in reply to explorations of consciousness and symbolic references...

Read the book The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. (I think that's the correct name of the translation.) It is incredible, describes exactly the same line of thought you are going with.

It completely changed the way I look at programming, and life in general. (Yeah, I know everyone has books like that to recommend, but if you get a chance, pick it up. I'm sure the translation is a good as the original German).

(Actually, buy it from Powellsor your favorite local bookseller. Damn the man.)

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RE: Glasperlenspiel
by eduardo (Curate) on Jul 03, 2000 at 03:20 UTC
    it has been bought ;) after reading the customer reviews I realized that this is one of those books that is going to take a lot longer to read than most of the books I read. Over the last few weeks I have taken on some difficult reading challenges, I am most of the way thorugh: "Godel, Escher, Bach" and i just finished Tao of Physics... so, we shall add this one to my list of: "books to make ed smarter" :) thank you for the suggestion!