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Table of Contents

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

A note from the Publisher

WORDS OF THANKS

PREFACE

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1 - On Souls and Their Sizes

Soul-Shards

What Is It Like to Be a Tomato?

Guinea Pig

Pig

Revulsion, Revelation, Revolution

Reversion, Re-evolution

The Mystery of Inanimate Flesh

Give Me Some Men Who Are Stouter-souled Men

Small-souled and Large-souled Humans

Hattie the Chocolate Labrador

Ollie the Golden Retriever

Where to Draw that Fateful, Fatal Line?

Interiority — What Has it, and to What Degree?

The Gradual Growth of a Soul

Lights On?

Post Scriptum

CHAPTER 2 - This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream

What Is a “Brain Structure”?

A Simple Analogy between Heart and Brain

Can Toilet Paper Think?

The Terribly Thirsty Beer Can

Levels and Forces in the Brain

Who Shoves Whom Around Inside the Cranium?

Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics

Thinkodynamics and Statistical Mentalics

CHAPTER 3 - The Causal Potency of Patterns

The Prime Mover

The Causal Potency of Collective Phenomena

Neurons and Dominos

Patterns as Causes

The Strange Irrelevance of Lower Levels

A Hat-tip to the Spectrum of Unpredictability

The Careenium

Simmballism

Taking the Reductionistic View of the Careenium

Taking a Higher-level View of the Careenium

Who Shoves Whom Around inside the Careenium?

The Dance of the Simmballs

CHAPTER 4 - Loops, Goals, and Loopholes

The First Flushes of Desire

A Soccer Ball Named Desire

The Slippery Slope of Teleology

Feedback Loops and Exponential Growth

Fallacy the First

Fallacy the Second

Feedback and Its Bad Rap

God, Gödel, Umlauts, and Mystery

Savoring Circularity and Self-application

The Timid Theory of Types

Intellectuals Who Dread Feedback Loops

CHAPTER 5 - On Video Feedback

Two Video Voyages, Three Decades Apart

Diary of a Video Trip

Enigmatic, Emergent Reverberation

Feeding “Content” to the Loop

A Mathematical Analogue

The Phenomenon of “Locking-in”

Emergent New Realities of Video Feedback

CHAPTER 6 - Of Selves and Symbols

Perceptual Looping as the Germ of “I”-ness

Varieties of Looping

Reception versus Perception

Mosquito Symbols

Mosquito Selves

An Interlude on Robot Vehicles

Pondering Dogthink

The Radically Different Conceptual Repertoire of Human Beings

Episodic Memory

CHAPTER 7 - The Epi Phenomenon

As Real as it Gets

Concrete Walls and Abstract Ceilings

The Many-faceted Intellectual Grounding of Reality

No Luck, No Soap, No Dice

An Out-of-the-Blue Ode to My Old Friend Epi

No Sphere, No Radius, No Mass

Where the Buck Seems to Stop

The Prime Mover, Redux

God’s Eye versus the Careenium’s Eye

I Am Not God

CHAPTER 8 - Embarking on a Strange-Loop Safari

Flap Loop, Lap Loop

Seeking Strange Loopiness in Escher

Seeking Strange Loops in Feedback

Seeking Strange Loops in the Russellian Gloom

Mr Berry of the Bodleian

I Can’t Tell You How Indescribably Nondescript It Was!

Blurriness Buries Berry

A Peanut-butter and Barberry Sandwich

An Autobiographical Snippet

Idealistic Dreams about Metamathematics

Post Scriptum

CHAPTER 9 - Pattern and Provability

Principia Mathematica and its Theorems

Mixing Two Unlikely Ideas: Primes and Squares

Pattern-hunting