Strange Loops Research Articles

Discretization as a Necessary Intellectual Function in Natural and Artificial Systems

This paper addresses the formation of discrete representations from continuous processes by intelligent systems of varying natures. It explores a range of philosophical approaches—such as monism, sensationalism, dualism, physicalism, behaviorism, cybernetics, and semiotics—that present different interpretations of how intelligence and consciousness transform continuous phenomena into discrete forms. The limitations of existing theories in articulating the mechanisms underlying this transformation are critically examined. By incorporating the concept of discretization, which is traditionally associated with digital signal processing, into interdisciplinary research on artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive sciences, the paper provides a novel perspective on the functions of both natural and artificial intelligence. Discretization emerges as a pivotal function of AI, enabling the conversion of continuous processes into discrete representations. An analogy is drawn between the discretization occurring in human consciousness and the mechanisms employed in artificial intelligence, underscoring the significance of forming discrete representations in the realms of perception and intellectual information processing. A discussion of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle within the context of discretization reveals how this process can lead to information loss and uncertainty within artificial intelligence systems. The concept of discretization has the potential to immensely enrich our understanding of information processing in human consciousness, elucidating how unique sensations and qualities of the perceived world are constructed, and how these processes relate to notions of self-organization and strange loops, as proposed by Douglas Hofstadter. Furthermore, the exploration of qualia contributes to the argument that qualia—which represent a collection of conscious, subjective experiences—must inherently include a discretization function as a fundamental aspect of organizing subjective perceptions. If this proposition holds true, then the philosophical zombie presented in Chalmers's thought experiment becomes conceptually untenable, rendering his criticisms of physicalism and materialism less convincing. This research offers new avenues for exploring the interaction between continuous and discrete phenomena, thereby proposing directions for future investigations in the philosophy of consciousness and the cognitive sciences.

Strange Loops in Design and Technology: 59th DAC Keynote Speech

Progress in engineering systems is the result of the combined improvements of technology and design methods. It is often a cyclic process, stimulated by success and failure. When the innovation loop stalls in producing effective progress, a change in paradigm is needed. Many examples populate the history of science and engineering, as well as of mankind.

THE ENDLESS ACCUMULATION OF HISTORY IN FINANCIAL TIMES

ABSTRACTThis essay engages with Amin Samman's incisive 2019 text, History in Financial Times, which unfolds a philosophy of history for contemporary “financial times.” I turn first to Samman's concept of the strange loops of financial history, and so to the historical turn initiated by the subprime crisis of 2008. Then, I add the concept of strange portraiture to Samman's idea of strange history. Borrowing a metaphor from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, I trace the oscillating appearance of the linked faces of homo historia and homo economicus, which each offer distinct explanatory frameworks “under the sign of finance.” In this way, I suggest that we can also observe how capitalism transformed the meaning and possible trajectories of something like fate from invented origins to imagined destinies. In that frame, I explore how the loops that Samman underscores are also bound to the ways in which history and economics have competed and continue to compete for ascendency as modern sense‐making epistemes with different time‐binding effects.

I am a Creative Loop: Towards Integrative Studios in Design and Creative Technologies

Feedback loops take place when the output of a system is fed back into its input, and the emergent results of this connection can be surprising and interesting as seen in video feedback art. I build here on the idea of “strange loops” developed from mathematics, neuroscience and philosophy to think about consciousness. Strange loops can be observed between the brain and mind, between the individual and society, and between thinking and doing in design. As one looks for their essence, we cross between levels of abstraction to find ourselves back where we started. I use this metaphor to define creative loops and apply them to critically examine how theory and practice co-exist in design education and research. The paper closes with two strategies to integrate theory and practice in design: by combination and by chunking.

Echo in <i>The Winter Vault</i>

The intertextuality of Anne Michaels’s The Winter Vault may be found not only in recurrent themes and images from her earlier novel, Fugitive Pieces, and her poetry, but also in the inclusion of other writers in her novel. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism, chronotopes, polyphony, heteroglossia, and the carnivalesque; John Hollander’s study of echo and transumption; and Douglas Hofstadter’s notion of “strange loops” – all offer means of understanding Michaels’s allusions and structure in her novel. They also shed light on how her writing remembers historical trauma and eventually finds redemption through language, love, and empathy. The central characters in The Winter Vault witness the devastation of Nubian villages along the Nile and Canadian villages along the St. Lawrence River. By listening closely to echoes and stories of past destruction, these characters find solace in recreating the Canadian landscape. The intertwining of characters, histories, and landscapes returns to the origins of civilization to emerge in forms of healing and post-traumatic redemption.

Strange Genre-related Loops in a Novel-Short Story: The Tension between the Genres and their Cultural Context

The goal of the current study was to examine the strange genre-related loops in the novel The Short Story Master, by Maya Arad (2009), through the tension between the two genres represented in the text and their cultural contexts. The plot of the novel tells of the professional and personal crisis of the master of the short story, who failed in his mission to write a novel. The text hints to the reader that the central conflict that moves the plot along is neither romantic nor existential, but rather genre-related, and thus the entire work is a manifestation of self-conscious literature. The focus of the discussion is on the concept of strange loops coined by Hofstadter (1979, 2007). The strange genre-related loops in the narrative are represented in three different spheres: the textual construct, the array of characters, and the perception of creative writing. Reviewing the strange genre-related loops in this work highlights the unique nature of this text, which attempts to establish itself as a short story – novel, while demonstrating an awareness of its artistic and cultural contexts.

Reciprocally-Coupled Gating: Strange Loops in Bioenergetics, Genetics, and Catalysis.

Bioenergetics, genetic coding, and catalysis are all difficult to imagine emerging without pre-existing historical context. That context is often posed as a “Chicken and Egg” problem; its resolution is concisely described by de Grasse Tyson: “The egg was laid by a bird that was not a chicken”. The concision and generality of that answer furnish no details—only an appropriate framework from which to examine detailed paradigms that might illuminate paradoxes underlying these three life-defining biomolecular processes. We examine experimental aspects here of five examples that all conform to the same paradigm. In each example, a paradox is resolved by coupling “if, and only if” conditions for reciprocal transitions between levels, such that the consequent of the first test is the antecedent for the second. Each condition thus restricts fluxes through, or “gates” the other. Reciprocally-coupled gating, in which two gated processes constrain one another, is self-referential, hence maps onto the formal structure of “strange loops”. That mapping uncovers two different kinds of forces that may help unite the axioms underlying three phenomena that distinguish biology from chemistry. As a physical analog for Gödel’s logic, biomolecular strange-loops provide a natural metaphor around which to organize a large body of experimental data, linking biology to information, free energy, and the second law of thermodynamics.

Strange loops, oedipal logic, and an apophatic ecology: Reimagining critique in environmental education

There are currently two broad forms of critique undergirding environmental education theories: the first is one of subtraction from perceived reality as it seeks to reveal and remove illusions and ideologies, while the other takes the inverse form of adding to reality in the form of investigating how matter comes to matter. We suggest a third form that explores the paradoxical and uncanny aspects of ecological awareness and assumes an apophatic, self-negating form, which short-circuits and relinquishes all attempts at epistemological closure. In this third form, we are drawing on themes from dark ecology, which maintains that ecological awareness is decidedly ‘weird’ as it assumes the guise of an ‘Oedipal’ logic, a narrative trope in which the protagonist seeking to avoid a tragic fate finds out that avoidance itself is the realization of the tragedy. Using Timothy Morton’s work as a springboard, we unpack the import of such looping temporality onto the onto-epistemological frameworks of environmental education.

Strange loops: Producing history in financial times

History in Financial Times is in many ways a book about writing, but one of the questions it leaves hanging is where the power of writing runs out. Throughout the book, I make various claims about the ability of narrative discourse to shape the temporal and historical signatures of contemporary experience, and in so doing, to produce rather than simply record or reflect the sense of development and change we expect from ‘history’. Yet when confronted with the thoughts of colleagues generous enough to take part in this forum, I am struck by the difficulty of responding to these in a way that might feel like a step forward, of writing something that pushes past the point at which History in Financial Times cuts off. Whether that is a fault of the book is not yet clear to me, although it seems equally plausible that this is one of its strengths. I will try to explain what I mean by this through a discussion of three questions that emerge in the forum, all of which strike me as not just fundamental questions, but deadlocks of a very peculiar kind - deadlocks we cannot hope to shake off, let alone answer once and for all. These relate to the contemporary status of historical discourse, financial market logics, and above all the figure of the ‘strange loop’, a conceptual device I borrow from Douglas Hofstadter (2007) and put forward as a means of reorienting the theory and philosophy of history. Before discussing each of these points in turn, it seems appropriate to offer some further, brief remarks on the contours of the book and why it departs from conventional forms of historicism in political economy.

Violins, violence, translation: looking outwards.

ABSTRACTBy taking contemporary art as a starting-point to define translation, we set off on a fascinating journey through disciplines which do not contradict each other but improve each other. Thus we can see, with this transversality among disciplines, that “each of us is a bundle of fragments of other people’s souls, simply put together in a new way” (Hofstadter 2007, 252), that we are strange loops where everything is interrelated and this gives us “a deeper and subtler vision of what it is to be human” (ibid., 361). On this journey, our aim is to find out what translation does: and what it does is, or should be, reveal those invisible worlds lying behind texts; see what texts say without saying; show the walls others have built, walls which are sometimes obvious, but at other times show the most dangerous walls, those that are not visible. Translation should be able to resist essentialisms, binary oppositions and the stagnation of the universal. Translation as a way of giving the other back the right to look.

Bruno's Score

Many of our experiences in hospice and palliative care medicine are challenging. We support dying patients and their families as they struggle with the transition from life to death and continue to support those in mourning. Many times, in America, it is difficult to even appreciate a glimmer of spiritual grace as our patients die. We easily remain stuck in the material and distance ourselves from the spiritual. Some exits are quite graceful, however. I present the case of an exceptional person, who enjoyed an exceptional life and had an exceptionally graceful dying process and death, in hopes that his story may encourage other healers as much as he inspired me. Bruno was a composer and cognitive musicologist, whose art forms of light and music simultaneously move and challenge virtually all the people and other artists he interfaced with and taught, including his talented wife and family, his friends, his acquaintances, his students, his colleagues, and his deans. He embodied theories as diverse as mathematical strange loops, continually paradoxical/recursive illusory art, contrapuntal fugues, and artificial intelligence. Bruno's spirituality was uncommonly profound. It spanned and interconnected many eclectic faith traditions, theologies, and philosophies, including Taoism, Greek mythology, distributed cognition, mathematics, and Tibetan Buddhism. It resonated strongly with Zen and Christian mysticism. Some of Bruno's being and transformation to nonbeing was obvious; some of it was inscrutable.

Strange Loops: Toward an Aesthetics for the Anthropocene

Beautiful things … act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space. … We find that we are standing in a different relation to the world than we were a mom...

Post-Non-Classical World View in the On-Screen Reality of the Digital Epoch

The article analyzes the correlation between the screen reality and the first-order reality in the digital culture. Specific concepts of the scientific paradigm of the late 20th century are considered as constituent principles of the on-screen reality of the digital epoch. The study proves that the post-non-classical cultural world view, emerging from the dynamic “chaos” of informational and semantic rows of TV programs and cinematographic narrations, is of a fractal nature. The article investigates different types of fractality of the TV content and film plots, their inner and outer “strange loops” and artistic interpretations of the “butterfly effect”.

Tristram Shandy ’s Strange Loops of Reading

In response to recent efforts to contextualize Tristram Shandy in relation to the eighteenth-century novel, this essay considers Sterne’s book as a reflexive romance. Tristram Shandy is formed of Quixotic pleasures of reading, those transitive circuits of desire that are the founding joke of Cervantes’s neo-romance, and it provokes such laughable desires in turn. By laying bare this central mechanism of romance, the circulation of desire through stories of desire, Tristram Shandy offers an entry into a centrifugal literary history organized by futurity and the strange temporalities of readerly play, which I further explore in Raymond Federman’s adaptation of Sterne.

Parasite in the system: Self-reflexivity in emerging network culture

Abstract This article aims to provide an account of self-reflexivity through recent debates that pertain to thinking about contemporary network culture. It focuses on the shifts from the mechanistic to the organic, and then towards the post-organic, pertaining particularly to current debates around an understanding of systems and structures. Although it employs a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from philosophy to mathematics, this article traces the lineage from modern art towards thinking about systems. This work is part of an ongoing research objective that is directed towards practice-based research, particularly aimed at art practice that seeks to intersect with emerging network thinking and culture. One of the intentions of this article is to consider the account of self-reflexivity towards the implication of a ‘system as the medium’ in contemporary art practice, which is found in the writing of Francis Halsall. The research is part of an agenda that seeks to explore the conditions of production in contemporary culture, as a supplement to practice-based research. This article frames the debates around self-reflexivity through the chapter entitled ‘Strange loops’ by Mark C. Taylor, which is found in his book The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (2001). It traces the lineage that Francis Halsall provides in his book Systems of Art: Art, History and Systems Theory (2008), and seeks to provide an account of self-reflexivity towards his consideration of the system as medium, found in the chapter entitled ‘Systems aesthetics and the system as medium’. In this chapter, Halsall provides an inclusive account of the medium that arguably covers the extent of contemporary art practices, through his contribution to system aesthetics. The account of self-reflexivity introduced in this article follows a parallel pathway to some of the major points in Halsall’s development of the system as medium. These include the ontologically stable modernist art object; the impact of cybernetics and information theory on art practice and discourse; and art that seeks to intersect with the environment.

Strange loops: Creative practice and philosophies of selfhood

In ‘A Creative Writing Research Methodology: New Directions, Strange Loops and Tornados’ (2009), Nicola Boyd takes the conceptual movement of Douglas Hofstadter’s Strange Loop as a model for creative research, and a plausible creative methodology. She describes the movement of a Strange Loop as a self-repeating spiral and, as a familiar sensation in creative writing, one useful as an effective metaphor for the emergence of focus in the writing process. But Boyd’s model overlooks Hofstadter’s original use of the Strange Loop as a neurological explanation for consciousness that is linked to narrative theories of selfhood. Arguably, taking an interdisciplinary focus in reading creative writing through Hofstadter could potentially serve to augment discussions of selfhood in the Creative Writing discipline. I contend that Boyd has inadvertently opened the way for a potentially rich discourse examining the involvement of self within the creative process. I question the manner in which a Strange Loop constructs self, and just how this might relate to the act of writing.

Exploring the Coordinated Management of Meaning of Sex: The Social Construction of Male College Student Logical Forces

This exploratory qualitative research study examined male college students’ narratives describing memorable sexual experiences, and how those encounters inform current sexual practices. Drawing from a larger collaborative research project, this study explores the narratives of 130 men who were attending college at one of three diverse US campuses in 2012. Utilizing a coordinated management of meaning theoretical frame we examine how sexual experiences are informed by logical forces of looped narratives that exhibit both charmed and strange loops. Findings demonstrate how men’s management of meaning regarding their sexual experiences is informed by larger expectations steeped in rigid masculine values, a major force in socially constructing sexuality.

Toward a genealogy of a cold war communication sciences: the strange loops of Leo and Norbert Wiener

A modest footnote in the mid-century annals of digital communication sciences, this article observes several strange loops in the dual biographies of Norbert Wiener, a primary founder of cybernetics – an American-born computer-compatible communication science that later took root in the Soviet Union – and his father, Leo Wiener, a Byelostock émigré who began Slavic studies in America. It proceeds in two parts: first, a biographical reflection on Norbert Wiener's method by analogy, which he first developed under his father as a youth, and second, a reflection on how Wiener's mature cybernetics combine analogy, feedback, and their contradictions ripe in biographical mind–body tensions. Among other notes, this article contends that the origins of a leading theory of digital communication may best be understood not as a disembodied abstraction of information, but rather in the messy world of biographical influences that helped usher in a cold war era of calculating communication.

Fractal Narrative, Paraspace, and Strange Loops: The Paradox of Escape in Jeff Noon’s <em>Vurt</em>

Fractal Narrative, Paraspace, and Strange Loops: The Paradox of Escape in Jeff Noon’s <em>Vurt</em>

Signs of the times: Mind, evolution, and the twilight of postmodernity

The creative imagination changes itself and the world in ways we cannot anticipate. This restless creativity gathers not just refutable facts; it hunts self-transforming revelations, semiotic prizes acclaimed and defended in the realms of inner awareness and political power. So doing, it eludes final description in any one set of signs. This means, I argue here, that sign systems must themselves give chase. Texts of this kind will not be the fixed embalmed arrays of signs and symbols that have sustained our civilizations to date. These texts will be a new kind of artificial life, creative agents that rewrite and re-express themselves on-the-fly, in ways unpredictable by their founding authors. The deconstructive turn in postmodern theory sought interpretive vistas and strange loops to be teased, once upon a time, from each embalmed text. Beyond postmodernity is an aesthetics and a critical theory of empowered texts — sign arrays never quite the same and that, like time itself, sit still for no one. After an initial push by us, they self-evolve. Human sociobiology, asking how culture rewrites the agenda of replicating genes, provides a first glimpse of this new adventure in semiotics and human self-discovery.