Re: "thou shalt not conflate meta-data with data"

Tom Ivar Helbekkmo wrote:
>>But of course you could just extend the language to include your
>>meta-language statements. And then the meta-language ceases to be a
>>meta-language, it's just part of your plain language. But of course you
>>then need a further meta-language to talk about *that* extended
>>language, and so on, ad infinitum.

> 
> ...and then I suddenly got the urge to re-read Douglas Hofstadter's
> "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid".  :-)

It's been a while since I last read it, but I seem to remember a nice example near the beginning of that book. There's a system that consists just of strings containing the symbols 0 and 1 plus some rules for combining them. The task is to show that some particular string is impossible to achieve. It turns out that you can't do it without stepping "outside" the system into another meta-system. But because the example is so simple it makes it clearer to understand by removing the irrelevant aspects.

I'd highly recommend this book to Neo, it's a classic covering a wide range of disciplines but written in a very quirky way and accessible to the layperson.

Paul. Received on Wed Mar 02 2005 - 23:55:29 CET