Reddit mentions of Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

There's an excellent essay by Douglas Hofstadter in his Metamagical Themas collection where he discusses the nature of creativity. It's called "Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity," and I couldn't immediately find an upload online.

The entire book is certainly worth reading, but this essay in particular stood out to me.

One of the essential ideas-- that I'm paraphrasing very poorly-- is that creativity is a consequence of your brain's ability to create many hypothetical scenarios, to ask what-if, subjunctive questions.

The important corollary to that is that it's very good to have a deep understanding of many different fields and topics, because then your brain has a wide variety of conceptual objects to compare, and there's abundant opportunity for two concepts you understand to fuse into a new idea.

Based on this and some other thoughts, my current understanding of creativity and knowledge is this:

• If you learn anything well, it will help you learn many other things. Information can be transferred from vastly disparate areas, but only if you have a deep structural understanding.
  
  
• Having a wide span of knowledge immensely improves your creative capacity.
  
  Math is great, but I'm saddened by a notion held by many of professors, and many of my fellow students-- this idea that only math is great.

I can think of a few

• Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" - WHY and how whole empires fall
  
  
• Niall Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money" - How money rules the world - here's how.
  
  
• Jarred Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" - his thesis might not be entirely correct - but it's a VERY fair look at how our history was influenced by these factors.
  
  
• Bruce Bueno De Mesquita's - "The Predictioneer's Game" - - How quantitative models are SCARILY accurate
  
  
• Emanuel Derman's "Models Behaving Badly" - And how sometimes quantitative models are totally wrong.
  
  
• Paul Roberts - "The End of Oil" - Probably the most serious and balanced read on what could be one of the most important economic problems facing our modern civilization in the next 20 years.
  
  
• Frank & Cook's "Winner Take All Society" - and why things are a problem.
  
  
• Richard Florida's "The Great Reset" - Florida is a pretty good author all around - far better than some others in the pitch.
  
  
• James Bamford's amazing "Body of Secrets" - Not all our enemies are external, and sometimes our allies turn out to actually be thuggish & deadly enemies.
  
  
• Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking" - Nobody here is exactly as they appear.
  
  
• Carl Sagan's "A Demon Haunted World"
  
  
• Robin Marantz Henig's "A Monk in the Garden" - Yeah - the priest that proved Darwin's theory, in 1865.....oh yeah and he invented statistics along the way.
  
  
• Brian Sykes' "The seven Daughters of Eve"
  
  
• Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" - Every page is practically amazing - a collection of amazing old articles from Dr. H's work
  
  
• Kristina Borjesson's edit of "Into the Buzzsaw" - the hard truth about a couple of things in the US media
  
  
• Richard Dawkins' "Climbing Mount Improbable" - a great work about such an amazing idea.
  
  
• Kim Sterelny's "Dawkins vs. Gould" - this is a REAL debate about evolution!
  

Metamagical Themas, Douglas R. Hofstadter, pages 513-520.

It happened in 1983, University of Kansas in Lawrence.

Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas is also a good read. I implemented a Lisp interpreter based on three of the articles in it.

Cryptonomicon.

The Planiverse, by A. K. Dewdney.

Edit: You might like Valentina, though it's a bit dated and out of print. I read it initially in 1985(ish) and more recently got it online, used.

Much of what Stross and Egan write appeals to my CS-nature.

> Here's the problem I have with liberal arts: other people have to pay for that education.

And here is the problem I have with people in this country. We have gotten so concerned about "what other people are paying for" that we don't even stop to question if any of us are getting our money's worth, including you.

It is the collective jealousy that "someone might be getting something for nothing" or might be getting ahead of our own station that we pull each other down in a race to the bottom, and its sad, and it needs to stop.

And we're not even talking about subsidizing education here, something that many other industrialized countries have while we instead build up elite universities that other countries send their students to but our own citizens' can't fully enjoy (with the exception of the online MIT university, I will commend that).

In essence, you seem to be bitching about the fact that these programs even exist and I find that pretty shallow.

> I agree with you things such as philosophy, sociology and English. Those are majors that require work and effort to excel in. The other degrees do not.

That's simply your opinion. Speaking as someone who excelled in English yet never cared for it, appreciated the timelessness of Shakespeare supporting others pursuit of it, I actually got the most out of journalism and if I were like you I'd say all English majors are useless. But I don't actually feel that way, and if I did, I would be wrong to do so.

> At my school, the history program is the cesspool for every student that can't get into a major (where I go to the majors are competitive).

Yup, I know. CivilEng here, remember? What I found instead is that the "competitive" environment was to a certain extent BS, that cookie cutter curriculum fed by TA drones fostered a lot of people who went through the motions. It was a reasonable state school, but not everyone was learning there because it was a tired formula.

Where did I find people with a high degree of creativity? The arts.

And likely some of those students might have benefited from that as well because I blame the program, not really the students. I stepped away from it when I couldn't get what I wanted out of the program and got tired of Simon Says.

Make no mistake, I also give an equally hard time to those in the arts who question the value of higher level math and science. It cuts both ways. I'm not simply singling out.

Had the Internet not exploded when it did I would have gone back, but instead I am probably more successful as a person embracing a multi-disciplinarian approach. Besides, its not like as a civil engineer I might find enough work. We aren't maintaining our infrastructure anymore anyway... /sarcasm, in jest.

> These are people who on average aren't doing more than one hour of homework a week. No motivation or critical learning is being acquired. The only skills these people are improving on is the ability to drink heavily.

That's your problem. Stereotyping based on just your personal experiences combined with a heavy does of jealousy. No offense, but to take this position you aren't doing much critical or creative thinking yourself. What you see doesn't condemn the academic discipline, just their implementation of it.

You also would be surprised how many "dumb" people have power and are moving up the ladder at happy hour. Again, I kid, but some of these people might be learning networking skills. Can't say how many people I've seen bust their ass to be outdone but people who knock back a few because they know the right people. This I'm actually not kidding about. Not to say those skills are really developed at a kegger, but I can say those who are just stuck in a book will be in for a rude awakening when someone half as qualified with the ability to schmooze sneaks past them.

You're proud of your studies as an electrical engineer. And you should be. Know what I'm proud of? Investing in a program that helped take a kid from a problematic background and combined with opportunities at school and in our arts group because a successful technical director in NYC theaters and electrician at Juilliard. So forgive me if I'm less than impressed with the position you put forth.

How does that saying go, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

> And the issue about polymaths.

Is that you don't understand them? A polymath is simply "a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas" and while the fact that I used DaVinci may have confused you, it shouldn't have. I simply used it to show the duality of art and science.

Benjamin Franklin would have been another good example. Or the guy down the street that tinkers with stuff and also paints murals.

Simply put, Polymath means the ability to be able to have a greater understanding of many disciplines, especially on the left and right sides of the brain. But see you then talk about "meaningful academic contributions" when I never said this was a requirement. Meaningful contributions to society is another matter.

A person could be like Douglas Hofstadter which arguably made contributions in his field, but he didn't set out to wake up one say and say "I'm going to make contributions in my field", he simply as himself and let his curiosity and imagination take him wherever it lead. Read Metamagical Themas or Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid Do you think he got his start by someone telling him to "go get a job" or "have marketable skills"? Hardly.

For that matter, I'm a polymath because my multi-disciplinary approach lets me interface and relate to more people. Its not about becoming published. That's actually what's wrong with our university level education.

What you run the risk of with your attitude is becoming a white-collar Joe-The-Plumber. We have a country filled with people who no longer are getting a well rounded education anymore. We have a Balkanization of people into various disciplines, sub-disciplines and ideologies yet have a shortage of people who can relate in a meaningful way to those outside their circle. That's why politics have become so partisan.

We need visionaries to help build the next generation of development and your approach does NOTHING to foster them.

So you may ask "why do we need another art history major" as if that is really the issue here, and I ask "perhaps if we stopped waging so many wars, we wouldn't need as many engineers developing electronics for high-tech weapons systems?" To me, you seem like a Chris Knight who has yet to meet your Laslo Hollyfeld.

The weekend is coming up. Why not put the books down for a few hours and step out into the world and interact with a few people from a different discipline than yourself. The worst that could happen is that you might learn something new.

The argument that "he" and "him" (and "himself"?) can be used in a gender-neutral fashion (as suggested by "The Elements of Style" as quoted in the article) has also been put forward by William Safire, conservative columnist for The New York Times, and beautifully laid to rest by Doug Hofstadter in his satire A Person Paper on Purity in Language

The piece is included in Metamagical Themas.
Another chapter in the same book, "Changes in Default Words and Images", also discusses gender-neutral language, and suggests a number of techniques we can use while waiting for the new pronouns to take hold...

ya. I am a strange loop is a bit more accessible, but still probably too hard for a 13 year old. keeping with the hofstadter bent, maybe metamagical themas would work.

Cool. Reminds me of the drawings in Metamagical Themas.

How long does this take you?

I haven't seen listed yet:

• The Ethics of What We Eat
  
• The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
  
• Metamagical Themas
  
  also upvote:
  
  
• Gödel, Escher, Bach
  
• Freakonomics
  

Metamagical Themas. Even better than GEB itself in my opinion.

Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern by Douglas Hofstadter

I was 15, I asked for it for Christmas and actually got it. I read that book until it fell apart. The rest of Hofstadters work is equally mind expanding, as others here have mentioned.

I got tired of that particular meme; so, I made a self-referential counter-meme. Ever since reading Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, I've enjoyed playing with self-referential thought.

Just think of it as trying to extinguish a fire with an explosion :)