MetaSysteMatic
After Japanese class last Halloween night, I met up with Jill, Matt, and Greg down in Hillcrest to wander around and check out the local kings (or queens, as may be the case) of costuming. As Hillcrest is the “gay district” of San Diego, it promised some of the most elaborate and entertaining of projects.
Of course, there were plenty of the standard leather-clad ass-less chaps wearing village people and slutty [insert occupation here] cross-dressers milling about, but there were also some truly genius getups. Perhaps one of the most creative two guys were dressed as jellyfish: white bodysuits carrying white umbrellas draped with strips of cloth and those long skinny balloon animal type balloons sticking out from underneath. The umbrellas were low enough so as to obscure their faces, all you saw were these cloth and balloon tentacles swaying from underneath the umbrella, illuminated by strategically placed glow sticks providing faux-bio-luminescence.
Toward the close of the evening, I ended up in an interesting conversation with Greg regarding Godel, Escher, and Bach – one of my all-time favorite non-fiction books – and Catch-22. He happened to be reading them at the same time and was providing interesting correlations between Catch-22, which is, or course, entirely paradoxical, and the notion of paradox and true-but-unprovable/false-but-not-unprovable from GEB. Furthermore, he noted the similar structure of the two, of Catch-22’s devotion of each chapter to an individual and GEB’s organization into separate analogies of cognition.
We started on the topics of systems – each person in C-22 is somewhat of a “system” in the GEB sense: internally consistent, sufficiently expressive, but containing their paradoxes that can only be explained by some sort of large “meta-system,” a system that takes into account talking about itself, or as I like to say, elevated semantics. Of course, there are always paradoxes available in the meta-system, perhaps in C-22, the analogy is the book itself, (and in fact, the meta-system must have paradoxes, and it is mathematically provable.) For you number theory geeks out there, I know I’m glossing things. Deal with it.
I particularly enjoyed the conversation given that Greg understands the structure and intricacies of the Fugue (specifically, Bachs’, a major component of GEB) much better than, while on the other hand I’m much more visceral understanding of number theory (Godel) and Escher’s works (Escher, of course.) Looking back on it, we were really just two meta-systems making our own analogies about systems and cognition. We have overlapping areas of expertise as well as disparate ones, we have things we believe but are not provable, and vice versa.
In essence, our conversation was a meta-system, involving two other meta-systems, making analogies about systems analogies of systems. Meta-meta-meta-meta system?
Greg is planning on doing more in-depth analysis and comparison, using two as foils of each other, and I think the idea is fantastic.
It occurred to me on the way home that Halloween in Hillcrest is the perfect place for this conversation: boys dressed as girls finding analogies in jellyfish and village people. Systems masquerading as systems, commenting on systems, creating new systems. Kind of makes you wonder if there’s some sort of meta-system up there that encourages these kinds synchronicities.