This week, host Isaac Butler traces the creative origins of Michael R. Jackson's Pulitzer-winning musical A Strange Loop. After the interview, Isaac and co-host June Thomas discuss Michael's distinction between an autobiographical work and a self-referential work. In Slate Plus, Michael talks about two celebrity encounters, one with Liz Phair, whose music inspired a lot of his work, and one with Tyler Perry, whose work was satirized ruthlessly in A Strange Loop. Send your questions about creativity and any other feedback to working@slate.com

You've read one of your four complimentary articles for this month. You can read four articles free per month. "You would not find the boundaries of the soul no matter how many paths you traveled, so deep is its measure." Today, more than two thousand years after Heraclitus wrote those words, science has shrunk the boundaries of the soul considerably. A soul that can transcend space and time, survive death, and even possess others, is considered intellectually passé.

This year is the 40th anniversary of the publication of one of the cult books of my generation: Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. This Pulitzer prize-winning tome was essential reading in the 1980s for emerging geeks like me. But, despite its name, it is not a book about the composer Bach, the artist Escher or even the mathematician Kurt Gödel. It is about consciousness and Hofstadter's belief that this elusive concept is related to the idea of what he calls "a strange loop". To celebrate the anniversary, I am staging a triptych of events at the Barbican in London called Strange Loops, looking at the impact of technology on what it means to be human.

Douglas Hofstadter in his book "I am a Strange Loop" coined this idea: Where he describes this self-referential mechanism as what describes the unique property of minds. The strange loop is a cyclic system that traverses several layers in a hierarchy. By moving through this cycle one finds oneself where one originally started. Coincidentally enough, this'strange loop' is in fact is the fundamental reason for what Yann LeCun describes as "the coolest idea in machine learning in the last twenty years." Loops are not typical in Deep Learning systems.

Douglas Hofstadter in his book "I am a Strange Loop" coined this idea: In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference. Where he describes this self-referential mechanism as what describes the unique property of minds. The strange loop is a cyclic system that traverses several layers in a hierarchy. By moving through this cycle one finds oneself where one originally started. Coincidentally enough, this'strange loop' is in fact is the fundamental reason for what Yann LeCun describes as "the coolest idea in machine learning in the last twenty years." Loops are not typical in Deep Learning systems.

Douglas Hofstadter in his book "I am a Strange Loop" coined this idea: Where he describes this self-referential mechanism as what describes the unique property of minds. The strange loop is a cyclic system that traverses several layers in a hierarchy. By moving through this cycle one finds oneself where one originally started. Coincidentally enough, this'strange loop' is in fact is the fundamental reason for what Yann LeCun describes as "the coolest idea in machine learning in the last twenty years." Loops are not typical in Deep Learning systems. These systems have conventionally been composed of acyclic graphs of computation layers.

Douglas Hofstader in his book "I am a Strange Loop" coined this idea: Where he describes this self-referential mechanism as what describes the unique property of minds. The strange loop is a cyclic system that traverses several layers in a hierarchy. By moving through this cycle one finds oneself where one originally started. Coincidentally enough, this'strange loop' is in fact is the fundamental reason for what Yann LeCun describes as "the coolest idea in machine learning in the last twenty years." Loops are not typical in Deep Learning systems.