Mark:

IIRC he was not only talking about the sophisticated self-replication and scalability (as in fractals and fugues) but also the paradox of self-referentiality, as in the sentence "This sentence is false." These are constructs which seem to drive the listener mad because they seem to embed the container into the thing contained, as James Thurber put it, setting up an Infinite Loop of reference. (Did you know that in the early days of Apple's success, Steve Jobs got the city of Cupertino to accept the name of their company campus as "Infinite Loop"?)

A