Metamagical themas : questing for the essence of mind and pattern : Hofstadter, Douglas R., 1945- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Includes bibliographical references (pages 802-819) and index

pt. 1. 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

pt. 2. 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

pt. 3. 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

pt. 4. 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

pt. 5. 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

pt. 6. 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

pt. 7. Sanity and survival -- 30. Dilemmas for supperrational 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"?

Includes articles, many of which originally appeared in Scientific American, on memes, innumeracy, William Safire, Frederic Chopin, Rubik's Cube, strange attractors, Lisp, Heisenburg's uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics, Alan Turing, sphexishness, Prisoner's dilemma, and other topics