Self-reference

I mean, my understanding is the number of people that start the book versus finish, there's a big drop off, but it's 800 pages of like math and parables and stuff.

But the core idea in it is self-referential loops.

He calls them strange loops, something that refers to itself and observes itself.

And so the idea basically is that like, is consciousness, a self-referential loop and the book's called Godel Escher Bach because Kurt Godel was an Austrian logician and he came up with one of the greatest logic proofs of all time Godel's incompleteness theorem and that was a self-referential loop to solve it and then the same thing in Bach's music and M.C. Escher's art And so the idea basically is self-referential loops might be core to our experience of reality, and the consciousness we experience may be the self observing the self.

And we have a little bit of that experience where we kind of are like, wait, I'm thinking about myself, but then what am I thinking about? Who's thinking about that thing? And you can get into many layers, whether you go into therapy or people that have done psychedelics.

You can experience this loop or sometimes step out of it if you're in meditation or psychedelics.