Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not ju… - Douglas Hofstadter

Godel showed how a statement about any mathematical formal system (such as the assertion that Principia Mathematica is contradiction-free) can be translated into a mathematical statement inside number theory (the study of whole numbers). In other words, any metamathematical statement can be imported into mathematics, and in its new guise the statement simply asserts (as do all statements of number theory) that certain whole numbers have certain properties or relationships to each other. But on another level, it also has a vastly different meaning that, on its surface, seems as far removed from a statement of number theory as would be a sentence in a Dostoevsky novel.

(1) Blurting may be considered as the reciprocal substitution of semiotic material (dubbing) for a semiotic dialogical product in a dynamic reflexion.

The human-written sentences are numbers (1) to 3; they were drawn from the contemporary journal Art-Language and are — as far as I can tell — completely serious efforts among literate and sane people to communicate something to each other.

And that is also the way the human mind works — by the compounding of old ideas into new structures that become new ideas that can themselves be used in compounds, and round and round endlessly, growing ever more remote from the basic earthbound imagery that is each language’s soil.