Metamagical Themas, page 8
Would not be anomalous if were in Italian.
When one this sentence into the German to translate wanted, would one the fact exploit, that the word order and the punctuation already with the German conventions agree.
How come this noun phrase doesn't denote the same thing as this noun phrase does?
Every last word in this sentence is a grotesque misspelling of "towmatow".
I don't care who wrote this sentence-whoever he is, he's a damn sexist!
This analogy is like lifting yourself by your own bootstraps.
Although this sentence begins with the word "because", it is false.
Despite the fact that it opens like a two-pronged pitchfork-or rather, because of it-this sentence resembles a double-edged sword.
This line from Shakespeare has delusions of grandeur.
If writers were bakers, this sentence would be exactly a dozen words long.
If this sentence had been on the previous page, this very moment would have occurred approximately 60 seconds ago.
This sentence is helping to increase the likelihood of nuclear war by distracting you from the more serious concerns of the world and beguiling you with the trivial joys of self-reference.
This sentence is helping to decrease the likelihood of nuclear war by chiding you for indulging in the trivial joys of self-reference and reminding you of the more serious concerns of the world.
We mention "our gigantic nuclear arsenal" in order not to use it.
The whole point of this sentence is to make clear what the whole point of this sentence is.
This last one's bizarre circularity reminds me of the number P that I invented a couple of years ago. P is, for each individual, the number of minutes per month that that person spends thinking about the number P. For me, the value of P seems to average out at about 2. 1 certainly wouldn't want it to go much above that! I find it crosses my mind most often when I'm shaving.
* * *
Dr. J. K. Aronson from Oxford, England, sent in some of the most marvelous discoveries. Here is one of his best:
'T' is the first, fourth, eleventh, sixteenth, twenty-fourth, twenty-ninth, thirty-third....
The sentence never ends, of course. He also submitted a wonderful complementary pair that faked me out beautifully. His challenge to you is: Try deciphering the first before you read the second.
I eee oai o ooa a e ooi eee o oe.
Ths sntnc cntns n vwls nd th prcdng sntnc n cnsnnts.
One that reminds me somewhat of Aronson's last sentence above is the following spoof on the ads that I believe you can still find in the New York subway, after all these years:
f y cn rd ths, itn tyg h myxbl cd.
By a remarkable coincidence, the remainder of Carl Bender's sentence "The rest of this sentence is written in Thailand, on" was discovered in, of all places, Bangkok, Thailand, by Gregory Bell, who lives there. He has luckily provided me with a perfect copy of it, so for all those who were dying of suspense, it is shown in Figure 2-3.
One evening during a bad electrical storm, I got the following message on the computer from Marsha Meredith:
I ]ion't be able to work at all tonight b]iecause of the w&atherBr/ I]i'm getting too many bad characters (as you can see). Ioo baw3d-I get spurious characters]i all over ]ithe place-talk totrrRBow,1F7U Marsha.
FIGURE 2-3. The conclusion of Carl Bender's sentence fragment ("The rest of this sentence is written in Thailand, on"), discovered by Gregory Bell on a scrap of paper in Bangkok, Thailand , Translated it says: : "this sheet of paper and is in Thai".
I wish she had had the patience to type more carefully, so that I could have understood what her problem was.
The sentences having to do with identity in counterfactual worlds, such as Dan Krimm's and its alter egos, reminded me of a blurb by E. O. Wilson I read recently on Lewis Thomas' latest book: "If Montaigne had possessed a deep knowledge of twentieth-century biology, he would have been Lewis Thomas." Ah me, the flittering elf of self! And Banesh Hoffmann, in Relativity and Its Roots, has written: "How safe we would be from death by nuclear bomb had we been born in the time of Shakespeare." Sure, except we'd also all be long dead-unless, of course, the 24th-century doctors who will invent immortality pills had also been born in Shakespeare's time!
The following self-referential poem just came to me one day:
Twice five syllables,
Plus seven, can't say much-but ...
That's haiku for you.
The genre of self-referential poetry-including haiku-was actually quite popular. Tom McDonald submitted this non-limerick:
A very sad poet was Jenny
Her limericks weren't worth a penny.
In technique they were sound,
Yet somehow she found
Whenever she tried to write any,
That she always wrote one line too many!
Several people sent in complex poems of various sorts, and mentioned books of them, such as John Hollander's Rhyme's Reason, a collection of poems describing their own forms.
* * *
Self-referential book titles are enjoying a mild vogue these days. Raymond Smullyan was one of the most enthusiastic explorers of the potential of this idea, using the titles What Is the Name of This Book? and This Book Needs No Title. Actually, I think Needs No Title would have said it more crisply, or maybe just No Title. Come to think of it, why not No, or even just plain ? (I hope you could tell that those blanks were in italics!)
Other self-referential book titles I have collected include these:
Forget all the rules you ever learned about graphic design. Including the ones in this book.
Steal This Book
Ban This Book
Deduct This Book (How Not to Pay Taxes While Ronald Reagan Is President)
Do You Think Mom Would Like This One?
Dewey Decimal No. 510.46 FC H3
I Never Can Remember What It's Called
The Great American Novel
ISBN 0-943568-01-3
Self Referential Book Title
The Top Book on the New York Times Bestseller List for the Past Ten Weeks
Don't Go Overseas Until You've Read This Book
Soon to Become a Major Motion Picture
By Me, William Shakespeare (by Robert Payne)
That Book with the Red Cover in Your Window
Reviews of This Book
Oh, by the way, some of these are fake, others are real. For example, the last one, Reviews of This Book, is just a fantasy of mine. I would love to see a book consisting of nothing but a collection of reviews of it that appeared (after its publication, of course) in major newspapers and magazines. It sounds paradoxical, but it could be arranged with a lot of planning and hard work. First, a group of major journals would all have to agree to run reviews of the book by the various contributors to the book. Then all the reviewers would begin writing. But they would have to mail off their various drafts to all the other reviewers very regularly so that all the reviews could evolve together, and thus eventually reach a stable state of a kind known in physics as a "Hartree-Fock self-consistent solution". Then the book could be published, after which its reviews would come out in their respective journals, as per arrangement. (A little more on this idea is given in the postscript to Chapter 16.)
* * *
I chanced across two books devoted to the subject of indexing books.
They are: A Theory of Indexing (by Gerald Salton) and Typescripts, Proofs, and Indexes (by Judith Butcher). Amazingly, neither one has an index. I also received a curious letter soliciting funds, which began this way: "Dear Friend: In these last months, I've been making a study of the money-raising letter as an art form ..." I didn't read any further.
Aldo Spinelli, an Italian artist and writer, sent me some of his products. One, a short book called Loopings, has pages documenting their own word and letter counts in various complex ways, and includes at the end a short essay on various ways in which documents can tally themselves up or can mutually tally each other in twisty loops. Another, called Chisel Book, documents its own production, beginning with the idea, going through the finding of a publisher, making the layout, designing the cover, printing it, and so on.
Ashleigh Brilliant is the inventor of a vast number of aphorisms he calls "potshots", many of which have become very popular phrases in this country. For some reason, he has a self-imposed limit of seventeen words per potshot. A few typical potshots (all taken from his four books listed in the Bibliography) are:
What would life be, without me?
As long as I have you, I can endure all the troubles you inevitably bring.
Remember me? I'm the one who never made any impression on you.
Why does trouble always come at the wrong time?
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
Although strictly speaking these are not self-referential sentences, they are all admirable examples of how the world constantly tangles with itself in multifarious self-undermining ways, and as such, they definitely belong in this chapter. As a matter of fact, I would like to take this occasion to announce that Ashleigh Brilliant is the 1984 recipient of the last annual Nobaloney Prize for Aphoristic Eloquence. The traditional Nobaloney ceremony, involving the awarding of a $1,000,000 cash prize two minutes before the recipient's decapitation, has been waived, at Mr. Brilliant's request.
There are other books containing much of interest to the self-reference addict. I would particularly recommend the recent More on Oxymoron, by Patrick Hughes, as well as the earlier Vicious Circles and Infinity, by Hughes and George Brecht. Also in this category are three thin volumes on Murphy's Law, compiled by Arthur Bloch. Murphy's Law, of course, is the one that says, "If anything can go wrong, it will", although when I first heard of it, it was called the "Fourth Law of Thermodynamics". O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law is: "Murphy was an optimist." Goldberg's Commentary thereupon is: "O'Toole was an optimist." And finally, there is Schnatterly's Summing Up: "If anything can't go wrong, it will."
My own law, "Hofstadter's Law", states: "It always takes longer than you think it will take, even if you take into account Hofstadter's Law." Despite being its enunciator, I never seem to be able to take it fully into account in budgeting my own time. To help me out, therefore, my friend Don Byrd came up with his own law that I have taken to heart:
Byrd's Law:
It always takes longer than you think it will take, even if you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Unfortunately, Byrd himself seems unable to take this law into account.
3 On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures
January, 1983
TWO years ago, when I first wrote about self-referential sentences, I was hit by an avalanche of mail from readers intrigued by the phenomenon of self-reference in its many different guises. I had the chance to print some of those responses one year ago, and that column then triggered a second wave of replies. Many of them have cast self-reference in new light of various sorts. In this column, I would like to describe the ideas of several people, two of whom responded to my initial column with remarkably similar letters: Stephen Walton of New York City and Donald R. Going of Oxon Hill, Maryland.
Walton and Going saw self-replicating sentences as similar to virusessmall objects that enslave larger and more self-sufficient "host" objects, getting the hosts by hook or by crook to carry out a complex sequence of replicating operations that bring new copies into being, which are then free to go off and enslave further hosts, and so on. "Viral sentences", as Walton called them, are "those that seek to obtain their own reproduction by commandeering the facilities of more complex entities".
Both Walton and Going were struck by the perniciousness of such sentences: the selfish way in which they invade a space of ideas and, merely by making copies of themselves all over the place, manage to take over a large portion of that space. Why do they not manage to overrun all of that idea-space? A good question. The answer should be obvious to students of evolution: competition from other self-replicators. One type of replicator seizes a region of the space and becomes good at fending off rivals; thus a "niche" in idea-space is carved out.
This idea of an evolutionary struggle for survival by self-replicating ideas is not original with Walton or Going, although both had fresh things to say on it. The first reference I know of to this notion is in a passage by neurophysiologist Roger Sperry in an article he wrote in 1965 called "Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values". He says: "Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence -of the living cell."
Shortly thereafter, in 1970, the molecular biologist Jacques Monod came out with his richly stimulating and provocative, book Chance and Necessity. In its last chapter, "The Kingdom and the Darkness", he wrote of the selection of ideas as follows:
For a biologist it is tempting to draw a parallel between the evolution of ideas and that of the biosphere. For while the abstract kingdom stands at a yet greater distance above the biosphere than the latter does above the nonliving universe, ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. I shall not hazard a theory of the selection of ideas. But one may at least try to define some of the principal factors involved in it. This selection must necessarily operate at two levels: that of the mind itself and that of performance.
The performance value of an idea depends upon the change it brings to the behavior of the person or the group that adopts it. The human group upon which a given idea confers greater cohesiveness, greater ambition, and greater self-confidence thereby receives from it an added power to expand which will insure the promotion of the idea itself. Its capacity to "take", the extent to which it can be "put over" has little to do with the amount of objective truth the idea may contain. The important thing about the stout armature a religious ideology constitutes for a society is not what goes into its structure, but the fact that this structure is accepted, that it gains sway. So one cannot well separate such an idea's power to spread from its power to perform.
The "spreading power"-the infectivity, as it were-of ideas, is much more difficult to analyze. Let us say that it depends upon preexisting structures in the mind, among them ideas already implanted by culture, but also undoubtedly upon certain innate structures which we are hard put to identify. What is very plain, however, is that the ideas having the highest invading potential are those that explain man by assigning him his place in an immanent destiny, in whose bosom his anxiety dissolves.
Monod refers to the universe of ideas, or what I earlier termed "idea-space", as "the abstract kingdom". Since he portrays it as a close analogue to the biosphere, we could as well call it the "ideosphere".
* * *
In 1976, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published his book The Selfish Gene, whose last chapter develops this theme further. Dawkins' name for the unit of replication and selection in the ideosphere--the ideosphere's counterpart to the biosphere's gene-is meme, rhyming with "theme" or "scheme". As a library is an organized collection of books, so a memory is an organized collection of memes. And the soup in which memes grow and flourish-the analogue to the "primordial soup" out of which life first oozed-is the soup of human culture. Dawkins writes:
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: ' . . . memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking-the meme for, say, `belief in life after death' is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.'
Consider the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool. Probably it originated many times by independent `mutation'. In any case, it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art. Why does it have such high survival value? Remember that `survival value' here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. The question really means: What is it about the idea of a god which gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The 'everlasting arms' hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor's placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
