Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

The Riddle on the Universe and its Solution 276any report itself can outweigh its danger to the reader. Indeed, d preparation of our finaldraft one of us tragically succumbed.ReflectionsThis curious story is predicated upon a rather outlandish yet Intri idea: a mindarrestingproposition, one that throws any mind into a of paradoxical trance, perhaps eventhe ultimate Zen state of satori. reminiscent of a Monty Python skit about a joke so funnythat anyone hears it will literally die laughing. This joke becomes the ultimate se weaponof the British military, and no one is permitted to know m than one word of it. (Peoplewho learn two words laugh so hard t require hospitalization!)This kind of thing has historical precedents, of course, both in and in literature.There have been mass manias for puzzles, there have been dancing fits, and so on. ArthurC. Clarke wrote a short story a a tune so catchy that it seizes control of the mind ofanyone who h it. In mythology, sirens and other bewitching females can completefascinate males and thus overpower them. But what is the nature of s mythical mindgrippingpowers?Cherniak's description of the Riddle as "the Gödel sentence for human Turingmachine" may seem cryptic. It is partly explicated late his likening it to the selfreferentialparadox "This sentence is false here, a tight closed loop is formed when youattempt to decide when it is indeed true or false, since truth implies falsity, and viceversa. nature of this loop is an important part of its fascination. A look at a variations onthis theme will help to reveal a shared central mechanism underlying their paradoxical,perhaps mind-trapping, effect.One variant is: "This sentence contains threee errors." On read it, one's firstreaction is, "No, no-it contains two errors. Whoever wrote the sentence can't count." Atthis point, some readers simply walk a scratching their heads and wondering why anyonewould .rite such pointless, false remark. Other readers make a connection betweensentence's apparent falsity and its message. They think to 'themselves "Oh, it made a thirderror, after all-namely, in counting its own errors A second or two later, these readers doa double-take, when they real that if you look at it that way, it seems to have correctlycounted its errors.