?
28. Undercut, Flaunt, Pounce, and Mediocrity: Psychological Games with Numbers
29. The Prisoner's Dilemma Computer Tournaments and the Evolution of Cooperation

Section VII: Sanity and Survival

30. Dilemmas for Superrational Thinkers, Leading Up to a Luring Lottery
31. Irrationality Is the Square Root of All Evil
32. The Tale of Happiton
33. The Tumult of Inner Voices, or, What is the Meaning of the Word "I"?

Epilogue
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

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