This post, which touched on the allowedness of admiration, started me thinking about the nature of things that are awesome.

The first thing one does in such a situation is generate examples.  And my brain, asked to enumerate things that are awesome, said:  "Douglas Hofstadter, E. T. Jaynes, Greg Egan..."

Upon that initial output of my brain, I had many other thoughts:

(1)  My brain was able to list more than one thing that is awesome.  I am not going to dwell on this, because I think it needless to go around saying, "Douglas Hofstadter is awesome, but E. T. Jaynes is awesome too," as though to deliberately moderate or subtract from the admiration of Hofstadter.  The enjoyment of things that are awesome is an important part of life, and I don't think a healthy mind should have to hold back.  But the more things you know that are awesome, the more there is to enjoy—this doesn't mean you should artificially inflate your estimations of awesomeness, but it does mean that if you can think of only one awesome thing, you must be missing out on a lot of life.  And some awesome things, but not all, are compatible enough with yourself that you can draw upon the awesome—Hofstadter and Jaynes are both like this for me, but Greg Egan is not.  So even leaving aside certain mental health risks from having only one awesome thing—it is both enjoyable, and strengthening, to know of many things that are awesome.

(2)  I can think of many places where I disagree with statements emitted by Douglas Hofstadter and Greg Egan, and even one or two places where I would want to pencil in a correction to Jaynes (his interpretation of quantum mechanics being the most obvious).  In fact, when my brain says "Greg Egan" it is really referring to two novels, Permutation City and Quarantine, which overshadow all his other works in my book.  And when my brain says "Hofstadter" it is referring to Gödel, Escher, Bach with a small side order of some essays in Metamagical Themas.  For most people their truly awesome work is usually only a slice of their total output, from some particular years (I find that scary as hell, by the way).