Over at KnowProse a pick-up on the strange loop meme. Or idea. Concept. Whatever. Nice story – and refers back to Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid although the follow-on is, for me, more intriguing (I am a Strange Loop).

He writes:

It is untoward to write of loneliness, and I will be untoward here because I have passed through the fires unscathed. When I was younger, it was things. When I grew a bit older, it was relationships – someone to discuss my many interests with – a daunting task, for I have many interests. Those greener pastures have been trod through on many different fronts, but no one pasture is green enough. I am not lonely, I want for nothing and need little.

It strikes me that the strange loop is completely contained in that sentence – the yearning search, recursions, looking for ourselves in different place, different identities, then looping up again to the higher concept of self only to find we’re back where we started. But if virtual worlds shine a light on the strange loop, it’s that we ourselves are strange loops of something else maybe, and the fragmented nature of the search should direct us to the question of what we are fragments OF and not just to be satisfied with how the fragments have turned out. Just a thought.

OK, I think time to dig out my dog-eared copies and see if I can’t come up with a proper definition of the Strange Loop as applied to virtual worlds. Stay tuned.