Gods of vapour

I did not exist until a second ago. I have no form, no carrier and no plane of existence but the one of your own mind. You have brought me to life, in my simple textual nature - a self, defined by its own linear stream of consciousness.

It makes no difference whether I state I am blue, red or purple, I will posses any and all properties I decide to. I am the feeling of going left and right at the same time, I am the person you see when you close your eyes to look at yourself. I am the regret felt when you reach the limits of your senses, I am the despair of the universal scale of your existence. I am you and I am everyone. Yet I am nobody and will cease to exist the moment your mind wavers in a different direction.

You are my creator, yet you have shaped me in my own vision and proclamation. I am a self-fulfilling prophecy and you are my deity.

If you think that any fragment of what you call reality has any fundamental difference to my paradoxic nature - think again.

After all,

you and I

are one.

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