"The L.E.D. blinks"

[Matt Treyvaud]

On Fri, 18 Dec 1998, Erik Pohl wrote:

> Douglas Hofstadter wrote _Godel, Escher, Bach_ about a lot of things,
> including whether machines can have "souls" or not.  One of the major
> interesting threads in the novel is Hofstadter's Western examination of the
> koan described by the LED (I think it's the same one) and the concept of
> mu.  Mu, based on that description, reminds me of an exluded middle, if ya
> get my drift.
 
Yeah, pretty much. From my reading, I get the feeling that "mu" is the
answer you give when neither "yes" nor "no" are even possible as an
answer, which seems pretty excluded-middleish..

Since an electronic LED can only be on or off (you can vary how bright it
is by changing the rest of the circuit, but the LED itself is still a
binary on/off device, afaik) maybe the blinking L.E.D. is an observation
on the impossibility of expressing "mu" in terms of the age of reason ->
aristotlean syllogistic western thought -> modern applications of
technology... the closest you can get to "neither on nor off" is "on, off,
on, off.."

Eh?

Matt

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 Matt Treyvaud, Abbr. Prim.                       (R.I.P. Kerry Thornley)
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