"As the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel proved (...) any system as complicated as arithmetic contains true statements that cannot be proved within the system. (...) You can take the number describing a formula and insert that number into the formula, which then becomes a statement about itself. Such a self-referential capability introduces a certain “loopiness” into mathematics. (...) But consciousness is more than just an ordinary feedback loop. It’s a strange loop, which Hofstadter describes as a loop capable of perceiving patterns in its environment and assigning common symbolic meanings to sufficiently similar patterns. (...) Human brains create vast repertoires of these symbols, conferring the “power to represent phenomena of unlimited complexity and thus to twist back and to engulf themselves via a strange loop.” Consciousness itself occurs when a system with such ability creates a higher-level symbol, a symbol for the ability to create symbols. That symbol is the self. The I. Consciousness. “You and I are mirages that perceive themselves,” (...) This self-generated symbol of the self operates only on the level of symbols." - Amira

"Perceptual systems able to symbolize themselves — self-referential minds — can’t be explained just by understanding the parts that compose them. (...) Gödel’s proof showed that math is “incomplete”; it contains truths that can’t be proven. And consciousness is a truth of a sort that can’t be comprehended within a system of molecules and cells alone. (...) It’s the brain’s information processing powers that allow the mind to symbolize itself. Koch believes that focusing on information could sharpen science’s understanding of consciousness. (...) “We … draw conceptual boundaries around entities that we easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality,” Hofstadter wrote. “The ‘I’ we create for each of us is a quintessential example of such a perceived or invented reality, and it does such a good job of explaining our behavior that it becomes the hub around which the rest of the world seems to rotate.” - Amira