The concept isn't mine, but I think it explains so much about life. It all started with a guy named Douglas Hofstadter and his book Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. He followed up with I am a Strange Loop. It's pretty intensive mathematics, but he does a pretty good job making sense of it for us, his fearless readers.
It turns out that you can create an infinite mathematical loop that parallels the statement: "This statement is false." Of course, the problem with said statement is that it is a statement that refers to itself, but posits its own destruction. But if the statement is, in fact, false, then it is no longer destroyed. It survives. But, if it survives . . . it is destroyed, again! And so on and so on and so on. This is the idea of a strange loop.
In his magnum opus (Godel, Escher, Bach) Hofstadter traces this idea through math (Godel), painting (Escher) and music (Bach). In his follow up, he makes a firmer connection to . . . the nature of the human soul.
I find his arguments compelling, if somewhat difficult to understand in detail. Unsurprisingly, then, I've also made a habit of noticing the Strange Loops that I come across in life . . . and, fearless reader, you shall be regaled with the tales . . . I'm sure you are as excited as I am.
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