Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> The announced point of the exercise was to *burst free of the traditional*
> (while, presumably, honoring it).
Um, I never announced that. You're probably thinking of Dale Johnstone.
As far as I'm concerned, the riddle had its genesis for me when Douglas
Hofstadter himself asked whether there was such a thing as a
self-answering question. I am frankly amazed that Hofstadter managed to
miss that. ("What is an example of a self-answering question?")
The riddle isn't quite as elegant as that, but it's still, as 'twere,
*the* self-referential riddle. (Obviously there can only be one
self-referential riddle, since even if they have different texts, they all
have the same answer. Right?)
> My reply above is a limit case: the
> answer, untraditionally, is the riddle itself. (The text of the riddle, if
> you wish to be pedantic, but that is what a riddle *is*, unless you are a
> Platonist.)
Did you read Godel, Escher, Bach? Did you *like* Godel, Escher, Bach? I
naturally tend to assume that everyone on the Extropians list read it and
loved it and is totally up to speed on self-reference, but it occurred to
me that the theoretical possibility exists and should be checked. You
seem to be exhibiting waaay too much shock over a simple bit of fun...
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:16 MDT