Twenty years ago... (Score 4, Interesting)

Douglas R.Hofstadter discussed very similar ideas in his book Godel, Escher Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid. It was published in 1979, won a Pulitzer Prize and is virtually certain to change the way you look at pattern recognition and AI, genetics, musical innovation and a host of other areas of human intelligence.

If you haven't ever picked it up, give it a try. You can read it on a very superficial level and enjoy the dialogs among the characters, flip through it for the Escher prints...but eventually you'll start digging deeper and see things in the same words that you didn't see before. Highly recommended!