GEB

Cognitive scientist and scholar, Douglas Hofstadter, asks the difficult question, How does the “self” come out of things that don’t have a self? In other words, how do all these primitive things that make up all of us such as carbon, proteins, atoms, and molecules—how do all these things go from meaningless to developing into an entity that can refer to itself? How do you get to “I” when all the stuff we are made up of doesn’t have meaning or self-awareness? You probably have heard the famous phrase from Rene Descartes who said, “Cogito, ergo sum” which means “I think, therefore I am.” How does one get there built upon things that seem to have no meaning whatsoever?

Hofstadter wrote a difficult book to undertake this question called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid that dives deep into this question. What he first saw was take the simple math equation of:

2 + 2 = 4

But these are symbols that we have all agreed upon and assigned meaning to. There are lots of ways to show the exact same thing. For example:

— — p — — q — — — —

Or you can look at it through Set Theory

∃ x ∀

Which simply means “there exist” and “x” “for any”

The point is that there are so many ways to interpret the basic math problem of 2+2. In mathematics, however, there are ways to have these formulas such as the ones listed above that can self-reference themselves much like how atoms and proteins form together for humans to refer to themselves.