Bread Crumbs

Informal

1. On Thinking for Oneself, by Arthur Schopenhauer
   
2. The Last Question, by Isaac Asimov 
3. Waking Life, movie by Richard Linklater
4. Meaning of Life, from Wikipedia
5. Philosophy, Physics, Mathematics - “Dangerous  Knowledge”, documentary by BBC
   
6. The Secret Life of Chaos, documentary by BBC
   
   

Formal

1. Predicativity, by Solomon Feferman
2. Self Reference, from Cut the Knot
3. The Paradox of Self-Amendment, by Peter Suber
4. Emergence, from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
   
5. Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey, from MIT OpenCourseWare
6. Philosophy of Mathematics, from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Works by Oliver Sacks and Douglas Hofstadter, to name a couple, are yet to be released in the Public Domain. Needless to say, most of them belong here too.

Drawing Hands

Drawing Hands,
lithograph by M. C. Escher, 1948

Food for thought

• The chicken and egg paradox
• The elusive threshold between the holistic and reductionist paradigms w.r.t consciousness.
• Self-referential loops such as "Reread from five words back."
• Generally: Strange loops
• (Based on "Tomorrow") Transcendence as an impossible to perceive, self-manifesting and self-fulfilling external imprint to our reality.
  
• (Based on "Tomorrow") Overstepping the boundaries of what could be understood as a definition of the paradoxical.

M. C. Escher raises a perfectly valid point.

"If the whole world was to be a single sentence and you were to seek infinite wisdom, what would you yearn? A dictionary? A grammar? Or the ones who spoke its language? "

Mr. Tortoise

Tomorrow

"Well what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn't one today..."
Quote from Groundhog Day (1993)

Interestingly my topic selection is quite clearly provoked yet again. Groundhog Day is playing in the background of my tapping fingers (for a third time), while I am pouring out thoughts into words on the border between Christmas Eve and Christmas, being in both in my home and university Time Zones.

Invoking Questions

Warning: Dangerous bend ahead


English has a well-defined set of question words. In brief, we claim all of them can be expanded into a what phrase. To demonstrate:

• what ::= what
• who ::= what be the actor of/that
  
• when ::= what be the time of
  
• where ::= what be the location of
  
• how ::= what be the way of
  
• which ::= what be the choice of
  
• whose ::= what be the owner of
• why ::= what be the reason of

Lets pursue this further.