Comment on Open Thread: July 2009

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:30:57 GMT

I think you are asking the question that is a major theme of Hofstadter's book: Godel, Escher,Bach. To be more specific he raises the question humorously on page 461 in the Birthday Cantatatatatat.... to motivate chapter XV: Jumping out of the System.

He returns to the question in Chapter XX and page 685 offers a quotable answer

There is no need to rely on "rules that permit you to apply rules", because the lowest level rules -- those without any "meta"'s infront -- are embedded in the hardware, and they run without permission.

Another way to look at the problem is to ask what kind of life experiences would give you the anchors in reality to dissolve the question? What works for me is understanding how computers work from gate level to interpreters for high level languages. How does (eval '(eval '(+ 2 2))) go from concluding it should evaluate (+ 2 2) to attempting to do it?

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