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Doug Hofstadter: Reflections on AI
Getting2Alpha
Gödel's Recursion
Girdle: The self-reference in Gödel's construction comes about in a way that is very surprising. In 19 roughly 10 to 13 Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, two important philosophers created a work called Principia Mathematica meaning the bases of mathematics. And so he could create a sentence that was about numbers, but at the same time it could be read at a second level so that it was about symbols. He wound up finding, creating a self-referential sentence in the fortress that Bertrand Russell had erected to banish self-reference from. It turned self-reference into something that was inevitable, even despite the best efforts to banish it.
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Speaker 1
So I think having like a more kind of like weekly
Speaker 2
or even like monthly kind of deadline for myself, I find
Speaker 1
it just be easier to kind of make up the time if that makes sense.
Speaker 2
But I think also like figuring out what sort of time works for you as well. Like I guess
Speaker 1
by this point I figured out like I'm really bad at writing in like the afternoons, but like evenings for me are great and also like kind of morning. So kind of figuring out when
Speaker 2
my brain is going to be like kind of bad. It's most useful as
Speaker 4
well and taking advantage of
Speaker 5
that. I have another sort of process question. I was wondering when you start a novel, do you feel like you start with character or with plot or how can you kind of describe like what makes an idea, a new novel for you and how you how you begin I guess.
Speaker 4
That's a really good question. I feel like for
Speaker 2
each book it's kind of been a little bit different and often it usually but they often start the same way which is like a random sentence on a notes app in my phone which then becomes
Speaker 1
bigger. With KISS Bread it was kind of like the story and with Blue Ticket it was actually it
Speaker 3
was kind of more the idea
Speaker 2
for a character who was kind of
Speaker 1
like a character who was not
Speaker 2
allowed to be pregnant but wanted to be pregnant and became pregnant and that then kind of transformed.
Speaker 1
So it kind
Speaker 2
of like it sounds really unhealthy. I just feel like it starts with a lot. But I think like from it normally kind of
Speaker 1
develops into character for me because I am so interested in kind of the interiority of the characters and interested in their experience more than a kind of larger world building but yeah kind of figuring out who the character is after that kind of first line. How did you find being longlisted for the Booker?
Speaker 3
I mean did that
Speaker 1
destabilize your writing at all or
Speaker 3
did it inspire it or because it just I mean that's such an enormous achievement it just must have thrown you or built you in some way.
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