I Am a Strange Loop

published	March 26th 2007 by Basic Books
binding	Hardcover
isbn	0465030785 (isbn13: 9780465030781)
ebook
pages	384
description	Douglas Hofstadter's long-awaited return to the themes of GÃ¶del, Escher, Bach--an original and controversial view of the nature of conscio...more [close] Douglas Hofstadter's long-awaited return to the themes of GÃ¶del, Escher, Bach--an original and controversial view of the nature of consciousness and identity. Can thought arise out of matter? Can self, a soul, a consciousness, an "I" arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here? I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the "strange loop"--a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. The most central and complex symbol in your brain or mine is the one called "I." The "I" is the nexus in our brain, one of many symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse. How can a mysterious abstraction be real--or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the laws of physics? These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since GÃ¶del, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is the book Hofstadter's many readers have been waiting for. [close]
date added	02-18-07 edit book

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Chuck rated it:

12/22/07

Read in January, 2007

recommends it for: Patient game lovers

Twenty-eight years ago, Douglas Hofstadter published a book titled "Goedel, Escher, Bach" that earned him instant academic renown and a cultlike following. A mathematician friend recommended the book to me, and I tried mightily to read it, keeping at it more because of my admiration for my friend that for the experience of reading the book. It was either too indirect, too intricately argued, or too Germanic for me to follow, and after months of off and on attempts I finally put it as...more Twenty-eight years ago, Douglas Hofstadter published a book titled "Goedel, Escher, Bach" that earned him instant academic renown and a cultlike following. A mathematician friend recommended the book to me, and I tried mightily to read it, keeping at it more because of my admiration for my friend that for the experience of reading the book. It was either too indirect, too intricately argued, or too Germanic for me to follow, and after months of off and on attempts I finally put it aside.

So why did I start out to read another Hofstadter book? I have long been interested in the nature and origin or human consciousness and sense of self, and as an irreligious materialist, the traditional explanations offered by our dominant social institutions were unsatisfactory. I bought and read "I am a strange loop" because the jacket liner began with the following: "Can a self, a soul, a consciousness, an 'I' arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here? If it can, then how can we understand this baffling emergence?" I was hooked.

My favorite materialist explanation of consciousness comes from Sartre, who says that consciousness arises out of material existence and serves as a presence to the world. The essence of human consciousness is the ability to negate, to say no, to conceive alternatives (l'etre et le neant). But Sartre does not explain in any detail how this consciousness can emerge from material existence. Rather, he develops a psychology that illustrates and supports his fundamental view of human reality.

The core of Hofstadter's consciousness (or self, soul, I) is the enormous capacity of the human brain for complex operations, among which are feedback loops that grow in number and sophistication until they enable the human consciousness of self, the emergence of an 'I', and our ability to conceive of or mirror others in our minds. This seems to me to be a satisfying, although not necessarily complete, analysis of the problem of human consciousness in a material universe. Hofstadter's intellectual touchstones lie in mathematics, and particularly number theory; mine are in language, grammar, linguistics.

The book's method and organization lead the reader to understand and perhaps accept this huge concept in a way that I again found very frustrating -- often indirect, full of special vocabulary and game-playing, highly personal, idiosyncratic, shifting and evasive, and (I would say) self-indulgent. More difficult, I thought, than it needed to be. The book demands great patience from the reader. I found myself cursing the author for the way he circled and circled around the subject, bringing in every thought he has ever had about consciousness, and relying to a disturbing extent on his personal experience.

But I'm going to forgive Hofstadter again because the book has in the end provided me with an enhanced perspective on something that interests me very much. I can also give him credit for having made a case that is certainly unpopular outside of academic circles in these days of established religion and political evangelicalism, and having made it in a way that rises above ad hominem criticism. (Indeed, given the way the book is written, it may be destined to forever fly under the Christian Right's polemical radar.) A critic could of course say that Hofstadter is mistaken in his conclusions, but there can be no doubt about the authenticity and good will of the effort he has made and the undeniability of the "factual" evidence he marshalls to support his claims.
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Craig rated it:

05/13/08

The purpose of this book is to explain the mystery of consciousness. He admits off the top that the concept of the mind and conscious thought is quite difficult to nail down, and probably impossible to draw a distinct line upon. Is a mosquito conscious? After all, it, like us, seems to have a will to live, and responds to environmental stimuli in ways that benefit itself. If not a mosquito, is a bee conscious? A fish? A snake? A dog?

He does so by describing the mind's process of something li...more The purpose of this book is to explain the mystery of consciousness. He admits off the top that the concept of the mind and conscious thought is quite difficult to nail down, and probably impossible to draw a distinct line upon. Is a mosquito conscious? After all, it, like us, seems to have a will to live, and responds to environmental stimuli in ways that benefit itself. If not a mosquito, is a bee conscious? A fish? A snake? A dog?

He does so by describing the mind's process of something like "infinite reflexivity". Whereas a mosquito probably only responds in very predictable and determined ways to stimulus, higher order life "reflects" on stimuli in increasing complicated and diverse ways. His epiphany came back in the 70's when he took a video camera and began shooting it directly at the TV monitor which itself was displaying the video feed, thus showing an infinite number of reflections which gradually fade to a single point. The point, I suppose, is that because of the depth and arbitrary complexity of human thought, it is difficult to define in discrete terms, although this fact does not make it any less grounded in purely scientific and reasonable terms. Perhaps the thing I learned most from this book is that consciousness can perhaps only be understood by analogy, not by a direct understanding of the physiology or via mechanical terms.

The fact that he spent nearly 200 page trying to develop this metaphor, and providing multiple anecdotes illustrating the concept of the infinite and circular suggests to me that he really has no idea what consciousness is. He tries to keep his discussion purely on mathematical and scientific terms. It's clear he falls into the camp of those who believe the mind and soul are no more than complicated atomic and molecular interactions, and is doing his part to further the quest for the Holy Grail of atheists: explaining humanity in purely godless terms.

The problem is that if consciousness and brain function (if that is really the essence of humanity) were truly understood, scientists should be able to program it into a computer. So far, the only noticeable advances in the field of AI have only been virtual magic tricks -- in part researchers can get computers to seem to "think" like humans (as in Deep Blue's chess victories over Garry Kasparov) for specific tasks, but such simulations only work for the specific applications for which they were programmed. This isn't really AI -- they're just essentially complicated math solutions. There has been no AI which has successfully modeled the brain and human intelligence, which can respond to abstract and arbitrary input and truly "learn".

Aside from the author's utter failure to explain the essence of consciousness (I mean, really, how could you in < 400 pages?), he shows himself to be quite the arrogant scholarly type, with contempt towards those living outside his bubble. Himself a strict vegetarian for many years, he suggests meat eaters are less human than he is, because they seem not to be bothered by eating that which once represented a conscious and semi-sentient being. He even uses such eating habits to establish his own numerical scale of human consciousness -- essentially the less meat you eat, the more human you are. Um, okkk......less

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