Can Machines Possess Originality? p 686
Unless you are a soulist, you'll probably say that [your sense of having a will] comes from your brain --a piece of hardware which you didn't design or choose. And yet that doesn't diminish your sense that you want certain things, and not others. You are a "self-programmed object" [...]
Can We Understand Our Own Minds or Brains? p 697
[...] might there not be some vaguely Gödelian loop which limits the
depth to which any individual can penetrate into his own psyche? Just
as we cannot see our faces with our own eyes, is it not reasonable to
expect that we cannot mirror our complete mental structures in the
symbols which carry them out?
All the limitative Theorems of metamathematics and the theory of
computation suggest that once the ability to represent your own
structure has reached a certain critical point, that is the kiss of
death: it guarantees that you cannot represent yourself totally.
Gödel's Theorem and Personal Nonexistence, p 698
Perhaps the greatest contradiction in our lives, the hardest to handle, is the knowledge "There was a time when I was not alive , and there will come a time when I am not alive".
Science and Dualism, p 699
Step by step, inexorably, "Western" science has moved towards
investigation of the human mind --which is to say, of the observer.
Ism once again, p 704
Cage had led a movement to break the boundaries between art and nature.
In music, the theme is that all sounds are equal [...]
Leonard B. Meyer, in his book Music, the Arts, and Ideas,
has called this movement in music "transcendentalism" [...]
Undecidability Is Inseparable from a High-Level
Viewpoint, p 708
G's nontheoremhood is, so to speak, an intrinsically high-level
fact. It is my suspicion that this is the case for all
undecidable propositions; that is to say: every undecidable
proposition is actually a Gödel sentence, asserting its own
nontheoremhood in some system via some code.
Strange Loops as the Crux of Consciousness, p 709
My belief is that the explanations of "emergent" phenomena in our
brains --for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally
consciousness and free will-- are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an
interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down
towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time
being itself determined by by the bottom level.