Metamagical Themas

Metamagical Themas is an eclectic collection of articles written for Scientific American during the early 1980s by Douglas Hofstadter, and published together as a book in 1985 by Basic Books (ISBN 0465045669) .

Related Topics:
Scientific American - 1980s - Douglas Hofstadter

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The subject matter of the articles is loosely woven about themes in philosophy, creativity, artificial intelligence and important social issues. The volume is substantial in size and contains extensive notes concerning responses to the articles and other information relevant to their content. (One of the notes--page 65--suggested memetics for the study of memes.)

Related Topics:
Philosophy - Creativity - Artificial intelligence - Memetics

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Major themes include: self-referentialism in memes; language; art and logic; discussions of philosophical issues important in cognitive science/AI; and lengthy discussions of the work of Robert Axelrod on the prisoner's dilemma and the idea of superrationality.

Related Topics:
Memes - Robert Axelrod - Prisoner's dilemma - Superrationality

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The concept of superrationality and its relevance to the Cold War, environmental issues and such is accompanied by some amusing and rather stimulating notes on experiments conducted by the author at the time.

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Many other topics are also mentioned, all in Hofstadter's usual easy, approachable style. Another feature is the inclusion of two dialogues in the style of those appearing in Gödel, Escher, Bach.

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Ambigrams are mentioned.

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There are three articles based around the Lisp programming language, where Hofstadter first details the language itself, and then shows how it relates to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.

Related Topics:
Lisp programming language - Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem

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The title is an example of wordplay: it is an anagram of Mathematical Games, the title of Martin Gardner's column that Hofstadter's column succeeded in Scientific American.

Related Topics:
Anagram - Mathematical Games - Martin Gardner

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