Which statement seems more true: (1) I have a brain. (2) I am a brain. - Douglas Hofstadter

"GEB is in essence a long proposal of strange loops as a metaphor for how selfhood originates, a metaphor by which to begin to grab a hold of just what it is that makes an "I" seem, at one and the same time, so terribly real and tangible to its own possessor, and yet also so vague, so impenetrable, so deeply elusive."

"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"."

Why is some music so much deeper and more beautiful than other music? It is because form, in music, is expressive–expressive to some strange subconscious regions of our minds. The sounds of music do not refer to serfs or city-states, but they do trigger clouds of emotion in our innermost selves; in that sense musical meaning IS dependent on intangible links from symbols to things in the world–those 'things', in this case, being secret software structures in our minds.