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deinonychus commented on the word strange loop
A strange loop arises when, by moving up or down through a hierarchical system, one finds oneself back where one started.
Strange loops may involve self-reference and paradox. The concept of a strange loop was proposed and extensively discussed by Douglas Hofstadter in "Gödel, Escher, Bach", and is further elaborated in Hofstadter's book "I Am a Strange Loop", published in 2007.
A tangled hierarchy is a hierarchical system in which a strange loop appears.
(Wikipedia)
January 13, 2012
ruzuzu commented on the word strange loop
To which I'll add more from Wikipedia.
"In I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter defines strange loops as follows: “And yet when I say "strange loop", I have something else in mind — a less concrete, more elusive notion. What I mean by "strange loop" is — here goes a first stab, anyway — not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one's sense of departing ever further from one's origin, one winds up, to one's shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop. (pp. 101-102)"
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Strange_loop&oldid=664233306
September 15, 2015