The time has come to bite into this bad boy. See y’all in a year.

#reading #readers #StoryGraph #hofstadter #godelescherbach

When I was a child, I thought the world had things that were true and things that were false, i.e., things were "black and white".

Things happened to me, including reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" #Godel #GodelEscherBach, and I realized "Oh! There’s a gray area! (and not only that, the very edges of the gray area are fuzzy!"

And then I learned about #Bayes (and #Laplace) and realized: "Oh shit! It’s **all** gray!"

It feels like you **know** some things to be true because have assigned them such high probabilities. So high, they seem certain. Sorry. It’s not actually 1. And always remember: probability is what you **know**; reality is outside of that (just like "is your blue the same as my blue?"). Yes! Your model is good enough to navigate the world and make good decisions; but absolutely don’t confuse that with having no room left to learn.

I know I said this in a weird way, but keep growing.

Wenn man des Esel nennt, kommt er gerennt.

#OutOfContext #GödelEscherBach

"Meta-Meta-Meta-Jōshū ist ein Satz von TNT"

#OutOfContext #GödelEscherBach

"Herr Krebs könnte behaupten, sein Kühlschrank sein ein „vollkommener“ Plattenspieler."

#OutOfContext #GödelEscherBach

I'm looking back at TNT (Typographical Number Theory) from Gödel Escher Bach, and I'm trying to sketch some simple proofs I could write in this system. And I'm stuck, because I have no way to get from "this thing exists" to "here's this thing, now what can I do with it?"

I'm trying to prove that every number is greater than or equal to all its positive divisors - e.g. An:Aa:<Eb:(a*Sb)=n -> Ec:(c+a)=n>.

I can generalize from a universal quantifier, but I can't do something similar for the existential quantifier. I'm stuck on how to proceed.

#numbertheory #TNT #GodelEscherBach #math #logic

"Hofstadters Gesetz - Hofstadter’s law - ist die Beobachtung, dass ein Prozess immer länger dauert, als man erwartet, auch wenn man Hofstadters Gesetz dabei berücksichtigt. Mit anderen Worten: Zeitschätzungen, wie lange etwas dauern wird, um etwas zu erreichen, bleiben demnach immer hinter der tatsächlich benötigten Zeit zurück, und zwar auch dann, wenn die Zeitzuteilung erhöht wird, um die dabei schon berücksichtigte menschliche Neigung zur Unterschätzung auszugleichen."

Stangl, W. (2025, 24. Mai). Hofstadters Gesetz. Online Lexikon für Psychologie & Pädagogik.

https://lexikon.stangl.eu/28707/hofstadters-gesetz

#GödelEscherBach #DouglasHofstadter

Some books don’t just expand your knowledge—they reveal its limits.

Gödel, Escher, Bach taught me the metaphysical and logical limits of epistemology and, by extension, the impossibility of omniscience.

No system can fully define itself. No mind can hold all knowledge. Understanding this isn’t a constraint—it’s the beginning of deeper thought.

#GödelEscherBach #Epistemology #Philosophy #bookstodon #Logic