Life is a Circle

[melanie]

The centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.

The centre of the circumference orders perfect balance.

[melanie]

Everything is moving - yet standing still.

[melanie]

[austintorn@aol.com]

Yellowstone volcano will erupt in 2012 and wipe out the world.

[melanie]

Yellowstone volcano will erupt in 2012 and wipe out the world.

Gosh Austin.....that must be one angry mother fking volcano

[austintorn@aol.com]

It's 30,000 years overdue.

[melanie]

It's 30,000 years overdue.

Geez, a hefty fine due here.

[melanie]

A strange loop occurs when you move through the levels of a hierarchical system and arrive back where you started.

Douglas Hofstadter uses the concept of self-referential strange loops to explain the emergent property of consciousness in the books – Gödel, Escher, Bach and I Am a Strange Loop.

''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. When a system evolves to a certain level of complexity, we have the emergence of a new system that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts…the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.''



I see the Tao symbol (Yin Yang symbol) as an example of a strange loop.
We see self-reference because there is Yang in the Yin (white in black) and vice versa.
A circular motion is suggested by the symbol which represents a never ending loop of transformation.




Zero points of reference, nothing to lose, nothing to gain.