There is no spoon
Suppose now that we would have a workable generate-and-test scheme for constructing and ameliorating representations. Then we could apply this scheme to itself in order to make it more efficient. This is a peculiar characteristic of metarepresentations: a metarepresentation allows to manipulate representations, yet it is itself a representation; hence it can manipulate itself (cfr. Pitrat, 1986; Lenat, 1983; Newell, Shaw & Simon, 1960). This argument can also be used to explain why it is meaningless to look for a meta-metarepresentation, a meta-meta- metarepresentation, etc. Indeed, such higher level representations could only be used to reason about representations (from whatever level) and hence would not be in any way more powerful than the (second level) metarepresentation.
–Heylighen F. (1988): Formulating the Problem of Problem-Formulation, in: Cybernetics and Systems ‘88, Trappl R. (ed.), (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht), p. 949-957.
This paper makes me feel like I’m in The Matrix.