"It was a hundred years later that Einstein gave a theory (general relativity) which said that the geometry of the universe is determined by its cont… - Douglas Hofstadter

The nice thing about having a brain is that one can learn, that ignorance can be supplanted by knowledge, and that small bits of knowledge can gradually pile up into substantial heaps.

[S]uitably complicated recursive systems might be strong enough to break out of any predetermined patterns. And isn't this one of the defining properties of intelligence? Instead of just considering programs composed of procedures which can recursively

"We have seen recursion in the grammars of languages, we have seen recursive geometrical trees, which grow upwards forever, and we have seen one way in which recursion enters the theory of solid state physics. Now we are going to see yet another way in which the whole world is built out of recursion. This has to do with the structure of elementary particles: electrons, protons, neutrons, and the tiny quanta of electromagnetic radiation called "photons". We are going to see that particles are - in a certain sense which can only be defined rigorously in relativistic quantum mechanics- nested inside each other in a way which can be described recursively, perhaps even by some sort of "grammar"."