advice to other reviewers; if you've not read Hostader's 20th anniversary preface, please do. all he wanted/s to do i/was show how self-awareness, the sense of "I", grows out of self-reference. mathematically speaking, which H insists he is not about, observes in Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica, while trying to build a Maginot Line in math against "self-reference", lays the seeds for it's own refutation in favor of self-reference. returnreturnin as few words as possible: it's not about the substance, but the patterns.