Metamagical Themas

It was only sheer pigheaded perseverance which lead me to finish reading Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas this fine Spring afternoon. I started reading the 30-year-old collection of essays with post scripts over 2 years ago after picking it up at McKay's (a local used bookstore). Some parts of the book have not aged well. But it was the memory of how profoundly Hofstader's Gödel, Escher, Bach affected me which led me to continue in spite of the utter boredom I often felt when reading this book. Sometimes I went months without finishing another chapter. Why continue? Why, that is, other than the silly notion that any task, once started, must eventually be completed? I surely don't adhere to that rule! Hofstadter is at his most interesting discussing psychology and its intersection with mathematics. And his jaunts into literary allegory are usually excellent. Unfortunately this book devoted more than a couple chapters to the Rubic's Cube, a toy that never held much interest for me. Ever the rule-breaker, I solved mine as a child by removing the stickers. The discussion of US-Soviet relations was equally as dated. And I could really care less about fonts, Hofstadter's main topic for another subsection of essays. But, there were moments that brought out ideas which took me back to Honduras, where I read GEB back in the 90's. There was a quality a bit more timeless about that book. Then again, each chapter wasn't originally a magazine article. Hofstadter's insistence on looking at the metaquestion has become a strong component of my own thinking. So strong, in fact, that I'd forgotten whence it came from. Life is a sequence of iterated Prisoners' Dilemmas. I repeatedly fall into the rational trap of defecting in the zero-sum game, much as Hofstadter's colleagues did in the book. I often look at my choices and see, like the prisoner, that I'm better off not cooperating with the other guy regardless of whether he chooses to cooperate with me or not. What kind of a horrible society would people like that make? Reading Themas I was reminded of Fukuyama's book on Trust which compared the success rate of high-trust societies to low trust ones. Deutschland, Japan and the like come out on top again and again because their cultures are built on trust. While some other cultures will see someone as a sap for cooperating with the other guy when they could do better for themselves by not, in successful trust cultures people are ready to cooperate because they see reciprocity as likely. Thank you, Douglas, for sharing a little bit more of your strange loop. I'll be reselling the book to McKay's, of course.