Last night I was minding my own business when I read my email and noticed one with the headline:

The 30-Day Hub Challenge Starts Monday -- are you up for it?

I'm one of those foolish people who'll always rushes in where angels....

So I opened the email and read among other things:

.... starting on Monday, May 11th (which might be today for some of you). The 30-Day HubPages Challenge is basically something that challenges Hubbers to either create 100 or 30 Hubs in the next 30 days as a way for them to see the true potential of making money on HubPages. Well, that's at least the way that it started, but now it's become a way for Hubbers to motivate and push themselves out of their HubPages comfort zone and have a ton of fun while doing it.

This was 10:30 p.m. my time and I decided to join in the challenge. As I was going to sleep before midnight I was thinking about the first HubPage to write and it became obvious that I should write about the challenge itself:

So I was thinking about how to start the first of these one hundred HubPages and it became obvious to me that I would start writing about the challenge itself. Now this is an example of self reference. It means exactly what it says.

Most of the time language, thought, sensations, consciousness is about other things so there is object referral. However, at times these things are about themselves.

Another example of self reference is: "This sentence has five words."

So far so good.

If I rewrite the above sentence as: "This sentence has four words," the sentence is self referent, grammatically correct and we really have no problems yet.

Now what happens if I ha\nd you a card. On one side is written, "Whatever, is written on the other side is a lie." And on the other side is written, ""Whatever, is written on the other side is the truth."

Now we get an example of the liar's paradox. This was first stated by Zeno (a Cretan) who wrote, "All Cretans are liars."

Here's is a version of this paradox told in a Sufi teaching story about Mullah Nasrudin.

I wrote above that sometimes self reference can get you into trouble (at times the trouble is from an endless loop). Many ultimate questions are dodged by self reference. For example who created the universe:

• Theological self referential answer: God - so who created God --> no answer or God is self created.
• Scientific answer I: The big bang - so what came before the big bang -> the universe is cyclical, it expands from the big bang and then collapses back into the next big bang - no beginning no end.
• Scientific answer II: according to the inflationary theory of the big bang, so long as one universe exists, new universes can start at anytime thanks to quantum fluctuations in empty space (or as a physicist once observed - the universe is the ultimate free lunch).... Now where did that first universe come from?
  

The problem with self-consciousness is that it is the ultimate self referral. You are conscious of the fact that you are conscious. This leads to many problems including the apparent paradox of free will. I experience free will even though I know that free will is impossible....

To explain what this means you'll have to read the one hundreth HubPage in this series (June 10^th 2009 - perhaps).