Metamagical Themas

Blurb

Metamagical Themas is an eclectic collection of articles that Douglas Hofstadter wrote for the popular science magazine Scientific American during the early 1980s. The anthology was published in 1985 by Basic Books.
The volume is substantial in size and contains extensive notes concerning responses to the articles and other information relevant to their content.
Major themes include: self-reference in memes, language, art and logic; discussions of philosophical issues important in cognitive science/AI; analogies and what makes something similar to something else; and lengthy discussions of the work of Robert Axelrod on the prisoner's dilemma, as well as the idea of superrationality.
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. Another notable feature is the inclusion of two dialogues in the style of those appearing in Gödel, Escher, Bach. Ambigrams are mentioned.