Matthew Gasda is interested in “strange loops.”
This is the term cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter coined in his Pulitzer Prize–winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, to describe self-referential systems that move beyond themselves while staying on the same plane. The classic example is someone thinking about themselves. If you are thinking about yourself, you are necessarily more than the thing you are thinking about, and yet, it’s still you. Strange recursive loops like these, Hofstadter says, are where consciousness comes from. Where souls come from.
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