Part 1 Snags and snarls: on self-referential sentences; self-referential sentences - a follow-up; on viral sentences and self-replicating structures; nomic - a self-modifying game based on reflexivity in law. Part 2 Sense and society: world views in collision - the "Skeptical Inquirer" versus the "National Enquirer"; the number numbness; changes in default words and images, engendered by rising consciousness; a person paper on purity in language. Part 3 Sparking and slipping: pattern, poetry, and power in the music of Frederic Chopin; Parquet deformations - a subtle, intricate art form; stuff and nonsense; variations on a theme as the crux of creativity; metafont, metamathematics, and metaphysics. Part 4 Structure and strangeness: magic cubology; on crossing the rubicon; mathematical chaos and strange attractors, lisp - atoms and lists, lisp - lists and recursion; lisp - recursion and generality; Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Part 5 Spirit and substrate: review of "Alan Turing - The Enigma"; a coffeehouse conversation on the Turing test; on the seeming paradox of mechanizing creativity; analogies and roles in human and machine thinking; who shoves whom around inside the careenium?; waking up from the Boolean dream, or, subcognition as computation. Part 6 Selection and stability: the genetic code - arbitrary?; undercut, flaunt, pounce, and mediocrity - psychological games with numbers; the prisoner's dilemma computer tournaments and the evolution of cooperation. Part 7 Sanity and survival: dilemmas for superrational thinkers, leading up to a luring lottery; irrationality is the square root of all evil; the tale of Happiton; the tumult of inner voices, or, what is the meaning of the work "I"?
