This book attempts to explain how minds work...There’s nothing very technical in this book. It...is a society - of many small ideas. One trouble is that these ideas have lots of cross-connections. My explanations rarely go in neat, straight lines from start to end. I wish I could have lined them up so that you could climb straight to the top, by mental stair-steps, one by one. Instead they’re tied in tangled webs.

Perhaps the fault is actually mine, for failing to find a tidy base of neatly ordered principles. But I’m inclined to lay the blame upon the nature of the mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect...Until you’ve seen some of the rest, you can’t make sense of the part.

- Marvin Minsky in the Prologue to The Society of Mind, 1985


This book assumes that any brain, machine, or other thing that has a mind must be composed of smaller things that cannot think at all. The structure of the book itself reflects this view: each page explores a theory or idea that exploits what other pages do. Some readers might prefer a more usual form of story plot. I tried to do that several times, but it never seemed to work; each way I tried to line things up left too many thoughts that would not fit. A mind is too complex to fit the mold of narratives that start out here and end up there; a human intellect depends upon the connections in a tangled web - which simply wouldn't work at all if it were neatly straightened out.

- Marvin Minsky in the Glossary and Bibliography to The Society of Mind, 1985


The diversity of my columns is worth discussing for a moment. On the surface, they seem to wander all over the intellectual map...But there is, I believe, a deep underlying unity to my columns. I felt that gradually, as I wrote more and more of them, regular readers would start to see the links between disparate ones, so that after a while, the coherence of the web would be quite clear. My image of this was always geometric. I envisioned my intellectual "home territory" as a rather large region in some conceptual space, a region that most people do not see as a connected unit.

Of course I wonder if my 25 columns are sufficient to convey the connectedness of my little patch of intellectual territory, or if, on the contrary, they would leave a question mark in the mind of someone who read them all in succession without any other explanation. Would it simply seem like a patchwork quilt, a curious potpourri? Truth to tell, I suspect that 25 columns are not quite enough on their own. Probably the dots are too sparsely distributed to suggest the rich web of potential cross-connections there.

- Douglas Hofstadter describing his "Metamagical Themas" columns for Scientific American in his introduction to Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, 1985


I've never used either hypertext or WWW.

- Douglas Hofstadter in an email message to World 3, March 21st, 1995.


When my agent, John Brockman, first saw the manuscript for this book in December 1990, he exclaimed: "Oh, what a chaotic manuscript!"

Indeed, this is not a normal narrative book. If it were, it would run to many volumes, like Toynbee's or Voegelin's. I do not have time to write them, and you would not have time to read them. Instead, I have tried to compact a large amount of historical information in such a way that my view of the data is communicated to you by a kind of resonance, like poetry. By means of a chaotic collage of ideas, data, graphics, rhyming sentence fragments, and telepathic communion, I hope to evoke a metapattern of history...

This book collects evidence for a theory. Rather than expand this collage of information into a pretense of normal narrative, for you to recondense in your own mind, I have kept it in condensed form. The information is not in linear (one-dimensional) order. Its natural order is multidimensional: one-dimensional time, two-dimensional space, plus many-dimensional ideas. Thus the same theme may be traced through time, over space, or through an evolution of ideas or myths. Wittgenstein wrote in the Preface to his Philosophical Investigations, "The very nature of the investigation...compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction. Thus this book is really only an album."

- Ralph Abraham in his preface to CHAOS, GAIA, EROS: A Chaos Pioneer Uncovers the Three Great Streams of History, HarperSanFrancisco, 1994


If Leibniz were alive today, he would almost certainly have put his ideas or theories in a relational database. There is no dominant center or deductive foundation to the world of his ideas. They could all be linked in various interesting ways.

- Pierre Levy in Wired UK July/August 1995, 1.04


I wanted, quite simply, to write a novel that would change in successive readings and to make those changing versions according to the connections that I had for some time naturally discovered in the process of writing and that I wanted my readers to share. In my eyes, paragraphs on many different pages could just as well go with paragraphs on many other pages, although with different effects and for different purposes. All that kept me from doing so was the fact that, in print at least, one paragraph inevitably follows another.

- Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics, The University of Michigan Press, 1995


No text is only a hierachy of elements. A hierachy is always an attempt to impose rigid order upon verbal ideas that are always prone to subvert that order. The principle of hierachy in writing is always in conflict with the principle of association.

- Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991


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NR - Last updated: August 7th, 1995