Metamagical Themas
| Company type | Book |
|---|---|
| Industry | Publishing |
| Founded | 1985 |
| Founder | Douglas Hofstadter |
| Products | Essay collection |
Metamagical Themas comprises a series of essays by Douglas Hofstadter that were first featured in Scientific American during the early 1980s, later compiled into a book published by Basic Books in 1985.
This comprehensive volume contains detailed annotations addressing the articles and associated subjects. Significantly, one annotation (on page 65) introduced the concept of memetics as the scientific study of memes.
Contents
The collection explores central topics such as self-reference within memes, language, artistic expression, and logic; philosophical questions tied to cognitive science and artificial intelligence; processes of analogy and recognition (for example, identifying an uppercase 'A'); alongside thorough examinations of Robert Axelrod's research on the prisoner's dilemma and the idea of superrationality.
Discussions highlight superrationality's implications for the Cold War, ecological issues, and Hofstadter's related experimental work. The book also includes two dialogues crafted in the style reminiscent of Gödel, Escher, Bach. Additionally, it delves into Ambigrams.
Three articles are dedicated to the Lisp programming language, outlining its architecture and its relationship to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Two chapters focus on puzzles like the Rubik's Cube. Many chapters commence with abstract alphabets that maintain gestalt recognizability.
The game of Nomic made its debut here in June 1982 through excerpts from an unpublished manuscript by its creator, Peter Suber.
The index cites Hofstadter’s frequent fictional persona, Egbert B. Gebstadter.
List of Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" columns
Between January 1957 and December 1980, Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" was a regular monthly feature in Scientific American. Starting in 1981, Gardner’s column alternated with Douglas Hofstadter’s "Metamagical Themas" (an anagram of "Mathematical Games"), which then appeared monthly from January 1982 until July 1983.
| Date | Title |
|---|---|
| 1981 Jan | An anagrammatic title introduces a new columnist to this feature |
| 1981 Mar | Cubists manipulate the Magic Cube’s pieces while cubemeisters solve it |
| 1981 May | A café discussion on the Turing test assessing machine intelligence |
| 1981 Jul | Challenges posed by the uncertainty principle and quantum mechanics paradoxes |
| 1981 Sep | Investigating how analogy—the core mechanism of human thought—might be understood by computers |
| 1981 Nov | Strange attractors: mathematical forms delicately balanced between order and chaos |
| 1982 Jan | A self-referential piece reflecting on last January's column about self-reference |
| 1982 Feb | Contrasting two modes of inquiry: "National Enquirer" versus "The Skeptical Inquirer" |
| 1982 Mar | Examining whether the genetic code is arbitrary or if alternative codes could function similarly |
| 1982 Apr | The music of Frédéric Chopin: surprising auditory patterns that also captivate visually |
| 1982 May | Exploring innumeracy: why lack of numerical literacy can be as harmful as illiteracy |
| 1982 Jun | Introducing Nomic: a game investigating law’s reflexive nature |
| 1982 Jul | Beyond the Rubik's Cube: puzzles involving spheres, pyramids, dodecahedrons, and others |
| 1982 Aug | Strategy games including Undercut, Flaunt, Hruska, and behavioral evolution |
| 1982 Sep | Can creativity be replicated mechanically? |
| 1982 Oct | Variations on a theme as fundamental to imagination |
| 1982 Nov | Impact of "default assumptions" on writing and cognition |
| 1982 Dec | Sense versus nonsense: why nonsense might serve certain purposes despite sense being more logical |
| 1983 Jan | Virus-like sentences and structures capable of self-replication |
| 1983 Feb | The delights of Lisp: favored language in artificial intelligence circles |
| 1983 Mar | Recursive exploration in Lisp, a language central to AI research |
| 1983 Apr | Concluding discourse on Lisp accompanied by an extravagant Italian feast |
| 1983 May | Computer tournaments on the Prisoner's Dilemma illustrating cooperation evolution |
| 1983 Jun | Testing cooperation calculus through a lottery experiment |
| 1983 Jul | Parquet deformations: tile patterns gradually shifting along one dimension |
French edition
Metamagical Themas was released in French under the title Ma Thémagie (InterEditions, 1988), with translation by Jean-Baptiste Berthelin, Jean-Luc Bonnetain, and Lise Rosenbaum.
The original pun did not carry over; ma Thémagie can be interpreted as "my themagy," a coined term that also suggests maths et magie ("mathematics and magic"). The translators proposed titles such as Le matin des métamagiciens, combining Hofstadter’s original with references to Le Matin des Magiciens, and Jeux malins des mathématiciens ("Clever Tricks of Mathematicians"), but these were deemed too complex by the publisher.
Reception
In White Dwarf issue #88, Dave Langford characterized Metamagical Themas as "an intellectually rich blend of computing, art, mathematics, philosophy, humor, and especially games."
External links
- "A Person Paper on Purity in Language", an essay featured in the collection, originally published in September 1983