It now becomes clear that consistency is not a property of a formal system per se, but depends on the interpretation which is proposed for it. By the… - Douglas Hofstadter

If words were nuts and bolts, people could make any bolt fit into any nut: they'd just squish the one into the other, as in some surrealistic painting where everything goes soft. Language, in human hands, becomes almost like a fluid, despite the coarse grain of its components.

There exist formal systems whose negative space (set of non-theorems) is not the positive space (set of theorems) of any formal system.

In the world of living things, the magic threshold of representational universality is crossed whenever a system’s repertoire of symbols becomes extensible without any obvious limit. This threshold was crossed on the species level somewhere along the way from earlier primates to ourselves.