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I Am a Strange Loop
Can thought arise out of matter? Can self, soul, consciousness, 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 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 Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since Godel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is a moving and profound inquiry into the nature of mind.
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 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 Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since Godel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is a moving and profound inquiry into the nature of mind.
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First published March 26, 2007
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About the author
Douglas R. Hofstadter
45 books2,349 followersDouglas Richard Hofstadter is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research focuses on consciousness, thinking and creativity. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979, for which he was awarded the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.
Hofstadter is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. Douglas grew up on the campus of Stanford University, where his father was a professor. Douglas attended the International School of Geneva for a year. He graduated with Distinction in Mathematics from Stanford in 1965. He spent a few years in Sweden in the mid 1960s. He continued his education and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975.
Hofstadter is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition which consists of himself and his graduate students, forming the "Fluid Analogies Research Group" (FARG). He was initially appointed to the Indiana University's Computer Science Department faculty in 1977, and at that time he launched his research program in computer modeling of mental processes (which at that time he called "artificial intelligence research", a label that he has since dropped in favor of "cognitive science research"). In 1984, he moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was hired as a professor of psychology and was also appointed to the Walgreen Chair for the Study of Human Understanding. In 1988 he returned to Bloomington as "College of Arts and Sciences Professor" in both Cognitive Science and Computer Science, and also was appointed Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology, but he states that his involvement with most of these departments is nominal.
In April, 2009, Hofstadter was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the American Philosophical Society.
Hofstadter's many interests include music, visual art, the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation and mathematics. He has numerous recursive sequences and geometric constructions named after him.
At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, he co-authored, with Melanie Mitchell, a computational model of "high-level perception" — Copycat — and several other models of analogy-making and cognition. The Copycat project was subsequently extended under the name "Metacat" by Hofstadter's doctoral student James Marshall. The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model the act of artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid). Other more recent models are Phaeaco (implemented by Harry Foundalis) and SeqSee (Abhijit Mahabal), which model high-level perception and analogy-making in the microdomains of Bongard problems and number sequences, respectively.
Hofstadter collects and studies cognitive errors (largely, but not solely, speech errors), "bon mots" (spontaneous humorous quips), and analogies of all sorts, and his long-time observation of these diverse products of cognition, and his theories about the mechanisms that underlie them, have exerted a powerful influence on the architectures of the computational models developed by himself and FARG members.
All FARG computational models share certain key principles, among which are: that human thinking is carried out by thousands of independent small actions in parallel, biased by the concepts that are currently activated; that activation spreads from activated concepts to less activated "neighbor concepts"; that there is a "mental temperature" that regulates the degree of randomness in the parallel activity; that promising avenues tend to be explored more rapidly than unpromising ones. F
Hofstadter is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. Douglas grew up on the campus of Stanford University, where his father was a professor. Douglas attended the International School of Geneva for a year. He graduated with Distinction in Mathematics from Stanford in 1965. He spent a few years in Sweden in the mid 1960s. He continued his education and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975.
Hofstadter is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition which consists of himself and his graduate students, forming the "Fluid Analogies Research Group" (FARG). He was initially appointed to the Indiana University's Computer Science Department faculty in 1977, and at that time he launched his research program in computer modeling of mental processes (which at that time he called "artificial intelligence research", a label that he has since dropped in favor of "cognitive science research"). In 1984, he moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was hired as a professor of psychology and was also appointed to the Walgreen Chair for the Study of Human Understanding. In 1988 he returned to Bloomington as "College of Arts and Sciences Professor" in both Cognitive Science and Computer Science, and also was appointed Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology, but he states that his involvement with most of these departments is nominal.
In April, 2009, Hofstadter was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the American Philosophical Society.
Hofstadter's many interests include music, visual art, the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation and mathematics. He has numerous recursive sequences and geometric constructions named after him.
At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, he co-authored, with Melanie Mitchell, a computational model of "high-level perception" — Copycat — and several other models of analogy-making and cognition. The Copycat project was subsequently extended under the name "Metacat" by Hofstadter's doctoral student James Marshall. The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model the act of artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid). Other more recent models are Phaeaco (implemented by Harry Foundalis) and SeqSee (Abhijit Mahabal), which model high-level perception and analogy-making in the microdomains of Bongard problems and number sequences, respectively.
Hofstadter collects and studies cognitive errors (largely, but not solely, speech errors), "bon mots" (spontaneous humorous quips), and analogies of all sorts, and his long-time observation of these diverse products of cognition, and his theories about the mechanisms that underlie them, have exerted a powerful influence on the architectures of the computational models developed by himself and FARG members.
All FARG computational models share certain key principles, among which are: that human thinking is carried out by thousands of independent small actions in parallel, biased by the concepts that are currently activated; that activation spreads from activated concepts to less activated "neighbor concepts"; that there is a "mental temperature" that regulates the degree of randomness in the parallel activity; that promising avenues tend to be explored more rapidly than unpromising ones. F
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August 18, 2019
Strangely Wrong
I must suggest something blasphemously arrogant: Douglas Hofstadter has it wrong. My only justification for saying such an outrageous thing is that it doesn’t matter. Folk will go on taking Hofstadter seriously in any case. Nevertheless I have a valid objection which needs to be recorded. Enough, then, of self-referentiality.
Hofstadter’s teenage intuition got him started on the idea that there are degrees of souledness in the material world. Atoms (and presumably their constituent parts) have no souls; bacteria have very primitive, that is to say, very small souls; dogs have somewhat bigger souls; and human beings have much larger souls but even among those there is enormous variation and no logical upper limit to size. This of course is not an entirely novel intuition. It was shared by Ancient Greek philosophers, pre-industrial tribal groups, perhaps some Shinto sects, and St. Thomas Aquinas among others.
This idea of souledness is of course essentially a moral one. Hofstadter’s explicit intention is to provide a criterion by which he and his fellow human beings can decide how to act - in general the more soul, the more respect should be afforded to its bearer. Incidentally he is also developing a theory of consciousness, which is a correlate of soul.
But this is simply wrong. Hofstadter, from the very beginning of his exceptionally discursive argument, presumes that what he is doing is constructing a metric of souledness through which he can estimate the size of soul or degree of consciousness possessed by an entity.
This is, of course what scientists, and engineers, and husbands who are putting up curtains usually think they are doing when they measure something, namely determining what length, breadth, volume, color, texture, or other magnitude constitutes some entity of interest. The metric employed depends on the interest one has of course.
It is this interest one has, however, and not the molecule, or bridge, or curtain material, which ‘contains’ the result of any measurement. The choice of which metric to employ determines not how much of something is contained in an object but where that object sits in relation to other objects on the metric. The object is a property of the metric; the metric is definitely not a property of the object.
This distinction is crucial in light of Hofstadter’s fundamental motivation to provide a criteria for correct behaviour. The choice of metric is THE moral choice. The thing measured has no moral content at all - not people, not events, not inanimate objects. They are considered as moral (or tall, or wide, or disgusting) when we put them on the scale we have chosen.
The consequence is that Hofstader’s Strange Loop, the ‘I’ of consciousness, is not some objective entity, a logical ego which can be studied scientifically for its salient characteristics. This Strange Loop is literally a moral construction, a consequence of the very metric of souledness that Hofstader chooses. We, not just human beings but all that exists, have no soul whatsoever until someone like Hofstader, or Plato, or Thomas Aquinas comes along and sets up a criterion for assessing it. Then, hey voila, it’s there.
But it’s really not there as well. The mirage that Hofstadter writes about is that the things we measure have the characteristics that we measure. An innocuous self-delusion, except when it’s not. The metric he started with is the Strange Loop, hiding in plain sight, a ninja ego smirking behind his index finger with a Cheshire Cat grin. It was created when Hofstadter said it and someone else heard it. The Strange Loop is not ‘I’, it is ‘We’.
And so the Strange Loop exists in that very strange state we call language, being nowhere specific but lurking invisibly everywhere. This gives the Strange Loop the character of quantum uncertainty: it can be experienced and reflected upon, but never at the same time. Just like the metric of souledness, one of its many masks.
I must suggest something blasphemously arrogant: Douglas Hofstadter has it wrong. My only justification for saying such an outrageous thing is that it doesn’t matter. Folk will go on taking Hofstadter seriously in any case. Nevertheless I have a valid objection which needs to be recorded. Enough, then, of self-referentiality.
Hofstadter’s teenage intuition got him started on the idea that there are degrees of souledness in the material world. Atoms (and presumably their constituent parts) have no souls; bacteria have very primitive, that is to say, very small souls; dogs have somewhat bigger souls; and human beings have much larger souls but even among those there is enormous variation and no logical upper limit to size. This of course is not an entirely novel intuition. It was shared by Ancient Greek philosophers, pre-industrial tribal groups, perhaps some Shinto sects, and St. Thomas Aquinas among others.
This idea of souledness is of course essentially a moral one. Hofstadter’s explicit intention is to provide a criterion by which he and his fellow human beings can decide how to act - in general the more soul, the more respect should be afforded to its bearer. Incidentally he is also developing a theory of consciousness, which is a correlate of soul.
But this is simply wrong. Hofstadter, from the very beginning of his exceptionally discursive argument, presumes that what he is doing is constructing a metric of souledness through which he can estimate the size of soul or degree of consciousness possessed by an entity.
This is, of course what scientists, and engineers, and husbands who are putting up curtains usually think they are doing when they measure something, namely determining what length, breadth, volume, color, texture, or other magnitude constitutes some entity of interest. The metric employed depends on the interest one has of course.
It is this interest one has, however, and not the molecule, or bridge, or curtain material, which ‘contains’ the result of any measurement. The choice of which metric to employ determines not how much of something is contained in an object but where that object sits in relation to other objects on the metric. The object is a property of the metric; the metric is definitely not a property of the object.
This distinction is crucial in light of Hofstadter’s fundamental motivation to provide a criteria for correct behaviour. The choice of metric is THE moral choice. The thing measured has no moral content at all - not people, not events, not inanimate objects. They are considered as moral (or tall, or wide, or disgusting) when we put them on the scale we have chosen.
The consequence is that Hofstader’s Strange Loop, the ‘I’ of consciousness, is not some objective entity, a logical ego which can be studied scientifically for its salient characteristics. This Strange Loop is literally a moral construction, a consequence of the very metric of souledness that Hofstader chooses. We, not just human beings but all that exists, have no soul whatsoever until someone like Hofstader, or Plato, or Thomas Aquinas comes along and sets up a criterion for assessing it. Then, hey voila, it’s there.
But it’s really not there as well. The mirage that Hofstadter writes about is that the things we measure have the characteristics that we measure. An innocuous self-delusion, except when it’s not. The metric he started with is the Strange Loop, hiding in plain sight, a ninja ego smirking behind his index finger with a Cheshire Cat grin. It was created when Hofstadter said it and someone else heard it. The Strange Loop is not ‘I’, it is ‘We’.
And so the Strange Loop exists in that very strange state we call language, being nowhere specific but lurking invisibly everywhere. This gives the Strange Loop the character of quantum uncertainty: it can be experienced and reflected upon, but never at the same time. Just like the metric of souledness, one of its many masks.
August 17, 2016
I have an interesting perspective on this title because the book I read just before it was The New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, a book grounded in Zen Buddhist philosophy. Tolle declares that the Ego (or thinking mind) is the cause of all the poisons of our civilization and the only hope for us as a species is to embrace awareness and presence and escape the thinking mind that feeds our needs for material possessions, success, achievement, domination, and so on. This book is in fact an entire logician’s analysis of what the “Ego” is, which Hofstadter believes is equivalent to the “I,” the Self, the soul, and consciousness itself. In fact Hofstadter believes the Ego is all there is in us. Tolle would probably say…you may be right that the Ego is a strange loop…but so what? It’s poison; cure it! While Tolle occasionally does fall into new-age batshit, overall his analysis was fairly compelling to me. I would also claim that Hofstadter’s equating consciousness, the “I,” and the “Ego” as all one equivalent thing is nothing more than an assertion.
Hofstadter’s essential claim is that the Ego is a strange loop in the mind, and by strange loop he means a feedback loop (or “pattern”) that reflects on itself. Everything in our brain is a symbol, including the symbol of itself. I believe he would say that the Self-symbol is a loop, and the loop is a symbol that is continually reevaluating itself and making slight adjustments to itself. A loop that can observe itself and provide feedback on itself (it’s “self”). We invent this Self-symbol in our minds over our lifetime as it constantly accretes bits of other symbols to it—it provides feedback on itself constantly. I actually agree that this is (possibly) an accurate way to describe much of the Ego. Hofstadter agrees with Buddhism that the Self is an illusion, but he off-handedly says striving to get past the illusion as Buddhism suggests is a pointless, dead-end pursuit.
I did not find that Hofstadter compellingly demonstrates that this strange loop is the entirety of consciousness. Awareness and energy or pure presence seem to be aspects of consciousness which are outside the symbol of the Ego. He tries—but doesn’t succeed in my mind—to dispel that there is something else present. In addition, he seems to confuse our mind's symbol of the “I” with what the “I” might really be. The mind is easily fooled after all so, this strange loop might certainly be an illusion. But also there might be something else we can’t sense because we are so easy to fool.
I think one of the key flaws in his argument is that he doesn’t delve deeply enough into the “self-reflexivity” he talks about. Since this “self-reflexivity” is the very point when a self-symbol examines itself then that very point may well be the point of the conscious mind. He essentially claims the self is a formula, and life is in fact mechanistic. There is no free-will because all your brain is doing is weighing pros and cons of various choices and whichever internal symbol gets the most checkmarks wins. The brain is an infinitely extensible, malleable computer processor and there is no “free” in will, only the choosing based on our brains weighing various symbols. He starts out sounding non-deterministic but in the end came out pro-deterministic. Thought=computation. In fact, he hasn’t really thought it all through. For example: can’t our brain re-evaluate a symbol’s value by thinking about it? By examining it internally, we can uncheck old boxes and check new ones. So in fact there is a consideration that occurs, a self-reflective change, an awareness that could be called “free.” It’s only action without analysis which is not free (at least within the framework he has set up.) This “will” to change is perhaps our moment of freedom.
There is something else to this self-reflective loop that Hofstadter doesn’t consider very thoroughly. Godel’s self-reflective mathematical statements are his model for what the Self is, such as “I am unprovable.” The self-reflective quality of Godel’s theories are certainly clever and very brilliant, but where they part ways with the analogy to human consciousness is our ability to change our formula and take a different direction through awareness. Someone actually wrote Godel’s formula, it didn’t burst into existence on its own. The claim that it represents the model for the self is nothing but a claim unbacked by scientific evidence.
One key outcome of Hofstadter’s analysis is that the “pattern” of the Self, or consciousness, can be distributed between people…so that a piece of his deceased wife’s consciousness exists in him because they were so intimate and her pattern lives on in him. But the flaw in this argument is so blatant, I can’t believe he doesn’t acknowledge it. If we grant him the premise that the Self is a symbol in the mind that the mind is constantly reinterpreting—then the symbol of “my dead wife” exists in his mind as a symbol of her but that symbol does not provide feedback to itself or reinterpret itself. So her consciousness is not distributed, merely a symbol of her is in his mind. The key difference being that (by his own definition) the Self is a self-reflexive symbol but my symbol of someone else—no matter how detailed it is, no matter how intimate we were—does not provide feedback to itself.
He gives us another hypothetical case to reinforce this theory. The story of a man who jumps into what is basically a Star Trek teleporter and is then reintegrated on another planet with every memory, thought, inclination, etc. Is it the same person or a new Self? What if the first person accidentally wasn’t disintegrated but survived? Which of the two would be the “real” man? He concludes that they really both are the real man and thus consciousness can be distributed. What this story lacks is an understanding of how a unique point-of-view makes the self what it is. To me the simple answer is: To other people, these two men will appear in every way the same. But to the individual who is teleported, the experience is not continuous. He simply dies in the first place and is not “reborn”. His consciousness will end and some other person identical to him in every way will be reborn, but his point-of-view of the world will be snuffed out. In the second case, the man who wasn’t disintegrated is the real consciousness while the new one is essentially an insta-clone. It’s not the complicated “grey area” puzzle Hofstadter claims. The clone may think it’s the same person as the previous one because it has the same thoughts and memories, but the man who stepped into the teleporter never had another thought. He died and was replaced by a doppelganger that was convinced it was him in every way. Hofstadter’s vision of distributed consciousness is not compelling.
Finally, in his conclusion, Hofstadter tries to bucket all people into two categories (an annoying habit he has): those who believe all things must follow physical laws (which would include those who agree with his theory), and those who believe in Dualism that would declare that there’s magic in that-there brain, a magic soul that gets squirted in at some point. The obvious flaw here is to assume that we have anywhere near a full grasp on what “physical laws” are. Does Quantum Physics “really” reflect what’s going on down there? Or is it just a metaphor for something we don’t understand at all? What about other universes or dimensions in space/time? So, perhaps there is another point to be made that maybe our “self” does follow a physical law that allows it to exist…but we just haven’t found that law yet. Or maybe physical laws are just abstractions and not so “determined” or concrete anyway. And what about the ambiguity and indeterminacy of quantum action itself? Or maybe something completely other is true that we have never even imagined.
Oh, and his weighing of “souls” by their level of consciousness is creepy. As well as his odd philosophy of how love of Bach makes you a bigger soul.
I Am a Strange Loop is overly-wordy and jammed with a few too many analogies and painful puns, but I enjoyed the intellectual challenge. He truly provides no concrete “reasons to believe” only assertions, which are worth pondering if not agreeing with.
Hofstadter’s essential claim is that the Ego is a strange loop in the mind, and by strange loop he means a feedback loop (or “pattern”) that reflects on itself. Everything in our brain is a symbol, including the symbol of itself. I believe he would say that the Self-symbol is a loop, and the loop is a symbol that is continually reevaluating itself and making slight adjustments to itself. A loop that can observe itself and provide feedback on itself (it’s “self”). We invent this Self-symbol in our minds over our lifetime as it constantly accretes bits of other symbols to it—it provides feedback on itself constantly. I actually agree that this is (possibly) an accurate way to describe much of the Ego. Hofstadter agrees with Buddhism that the Self is an illusion, but he off-handedly says striving to get past the illusion as Buddhism suggests is a pointless, dead-end pursuit.
I did not find that Hofstadter compellingly demonstrates that this strange loop is the entirety of consciousness. Awareness and energy or pure presence seem to be aspects of consciousness which are outside the symbol of the Ego. He tries—but doesn’t succeed in my mind—to dispel that there is something else present. In addition, he seems to confuse our mind's symbol of the “I” with what the “I” might really be. The mind is easily fooled after all so, this strange loop might certainly be an illusion. But also there might be something else we can’t sense because we are so easy to fool.
I think one of the key flaws in his argument is that he doesn’t delve deeply enough into the “self-reflexivity” he talks about. Since this “self-reflexivity” is the very point when a self-symbol examines itself then that very point may well be the point of the conscious mind. He essentially claims the self is a formula, and life is in fact mechanistic. There is no free-will because all your brain is doing is weighing pros and cons of various choices and whichever internal symbol gets the most checkmarks wins. The brain is an infinitely extensible, malleable computer processor and there is no “free” in will, only the choosing based on our brains weighing various symbols. He starts out sounding non-deterministic but in the end came out pro-deterministic. Thought=computation. In fact, he hasn’t really thought it all through. For example: can’t our brain re-evaluate a symbol’s value by thinking about it? By examining it internally, we can uncheck old boxes and check new ones. So in fact there is a consideration that occurs, a self-reflective change, an awareness that could be called “free.” It’s only action without analysis which is not free (at least within the framework he has set up.) This “will” to change is perhaps our moment of freedom.
There is something else to this self-reflective loop that Hofstadter doesn’t consider very thoroughly. Godel’s self-reflective mathematical statements are his model for what the Self is, such as “I am unprovable.” The self-reflective quality of Godel’s theories are certainly clever and very brilliant, but where they part ways with the analogy to human consciousness is our ability to change our formula and take a different direction through awareness. Someone actually wrote Godel’s formula, it didn’t burst into existence on its own. The claim that it represents the model for the self is nothing but a claim unbacked by scientific evidence.
One key outcome of Hofstadter’s analysis is that the “pattern” of the Self, or consciousness, can be distributed between people…so that a piece of his deceased wife’s consciousness exists in him because they were so intimate and her pattern lives on in him. But the flaw in this argument is so blatant, I can’t believe he doesn’t acknowledge it. If we grant him the premise that the Self is a symbol in the mind that the mind is constantly reinterpreting—then the symbol of “my dead wife” exists in his mind as a symbol of her but that symbol does not provide feedback to itself or reinterpret itself. So her consciousness is not distributed, merely a symbol of her is in his mind. The key difference being that (by his own definition) the Self is a self-reflexive symbol but my symbol of someone else—no matter how detailed it is, no matter how intimate we were—does not provide feedback to itself.
He gives us another hypothetical case to reinforce this theory. The story of a man who jumps into what is basically a Star Trek teleporter and is then reintegrated on another planet with every memory, thought, inclination, etc. Is it the same person or a new Self? What if the first person accidentally wasn’t disintegrated but survived? Which of the two would be the “real” man? He concludes that they really both are the real man and thus consciousness can be distributed. What this story lacks is an understanding of how a unique point-of-view makes the self what it is. To me the simple answer is: To other people, these two men will appear in every way the same. But to the individual who is teleported, the experience is not continuous. He simply dies in the first place and is not “reborn”. His consciousness will end and some other person identical to him in every way will be reborn, but his point-of-view of the world will be snuffed out. In the second case, the man who wasn’t disintegrated is the real consciousness while the new one is essentially an insta-clone. It’s not the complicated “grey area” puzzle Hofstadter claims. The clone may think it’s the same person as the previous one because it has the same thoughts and memories, but the man who stepped into the teleporter never had another thought. He died and was replaced by a doppelganger that was convinced it was him in every way. Hofstadter’s vision of distributed consciousness is not compelling.
Finally, in his conclusion, Hofstadter tries to bucket all people into two categories (an annoying habit he has): those who believe all things must follow physical laws (which would include those who agree with his theory), and those who believe in Dualism that would declare that there’s magic in that-there brain, a magic soul that gets squirted in at some point. The obvious flaw here is to assume that we have anywhere near a full grasp on what “physical laws” are. Does Quantum Physics “really” reflect what’s going on down there? Or is it just a metaphor for something we don’t understand at all? What about other universes or dimensions in space/time? So, perhaps there is another point to be made that maybe our “self” does follow a physical law that allows it to exist…but we just haven’t found that law yet. Or maybe physical laws are just abstractions and not so “determined” or concrete anyway. And what about the ambiguity and indeterminacy of quantum action itself? Or maybe something completely other is true that we have never even imagined.
Oh, and his weighing of “souls” by their level of consciousness is creepy. As well as his odd philosophy of how love of Bach makes you a bigger soul.
I Am a Strange Loop is overly-wordy and jammed with a few too many analogies and painful puns, but I enjoyed the intellectual challenge. He truly provides no concrete “reasons to believe” only assertions, which are worth pondering if not agreeing with.
December 4, 2022
*Edit December 2022* Came back here just to muse on the idea that Hofstadter's idea of the "strange loop" is more or less an intuitive, philosophical way, rather than a theoretical physics and mathematical way, of getting to the idea of quantum entanglement - which is just marvelous.
*Original Review:*
I’d like to preface the review (which is very long, but if you are vacillating on whether or not to read this book, I hope my review will help you decide to your best interests, whichever those will be. Particularly if you, like me, are decidedly not math-inclined) by saying that I’m a philosophy student. I love philosophy so much it’s disgusting. We’re dating. We moved in together after our third date. We have a wedding registry at Macy’s. So it is with nothing but complete affection that I say many, many, many philosophers- particularly modern, male philosophers- are total fucking assholes who I will happily argue do not possess souls and as such have no business talking about them. But I love their soulless little hearts anyway.
Naturally, I head into “I Am A Strange Loop” expecting more of the same. So you can imagine my surprise when, by page 11, I’m aw’ing at Douglas Hofstadter’s warm little animal-loving soul, and later, when he talks about losing his wife- it’s unbelievably touching. So basically consider me fully indoctrinated to the Hofstadter cult of personality. I am fully ready to drink the Kool-Aid. I am THERE. Show me your world, Douglas.
And what an interesting world. I read this book as a teaser to convince me I need to read Godel, Escher, Bach. I wanted the motivation to read that, because it’s twice as long as “Loop” is and you need to really commit. Successful! This book is fully readable for anyone who likes thinking about thinking.
Contrary to what the other reviewers say, there’s not really that much math. From Page 113 to around 170, there’s some conceptual math he walks you through, but he’s gentle and at least half of that material is anecdotes and analogies, so really you’re look at mayyyybe 20 or 30 pages of actual math and metamathematics. That’s practically a pamphlet, and doable for anyone if you just grit your teeth. But it’s important you read it or the rest of the book will be a waste.
That said, I don’t think it’s important for the *idea* the book outlines. Godel’s discovery that Russell & Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica is self-referential (self-reference in math being the very thing Russell & Whitehead were trying to explain away by writing PM) is an analogy for the main idea of the book, and as such, it’s supposed to elucidate the primary idea. It doesn’t, much. There are many other, much shorter analogies (a good number of which Hofstadter also uses) to introduce the idea that consciousness and perception of the “I” are Mobius strip-esque. An analogy to support an idea shouldn’t take up half the book. While the analogy is sound, it’s superfluous, and I think Hofstadter just loves Godel too much to leave him out of anything (Bach, too. And Escher. We’re treated to all three of his heroes in varying doses). Therefore I agree with other reviews which say this book could have been half this size and gotten the same point across, but I disagree that it *should* have been shorter. I’m glad the Godel analogy (and all the rest of the digressions, which are many but pleasant) was included, because I enjoyed learning about it, and I liked reading the book the way it was written.
Other notes: Douglas, you are a freak. I would have loved to be your mom because you were obviously the kind of kid you could leave in a house alone for days, like a cat, and come back to find you sitting in the exact same spot you left them staring fixedly at his own hands. I say this because he explains that for Video Voyage II (when he pointed a camera at the TV screen which displayed its feed, creating an infinite feedback loop) he spent twelve hours with his friend just playing with that. Dangling shit in front of the camera to see what would happen.
Now, look. That sounds like a fantastic thing to do and I’m going to try it myself when I have the chance. But for an hour. Mayyyyybe two if I’ve had some Adderall or something. But twelve hours? He also names a box of envelopes Epi and carries “her” around for thirty years and counting. He is- perhaps appropriately- loopy. While he clearly recognizes his zaniness, he so obviously doesn’t know the half of it. He’s like what would result if Pee Wee Herman and Hilary Putnam somehow had a baby and dipped it in radioactive ice cream. And I truly mean that as a compliment.
What might be my favourite moment of the book is his explanation of Euclid’s proof on the infinitude of prime numbers. WHAT? you gasp, remembering that I said I am so unmathy there are not words to describe it (amusingly, Hofstadter points out somewhere that in saying that, I have described it- “indescribable” is a descriptive word. Ah, loops and paradoxes). But it’s true. In less than a page, he describes this proof, and if you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a “Eureka!” moment like no other. He leads into the proof by saying it’s a crucial life experience like tasting chocolate or hearing music for the first time. At this, I’m scoffing. Sure, Douggie. For a mathfreak like you, sure. But for me, it is just a page to get through before we go back to the fun philosophy. By the end of it, there are stars in my eyes because I’ve just had the most enjoyable math-related experience of my life because, for the first time, it clicked and it was amazing and it was chocolate. It was music. HE WAS RIGHT.
Nota bene: it's true this book doesn’t have a lot of brand-new ideas- new to me or new to the world. But it does articulate them in more compelling ways than I’ve personally encountered, and in doing so, convinced me more of their possibility. So in that way it was personally transformative.
He gets a lot of criticism for the amount of himself that he puts in the book. There are many personal anecdotes and a lot about the death of his wife. I think that’s important. I think that to write a book on the nature of the “I” for the author to abstract entirely is delusional and as foolhardy as a scientist claiming that science is pure hard fact and doesn’t come with its own set of warping factors and biases. It also, of course, makes for a more readable book, and makes the ideas he defends with those personal stories more convincing.
The philosophical world he describes about midway through the book, Twinwirld, was extremely fun to play with.
He loves to play with words and he loves corny puns. From “simmballs” to “post partyum decompression” there are many winks to make you smile.
I would respectfully but staunchly disagree with interpretations that claim Hofstadter’s take is reductionist. It is not. In no way is he claiming that mental states are irrelevant. Quite the opposite- he is claiming that the body is the least important part of the mind, that the mind can exist outside one body, that in being able to think like someone else, and experience states of mind from or of them, we are them, in a strange way- we don’t carry the most faithful part of them, of course, but we do in some sense have their “soul” (he often uses this word in a non-religious and unromantic way, of course, and really means something more like “essence” or “consciousness”) in part. Because, like a finger waggling in front of a video camera pointed at a screen showing its own feed, souls are strange loops- one small alteration will be played back eternally, and human interaction creates many such alterations, and so just as the finger will exist on those video screens in an infinite loop (infinite so long as the camera and screen hold out without breaking or being moved, obviously) long after the finger is gone (even, in fact, if the owner of the finger is dead and rotted away), and in that way the finger is preserved, sort of, just so a person’s consciousness, when it becomes intertwined with the loops of others’ consciousness, may well be said to endure in some sense after they are dead.
*Original Review:*
I’d like to preface the review (which is very long, but if you are vacillating on whether or not to read this book, I hope my review will help you decide to your best interests, whichever those will be. Particularly if you, like me, are decidedly not math-inclined) by saying that I’m a philosophy student. I love philosophy so much it’s disgusting. We’re dating. We moved in together after our third date. We have a wedding registry at Macy’s. So it is with nothing but complete affection that I say many, many, many philosophers- particularly modern, male philosophers- are total fucking assholes who I will happily argue do not possess souls and as such have no business talking about them. But I love their soulless little hearts anyway.
Naturally, I head into “I Am A Strange Loop” expecting more of the same. So you can imagine my surprise when, by page 11, I’m aw’ing at Douglas Hofstadter’s warm little animal-loving soul, and later, when he talks about losing his wife- it’s unbelievably touching. So basically consider me fully indoctrinated to the Hofstadter cult of personality. I am fully ready to drink the Kool-Aid. I am THERE. Show me your world, Douglas.
And what an interesting world. I read this book as a teaser to convince me I need to read Godel, Escher, Bach. I wanted the motivation to read that, because it’s twice as long as “Loop” is and you need to really commit. Successful! This book is fully readable for anyone who likes thinking about thinking.
Contrary to what the other reviewers say, there’s not really that much math. From Page 113 to around 170, there’s some conceptual math he walks you through, but he’s gentle and at least half of that material is anecdotes and analogies, so really you’re look at mayyyybe 20 or 30 pages of actual math and metamathematics. That’s practically a pamphlet, and doable for anyone if you just grit your teeth. But it’s important you read it or the rest of the book will be a waste.
That said, I don’t think it’s important for the *idea* the book outlines. Godel’s discovery that Russell & Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica is self-referential (self-reference in math being the very thing Russell & Whitehead were trying to explain away by writing PM) is an analogy for the main idea of the book, and as such, it’s supposed to elucidate the primary idea. It doesn’t, much. There are many other, much shorter analogies (a good number of which Hofstadter also uses) to introduce the idea that consciousness and perception of the “I” are Mobius strip-esque. An analogy to support an idea shouldn’t take up half the book. While the analogy is sound, it’s superfluous, and I think Hofstadter just loves Godel too much to leave him out of anything (Bach, too. And Escher. We’re treated to all three of his heroes in varying doses). Therefore I agree with other reviews which say this book could have been half this size and gotten the same point across, but I disagree that it *should* have been shorter. I’m glad the Godel analogy (and all the rest of the digressions, which are many but pleasant) was included, because I enjoyed learning about it, and I liked reading the book the way it was written.
Other notes: Douglas, you are a freak. I would have loved to be your mom because you were obviously the kind of kid you could leave in a house alone for days, like a cat, and come back to find you sitting in the exact same spot you left them staring fixedly at his own hands. I say this because he explains that for Video Voyage II (when he pointed a camera at the TV screen which displayed its feed, creating an infinite feedback loop) he spent twelve hours with his friend just playing with that. Dangling shit in front of the camera to see what would happen.
Now, look. That sounds like a fantastic thing to do and I’m going to try it myself when I have the chance. But for an hour. Mayyyyybe two if I’ve had some Adderall or something. But twelve hours? He also names a box of envelopes Epi and carries “her” around for thirty years and counting. He is- perhaps appropriately- loopy. While he clearly recognizes his zaniness, he so obviously doesn’t know the half of it. He’s like what would result if Pee Wee Herman and Hilary Putnam somehow had a baby and dipped it in radioactive ice cream. And I truly mean that as a compliment.
What might be my favourite moment of the book is his explanation of Euclid’s proof on the infinitude of prime numbers. WHAT? you gasp, remembering that I said I am so unmathy there are not words to describe it (amusingly, Hofstadter points out somewhere that in saying that, I have described it- “indescribable” is a descriptive word. Ah, loops and paradoxes). But it’s true. In less than a page, he describes this proof, and if you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a “Eureka!” moment like no other. He leads into the proof by saying it’s a crucial life experience like tasting chocolate or hearing music for the first time. At this, I’m scoffing. Sure, Douggie. For a mathfreak like you, sure. But for me, it is just a page to get through before we go back to the fun philosophy. By the end of it, there are stars in my eyes because I’ve just had the most enjoyable math-related experience of my life because, for the first time, it clicked and it was amazing and it was chocolate. It was music. HE WAS RIGHT.
Nota bene: it's true this book doesn’t have a lot of brand-new ideas- new to me or new to the world. But it does articulate them in more compelling ways than I’ve personally encountered, and in doing so, convinced me more of their possibility. So in that way it was personally transformative.
He gets a lot of criticism for the amount of himself that he puts in the book. There are many personal anecdotes and a lot about the death of his wife. I think that’s important. I think that to write a book on the nature of the “I” for the author to abstract entirely is delusional and as foolhardy as a scientist claiming that science is pure hard fact and doesn’t come with its own set of warping factors and biases. It also, of course, makes for a more readable book, and makes the ideas he defends with those personal stories more convincing.
The philosophical world he describes about midway through the book, Twinwirld, was extremely fun to play with.
He loves to play with words and he loves corny puns. From “simmballs” to “post partyum decompression” there are many winks to make you smile.
I would respectfully but staunchly disagree with interpretations that claim Hofstadter’s take is reductionist. It is not. In no way is he claiming that mental states are irrelevant. Quite the opposite- he is claiming that the body is the least important part of the mind, that the mind can exist outside one body, that in being able to think like someone else, and experience states of mind from or of them, we are them, in a strange way- we don’t carry the most faithful part of them, of course, but we do in some sense have their “soul” (he often uses this word in a non-religious and unromantic way, of course, and really means something more like “essence” or “consciousness”) in part. Because, like a finger waggling in front of a video camera pointed at a screen showing its own feed, souls are strange loops- one small alteration will be played back eternally, and human interaction creates many such alterations, and so just as the finger will exist on those video screens in an infinite loop (infinite so long as the camera and screen hold out without breaking or being moved, obviously) long after the finger is gone (even, in fact, if the owner of the finger is dead and rotted away), and in that way the finger is preserved, sort of, just so a person’s consciousness, when it becomes intertwined with the loops of others’ consciousness, may well be said to endure in some sense after they are dead.
March 26, 2009
I read Douglas Hofstadter”s “Godel, Escher, Bach” long ago – sometime in the early ‘80s, and I remember thinking “I really need to read this again. I liked this book, but there was a lot I think I missed.”
When I saw a copy of “I Am a Strange Loop” in a used-book store, and Hofstadter said in the intro it was his update of “Godel, Escher, Bach,” I figured this was my chance to rediscover the concepts in “Godel, Escher, Bach.”
Well, I did, but I can’t say I was happy with the result. Hofstadter’s topic in “I Am a Strange Loop” is consciousness, and the concept of the “I” that we all carry around in our heads. And somewhat like Gilbert Ryle and the other black-box philosophers who believe that mental states are unimportant phenomena, and all that matters is physical behavior, Hofstadter concludes that there is no I there at all. Instead, there are just a bunch of competing desires that he says, using one of his many analogies, compete in the brain for votes, and the one with the most votes gets to see that desire translated into action.
Hofstadter’s primary point is the problem that’s haunted the mind-body dualists since Descartes: How does a thought or idea get transmitted from the non-corporeal plane of mental activity to the decidedly down-and-dirty mass of blood and bone that is human flesh? Hofstadter claims that the I we believe we have is just a convenient fiction our brains have constructed, and that there’s no way our mental beliefs could be translated into physical action.
Of course, Hofstadter’s own theory suffers from the same fundamental problem: How does the winner in the competition between various wishes and desires translate that specific wish and desire into physical action? What is the mechanism that bridges the gap between the world of spirit and the world of flesh?
Absent that key connection, Hofstadter’s alternative to our ingrained belief in our own consciousness, and our own ability to make decisions that we then execute, lacks any real advantage. It’s just another theory about mental states, but one that ignores the reality of our belief in our own identity.
Which leads to a second argument against Hofstadter’s position that there’s no I there: the evolutionary one. If the I really doesn’t exist, why do we think it does? If we don’t have free will, why did we develop this elaborate mental apparatus that makes us think we do? If free will is an illusion, wouldn’t we as a species be better off applying the resources we spend believing in our ability to choose to something more practical, like running faster, or producing more sperm and eggs, or having a better sense of smell? Why would evolution have allowed this strong sense of our own consciousness to use up so much of our mental energy if it was just a figment of our imagination?
Another argument: In the 19th century, there was a great deal of philosophical debate, again going back to Descartes, about the validity of our perceptions about reality. Bishop Berkeley contended that all that existed were ideas, as whatever we perceive is mediated by our brains – and thus even if there were an objective reality, we could have no idea what it was because of the barrier set up by our brain’s interpretation of what our senses transmitted.
Logically, there is no real answer to this contention, but pragmatist G.E. Moore finally simply said “This is my hand” – and the idealists, as they were called, cannot deny that the world operates as though our hands are real, and exist.
Finally, though I could go on, there’s this question: Does Hofstadter himself believe that he doesn’t make choices? Does he really live his life as though his own identity doesn’t matter, and doesn’t make decisions? Does he go to lunch with the other philosophers who believe our mental states cannot translate into action, and wind up just walking aimlessly until they find a Taco Bell? Or do they act as if they could decide that the local taqueria is a better choice?
All that said, I did find parts of “I Am a Strange Loop” well worth reading. Hofstadter’s long explanation of precisely how Kurt Godel demolished the formalist mathematical theories of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead is fascinating (if sometimes difficult), and there are other segments early in the book that are very engaging.
But as the book goes on, Hofstadter’s penchant for unusual analogies and his reductionist philosophy take over, and frankly, left me cold. I read the first 200 pages with interest, but it was a struggle to finish “I Am a Strange Loop.”
Oh, and I am now cured of my desire to go back and re-read “Godel, Escher, Bach” – especially since, according to Hofstadter, I don’t really exist at all.
When I saw a copy of “I Am a Strange Loop” in a used-book store, and Hofstadter said in the intro it was his update of “Godel, Escher, Bach,” I figured this was my chance to rediscover the concepts in “Godel, Escher, Bach.”
Well, I did, but I can’t say I was happy with the result. Hofstadter’s topic in “I Am a Strange Loop” is consciousness, and the concept of the “I” that we all carry around in our heads. And somewhat like Gilbert Ryle and the other black-box philosophers who believe that mental states are unimportant phenomena, and all that matters is physical behavior, Hofstadter concludes that there is no I there at all. Instead, there are just a bunch of competing desires that he says, using one of his many analogies, compete in the brain for votes, and the one with the most votes gets to see that desire translated into action.
Hofstadter’s primary point is the problem that’s haunted the mind-body dualists since Descartes: How does a thought or idea get transmitted from the non-corporeal plane of mental activity to the decidedly down-and-dirty mass of blood and bone that is human flesh? Hofstadter claims that the I we believe we have is just a convenient fiction our brains have constructed, and that there’s no way our mental beliefs could be translated into physical action.
Of course, Hofstadter’s own theory suffers from the same fundamental problem: How does the winner in the competition between various wishes and desires translate that specific wish and desire into physical action? What is the mechanism that bridges the gap between the world of spirit and the world of flesh?
Absent that key connection, Hofstadter’s alternative to our ingrained belief in our own consciousness, and our own ability to make decisions that we then execute, lacks any real advantage. It’s just another theory about mental states, but one that ignores the reality of our belief in our own identity.
Which leads to a second argument against Hofstadter’s position that there’s no I there: the evolutionary one. If the I really doesn’t exist, why do we think it does? If we don’t have free will, why did we develop this elaborate mental apparatus that makes us think we do? If free will is an illusion, wouldn’t we as a species be better off applying the resources we spend believing in our ability to choose to something more practical, like running faster, or producing more sperm and eggs, or having a better sense of smell? Why would evolution have allowed this strong sense of our own consciousness to use up so much of our mental energy if it was just a figment of our imagination?
Another argument: In the 19th century, there was a great deal of philosophical debate, again going back to Descartes, about the validity of our perceptions about reality. Bishop Berkeley contended that all that existed were ideas, as whatever we perceive is mediated by our brains – and thus even if there were an objective reality, we could have no idea what it was because of the barrier set up by our brain’s interpretation of what our senses transmitted.
Logically, there is no real answer to this contention, but pragmatist G.E. Moore finally simply said “This is my hand” – and the idealists, as they were called, cannot deny that the world operates as though our hands are real, and exist.
Finally, though I could go on, there’s this question: Does Hofstadter himself believe that he doesn’t make choices? Does he really live his life as though his own identity doesn’t matter, and doesn’t make decisions? Does he go to lunch with the other philosophers who believe our mental states cannot translate into action, and wind up just walking aimlessly until they find a Taco Bell? Or do they act as if they could decide that the local taqueria is a better choice?
All that said, I did find parts of “I Am a Strange Loop” well worth reading. Hofstadter’s long explanation of precisely how Kurt Godel demolished the formalist mathematical theories of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead is fascinating (if sometimes difficult), and there are other segments early in the book that are very engaging.
But as the book goes on, Hofstadter’s penchant for unusual analogies and his reductionist philosophy take over, and frankly, left me cold. I read the first 200 pages with interest, but it was a struggle to finish “I Am a Strange Loop.”
Oh, and I am now cured of my desire to go back and re-read “Godel, Escher, Bach” – especially since, according to Hofstadter, I don’t really exist at all.
February 15, 2011
I didn’t like this book, although I agree with almost all of its assertions. Conceptually, I guess you could say, I enjoyed it, but the presentation - the language of the author, the over-long format, and the strange mixture of hard math and elementary philosophy - diminished and diluted the content to the point that it was barely worth reading. The first problem is Hofstadter’s “aww shucks” Uncle Fluffy writing style. His language is so steeped in a fireside chat mentality that the meat of his ideas is completely devoured by his good-natured cleverness. He is kind of a dork (I mean that as uninsultingly as possible) and it shows. Despite his obvious grasp of a difficult subject, I can’t imagine conversing with him about it. His anecdotal asides alone are enough to trigger the gag reflex. The book is written as if he is more worried about getting the reader to like him than he is about clarity in the presentation and defense of his thesis (which, I must assert again, is a marvelous thesis, indeed).
What was already to me a shaky book collapses completely in the final few chapters, when Hofstadter devotes a significant portion of his efforts to refuting only tangentially related philosophical claims. In particular, his analysis of the “inverted spectrum” is not only extraneous but outright wrong. His grasp of the philosophical arguments is lacking, and he spends most of a chapter refuting thought experiments with the laws of physics. It is frustrating for an author who has been delving into abstraction for 400 pages to suddenly attack others for their abstractions. While I’m not versed in the particular philosophers he is addressing (and I don’t think he addresses anything with thoroughness), I know enough of the concept to realize immediately the fallacy of his argument. His conclusions are irrelevant because they operate within a field of study separate from the one in question. Not only that, he is mistaken on a number of his assumptions, including the foundation of his argument – that physical external stimuli cause the same internal neural reaction. The quickest way to refute this claim is with dyslexia, where a concrete word, number or shape is viewed completely differently by a dyslexic brain as compared to a normal brain. He assumes a universal nature for thought, which proven wrong quite simply, and on the abstract level the actual nature of thought is irrelevant for philosophical musings. His mixing of physics and metaphysics, especially in an important part of his book, so near the end, shattered for me much of his credibility, mainly because it is presented in the context of a petty attack against ideas he doesn’t “like.”
My long refutation of this single point of Hofstadter’s should not imply that I liked the book up to this point. I was disappointed from the beginning it. It seemed like his arguments could have been made much more clearly in a shorter work and if he toned down his personality. The density of “revelations” in this book is too low for it to be worth reading.
What was already to me a shaky book collapses completely in the final few chapters, when Hofstadter devotes a significant portion of his efforts to refuting only tangentially related philosophical claims. In particular, his analysis of the “inverted spectrum” is not only extraneous but outright wrong. His grasp of the philosophical arguments is lacking, and he spends most of a chapter refuting thought experiments with the laws of physics. It is frustrating for an author who has been delving into abstraction for 400 pages to suddenly attack others for their abstractions. While I’m not versed in the particular philosophers he is addressing (and I don’t think he addresses anything with thoroughness), I know enough of the concept to realize immediately the fallacy of his argument. His conclusions are irrelevant because they operate within a field of study separate from the one in question. Not only that, he is mistaken on a number of his assumptions, including the foundation of his argument – that physical external stimuli cause the same internal neural reaction. The quickest way to refute this claim is with dyslexia, where a concrete word, number or shape is viewed completely differently by a dyslexic brain as compared to a normal brain. He assumes a universal nature for thought, which proven wrong quite simply, and on the abstract level the actual nature of thought is irrelevant for philosophical musings. His mixing of physics and metaphysics, especially in an important part of his book, so near the end, shattered for me much of his credibility, mainly because it is presented in the context of a petty attack against ideas he doesn’t “like.”
My long refutation of this single point of Hofstadter’s should not imply that I liked the book up to this point. I was disappointed from the beginning it. It seemed like his arguments could have been made much more clearly in a shorter work and if he toned down his personality. The density of “revelations” in this book is too low for it to be worth reading.
May 14, 2008
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...
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...
July 13, 2016
After about 200 pages of reading I still was unsure what the point was supposed to be. Hoffstadter purportedly explores the nature of self-reference and consciousness, but instead, I think, spends more time pointing out through his writing how clever he is, how feeble he considers Bertrand Russell, and how much of a fan boy he (Hoffstadter) is of Godel. It's not at all clear to me that this book has any genuine insights to offer, but that may be that it is lost on me as I find his writing style clear, but amateurish... It is difficult to get into the book for the following reasons: (a) he subdivides each chapter into 10-20 sections, each with it's own header--this serves to state what he is about to tell you, but in far fewer words, and in a way that illustrates his wit (we get it, you're very clever); it also makes reading it difficult to maintain because it breaks up the flow of the read... (b) he spends far too much time explaining extravagant thought experiments that are meant to clarify concepts that are already pretty clear... (c) he spends much of the book making one of the most impressive feats of 20th century logic (Principia Mathematica) sound like the musings of a feeble old lunatic... and (d) he does not really ever say anything.
These things together make the book uninteresting and no fun to read.
These things together make the book uninteresting and no fun to read.
August 9, 2019
There really is no valid reason I could recommend this book. It would be the rare reader who is interested in this topic who hasn’t read about all the classical Philosophy of Mind thought experiments presented throughout this book, and I really would have to ask any such reader: ‘what did you learn about consciousness that you didn’t already know and is meaning about meaning really that elusive to you?”.
After Godel the firm foundation of mathematics as an absolute truth about knowledge outside ourselves has been seen as a chimera. Logic will only preserve truth and never creates truth outside of itself and within its own logical system needs set theory to get from the rules of thought to mathematics and by doing that you will have incompleteness and won’t be able to prove consistency. Anytime you have a system with rules a statement about the rules, a meta-statement can be made about those rules and that will lead to a recursive, self-referential, existence of a ‘strange loop’, or as in the case for being human, the ‘I’.
The author invokes Bertrand Russell and Principia Mathematica frequently. The single most tone deaf introduction I have ever read was Russell’s for Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Russell didn’t quite comprehend that Wittgenstein eviscerates his (and Whitehead’s) ‘firm foundations’ for mathematics through grammar and tone deafly condescendingly patronizes Wittgenstein’s understanding of the absolute foundation of mathematical certainty. There is a reason why the trivium for the seven liberal arts consists of grammar, logic and rhetoric. Wittgenstein uses grammar to demonstrate the strange loop we live in, Godel comes along a few years later and uses logic to show the strange loop and Hofstadter uses Godel’s Incompleteness with rhetorical finesse. I don’t think Hofstadter mentions Wittgenstein (if he does, it was only in passing) at all in this book and that to me seems an oversight given the similar story both rhetorically tell, one through grammar the other through logic.
The author does move around a lot in the story telling and will tend to conflate ‘I’ with ‘self aware’ with ‘consciousnesses or ‘conscience’ or ‘thinking’ or other such labels. He definitely has an ‘intentionality’ way ingrained in his methodology such that thought is always ‘about something’ such as about our hope, fears, desires or wants and gives predominance to the ‘why’ of our thought over the ‘what’ was done. He’ll make ‘Being’ as thinking as in ‘I think, therefore I am’, the cogito is really saying thinking=being (that is being is not becoming, nor knowledge, nor truth, nor striving (conatus), nor will, nor will to power, but thinking), the author will make it an implied ‘we’ for the ‘I’ and therefore his cogito would be ‘we think, therefore we are’ because ‘I’ is a label for the ‘we’ that comes about through our strange loop within us. (The author says he’s not a dualist, but he does lapse into that pattern from time to time). What he is trying to get at overall requires various discussions on free will, identity, qualia, zombies, and Star Trek transporters and he makes multiple forays into those overly familiar Philosophy of Mind topics.
Gadamer in ‘Truth and Method’ said, "All understanding is interpretation. Being that can be understood is language". Gadamer is the last of the phenomenologist and hence he too would have an intentionalist stance and would think that thought (consciousness) is always about something such as our hope, fears, desires, or wants. Gadamer’s quote is another way of saying we are a strange loop. Hofstadter and Gadamer accept free will as a given, but I tend to agree with Hume and Schopenhauer who both would say that we understand our desire but we don’t control the desires of our desires it just happens through our experiences and through a long series of cause and effects; understanding that we are a strange loop doesn’t change that we are captive creatures of all of our previous environments, our present presence and our expectations for the future which are filtered and weighted by our past experiences and previous environments (see, we are a strange loop!) .
Our ‘I’ that we have is a label that we put onto ourselves in order get a handle on how to deal with the outside world. It’s an illusion. (I tend to agree with that, and that is the author’s thrust too). He’ll conflate the consciousness with the ‘I’. The one thing with certainty one knows about ‘consciousness’ is that it can’t be an illusion since the definition of illusion needs a consciousness in order to exist, see ‘The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars: A Neuropsychologist's Odyssey through Consciousness’ by Broks. That book is better than this book in almost every way. Both books authors are dealing with a loss of a loved one and are searching for meaning and the meta-meaning that automatically generates from any system that has meaning (we are always in a strange loop referencing recursively leading to a paradox of existence or in other words what Kierkegaard said, ‘Irony is jealous of authenticity’. It’s well worth reading Kierkegaard just for being able to unpack what he meant by that statement).
I think Hegel in ‘Phenomenology of Mind’ understands the strange loop that is within our own minds, between me and another, and between us and them, then the author was able to explain in this book. Hegel has a beautiful philosophical dialectic giving existence to the self through the acceptance of the other and the negation of that acceptance and so on with us and between us and within our nation as a whole. This author through his methodology reaches similar conclusions (except for the national part) by leveraging off of his mostly one dimensional strange loop formulation. It seems to me Hegel explains our strange loop with more pizzazz, but obviously by not appealing to Godel. Wittgenstein doesn’t have the mathematical logic but he does have the grammar and his core belief is we live in a strange loop such that the ‘finite will never understand the infinite’ and our labels we assign are at most part of our language games and ‘the world is made up of facts’ through our experiences of the world (the second line in the Tractatus is ‘The world is the totality of facts, not of things.’).
I don’t think one lives on within us when one dies as the author says. I think when one dies one is dead. Symbols of another that float in our minds as representations of an idea are just that, ‘symbols in our own mind’, calling them symbols or part of a strange loop don’t make them real outside of our own mind. Also, I think there is always a gap between humans such that no matter how close we try to get to another we can never be thought of as one (no matter how many twin thought experiments are told such as by this author) because that is part of the human experience and our meaning comes from closing that gap, and our meaning comes from remembering loved ones who have passed on and the gap between anything that is not me is a chasm that only by pretending to know what is true but is not could allow it to be falsely broached; even within myself I never know myself, and the dumbest advice of all is ‘just be yourself’ because the self is just as elusive to ourselves as others would be to ourselves. The author gives existence to the dead and closes the gap within ourselves and between others more than I think is warranted.
The author takes a long time to explain what he is getting at and the story is better told elsewhere. The meaning about meaning that Hofstadter tells the reader is universal and is already part of the human experience and is told more succinctly in other books. I don’t dislike this book, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, et al. had already demonstrated that ‘I am a strange loop’ using different methodologies, and the Philosophy of Mind standard tropes provided in this book just seem too overly familiar for my taste without adding anything new.
After Godel the firm foundation of mathematics as an absolute truth about knowledge outside ourselves has been seen as a chimera. Logic will only preserve truth and never creates truth outside of itself and within its own logical system needs set theory to get from the rules of thought to mathematics and by doing that you will have incompleteness and won’t be able to prove consistency. Anytime you have a system with rules a statement about the rules, a meta-statement can be made about those rules and that will lead to a recursive, self-referential, existence of a ‘strange loop’, or as in the case for being human, the ‘I’.
The author invokes Bertrand Russell and Principia Mathematica frequently. The single most tone deaf introduction I have ever read was Russell’s for Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Russell didn’t quite comprehend that Wittgenstein eviscerates his (and Whitehead’s) ‘firm foundations’ for mathematics through grammar and tone deafly condescendingly patronizes Wittgenstein’s understanding of the absolute foundation of mathematical certainty. There is a reason why the trivium for the seven liberal arts consists of grammar, logic and rhetoric. Wittgenstein uses grammar to demonstrate the strange loop we live in, Godel comes along a few years later and uses logic to show the strange loop and Hofstadter uses Godel’s Incompleteness with rhetorical finesse. I don’t think Hofstadter mentions Wittgenstein (if he does, it was only in passing) at all in this book and that to me seems an oversight given the similar story both rhetorically tell, one through grammar the other through logic.
The author does move around a lot in the story telling and will tend to conflate ‘I’ with ‘self aware’ with ‘consciousnesses or ‘conscience’ or ‘thinking’ or other such labels. He definitely has an ‘intentionality’ way ingrained in his methodology such that thought is always ‘about something’ such as about our hope, fears, desires or wants and gives predominance to the ‘why’ of our thought over the ‘what’ was done. He’ll make ‘Being’ as thinking as in ‘I think, therefore I am’, the cogito is really saying thinking=being (that is being is not becoming, nor knowledge, nor truth, nor striving (conatus), nor will, nor will to power, but thinking), the author will make it an implied ‘we’ for the ‘I’ and therefore his cogito would be ‘we think, therefore we are’ because ‘I’ is a label for the ‘we’ that comes about through our strange loop within us. (The author says he’s not a dualist, but he does lapse into that pattern from time to time). What he is trying to get at overall requires various discussions on free will, identity, qualia, zombies, and Star Trek transporters and he makes multiple forays into those overly familiar Philosophy of Mind topics.
Gadamer in ‘Truth and Method’ said, "All understanding is interpretation. Being that can be understood is language". Gadamer is the last of the phenomenologist and hence he too would have an intentionalist stance and would think that thought (consciousness) is always about something such as our hope, fears, desires, or wants. Gadamer’s quote is another way of saying we are a strange loop. Hofstadter and Gadamer accept free will as a given, but I tend to agree with Hume and Schopenhauer who both would say that we understand our desire but we don’t control the desires of our desires it just happens through our experiences and through a long series of cause and effects; understanding that we are a strange loop doesn’t change that we are captive creatures of all of our previous environments, our present presence and our expectations for the future which are filtered and weighted by our past experiences and previous environments (see, we are a strange loop!) .
Our ‘I’ that we have is a label that we put onto ourselves in order get a handle on how to deal with the outside world. It’s an illusion. (I tend to agree with that, and that is the author’s thrust too). He’ll conflate the consciousness with the ‘I’. The one thing with certainty one knows about ‘consciousness’ is that it can’t be an illusion since the definition of illusion needs a consciousness in order to exist, see ‘The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars: A Neuropsychologist's Odyssey through Consciousness’ by Broks. That book is better than this book in almost every way. Both books authors are dealing with a loss of a loved one and are searching for meaning and the meta-meaning that automatically generates from any system that has meaning (we are always in a strange loop referencing recursively leading to a paradox of existence or in other words what Kierkegaard said, ‘Irony is jealous of authenticity’. It’s well worth reading Kierkegaard just for being able to unpack what he meant by that statement).
I think Hegel in ‘Phenomenology of Mind’ understands the strange loop that is within our own minds, between me and another, and between us and them, then the author was able to explain in this book. Hegel has a beautiful philosophical dialectic giving existence to the self through the acceptance of the other and the negation of that acceptance and so on with us and between us and within our nation as a whole. This author through his methodology reaches similar conclusions (except for the national part) by leveraging off of his mostly one dimensional strange loop formulation. It seems to me Hegel explains our strange loop with more pizzazz, but obviously by not appealing to Godel. Wittgenstein doesn’t have the mathematical logic but he does have the grammar and his core belief is we live in a strange loop such that the ‘finite will never understand the infinite’ and our labels we assign are at most part of our language games and ‘the world is made up of facts’ through our experiences of the world (the second line in the Tractatus is ‘The world is the totality of facts, not of things.’).
I don’t think one lives on within us when one dies as the author says. I think when one dies one is dead. Symbols of another that float in our minds as representations of an idea are just that, ‘symbols in our own mind’, calling them symbols or part of a strange loop don’t make them real outside of our own mind. Also, I think there is always a gap between humans such that no matter how close we try to get to another we can never be thought of as one (no matter how many twin thought experiments are told such as by this author) because that is part of the human experience and our meaning comes from closing that gap, and our meaning comes from remembering loved ones who have passed on and the gap between anything that is not me is a chasm that only by pretending to know what is true but is not could allow it to be falsely broached; even within myself I never know myself, and the dumbest advice of all is ‘just be yourself’ because the self is just as elusive to ourselves as others would be to ourselves. The author gives existence to the dead and closes the gap within ourselves and between others more than I think is warranted.
The author takes a long time to explain what he is getting at and the story is better told elsewhere. The meaning about meaning that Hofstadter tells the reader is universal and is already part of the human experience and is told more succinctly in other books. I don’t dislike this book, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, et al. had already demonstrated that ‘I am a strange loop’ using different methodologies, and the Philosophy of Mind standard tropes provided in this book just seem too overly familiar for my taste without adding anything new.
April 30, 2008
i am sorry to give this book one measly star. i am a huge admirer of hofstadter's work. i would fanatically recommend any of his books, which are all fantastic and required reading by this point for all intellectually-minded people interested in "putting it all together". i was therefore ecstatic that he should finally publish another book, but crushed upon reading it.
the principle point is that though he purports to have some new big answer, this book merely retraces terrain he covered decades ago. it gives us all the same paradigm shifts that he presented throughout his other books, simply collected into one volume and severely abbreviated in scope. it does not put them together. we get no new thinking, no astounding new products of his analytical genius.
this book might be great for a first-timer who wants to know what hofstadter's about. but for those of us who've read his prior books and spent years thinking about them and the implications of their concepts, this is a regrettable waste of time.
if you haven't read him and you're thinking about reading this, skip it and go straight for "godel, escher, bach". you will be profoundly rewarded.
the principle point is that though he purports to have some new big answer, this book merely retraces terrain he covered decades ago. it gives us all the same paradigm shifts that he presented throughout his other books, simply collected into one volume and severely abbreviated in scope. it does not put them together. we get no new thinking, no astounding new products of his analytical genius.
this book might be great for a first-timer who wants to know what hofstadter's about. but for those of us who've read his prior books and spent years thinking about them and the implications of their concepts, this is a regrettable waste of time.
if you haven't read him and you're thinking about reading this, skip it and go straight for "godel, escher, bach". you will be profoundly rewarded.
February 22, 2008
I read Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" many years ago and was completely taken aback by the author's brilliant style and insight.
I read Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" many years ago and was fascinated by the author's vast area of expertise.
I read Hofstadter's "Le Ton Beau de Marot" a few years ago and was amazed by the author's enormous knowledge.
I just finished Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop" and was thoroughly disappointed.
The author uses 300+ pages to say something that could just as easily have been said in 100. This means that he repeats himself over and over again. And he doesn't really get to the point until about 50 pages before the end. Finally, I find his point ("consciousness is a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination") useless and downright wrong.
Waste your time on something else.
I read Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" many years ago and was fascinated by the author's vast area of expertise.
I read Hofstadter's "Le Ton Beau de Marot" a few years ago and was amazed by the author's enormous knowledge.
I just finished Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop" and was thoroughly disappointed.
The author uses 300+ pages to say something that could just as easily have been said in 100. This means that he repeats himself over and over again. And he doesn't really get to the point until about 50 pages before the end. Finally, I find his point ("consciousness is a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination") useless and downright wrong.
Waste your time on something else.
November 26, 2016
The parts I liked were great, were what literature is for, really. Intellectual musings based on personal experience. Fascinating to hear about Hofstadter going through the loss of his wife. Easier to understand than Godel, Escher, Bach, especially if you read that one first.
It is so awesome that Hofstadter is celebrated for/is allowed to/has made a career out of following the conclusions of his passions, making previously unforeseen connections. Ultimately I think it's an empty meditation, but a beautiful one all the same. Every now and then, we humans, despite knowing we won't come to any definite conclusion, need to sit back and wonder what it all means, in a new way each time. Hofstadter provides one of these ways. It was so cool to hear him unashamedly demonstrate his passions for the rigorous and logical study of mathematics and then discuss the definition of a soul and how we live in many people, live on in others to some extent, that this offers some consolation when people pass.
It reminded me of something I was thinking hard about last year. It's no secret that I love DFW's book Oblivion—many of my reviews attest to that. Anyways, there's a story in it called The Soul is Not a Smithy, referencing the quote in Joyce's Portrait of an Artist...:
"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
DFW is saying, no, you can't do this, that the tragedy of human existence is that we are trapped in our own heads.
Since his background was philosophy, he's been trained, I think, to argue for a particular side of a debate even although there isn't enough evidence available in the universe to ever prove it one way or another. So in one respect what DFW is saying is true, but in another, Hofstadter says 'True, but you can't deny the way we live in other people's thoughts, influence their decisions.'
I'm very proud to think of myself as a test for my loved ones. It seems despite all my own follies, most people I know respect me way more highly than I think I deserve (this is just a fact, not a boast. Whatever. Why am I defending myself to you? I don't know you, I'm basically writing this for my own understanding and I offer you all these words for free!) Anyways to get the full picture of my own family and friends I often have to ask around and hear things secondhand because whatever someone disapproves of that they're doing, they don't tell me! That's at least the clearest evidence I've ever found that when I'm not around, I have a certain influence in people's heads, that they ask what I would do or think. My boss said that whatever people say about you when you're not around is your reputation. I've done nothing overt to make myself so scary. But if I make people want to be better, I love it.
So in conclusion: I believe the soul is a smithy, albeit an imperfect one, because I've seen evidence of it. Sure, I can't prove it, but I'm glad for that, because maybe we were never meant to. Maybe, in the face of existence, we were mercifully left to choose the happier philosophical position. So why wouldn't you?! And should I get hit by a bus today, with these words I am with you now. The only immortality we get is pseudo, but we do get it. And that's pretty damn cool :)
It is so awesome that Hofstadter is celebrated for/is allowed to/has made a career out of following the conclusions of his passions, making previously unforeseen connections. Ultimately I think it's an empty meditation, but a beautiful one all the same. Every now and then, we humans, despite knowing we won't come to any definite conclusion, need to sit back and wonder what it all means, in a new way each time. Hofstadter provides one of these ways. It was so cool to hear him unashamedly demonstrate his passions for the rigorous and logical study of mathematics and then discuss the definition of a soul and how we live in many people, live on in others to some extent, that this offers some consolation when people pass.
It reminded me of something I was thinking hard about last year. It's no secret that I love DFW's book Oblivion—many of my reviews attest to that. Anyways, there's a story in it called The Soul is Not a Smithy, referencing the quote in Joyce's Portrait of an Artist...:
"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
DFW is saying, no, you can't do this, that the tragedy of human existence is that we are trapped in our own heads.
Since his background was philosophy, he's been trained, I think, to argue for a particular side of a debate even although there isn't enough evidence available in the universe to ever prove it one way or another. So in one respect what DFW is saying is true, but in another, Hofstadter says 'True, but you can't deny the way we live in other people's thoughts, influence their decisions.'
I'm very proud to think of myself as a test for my loved ones. It seems despite all my own follies, most people I know respect me way more highly than I think I deserve (this is just a fact, not a boast. Whatever. Why am I defending myself to you? I don't know you, I'm basically writing this for my own understanding and I offer you all these words for free!) Anyways to get the full picture of my own family and friends I often have to ask around and hear things secondhand because whatever someone disapproves of that they're doing, they don't tell me! That's at least the clearest evidence I've ever found that when I'm not around, I have a certain influence in people's heads, that they ask what I would do or think. My boss said that whatever people say about you when you're not around is your reputation. I've done nothing overt to make myself so scary. But if I make people want to be better, I love it.
So in conclusion: I believe the soul is a smithy, albeit an imperfect one, because I've seen evidence of it. Sure, I can't prove it, but I'm glad for that, because maybe we were never meant to. Maybe, in the face of existence, we were mercifully left to choose the happier philosophical position. So why wouldn't you?! And should I get hit by a bus today, with these words I am with you now. The only immortality we get is pseudo, but we do get it. And that's pretty damn cool :)
July 14, 2009
This book is the painful rantings of a man suffering a great loss. Not the brilliance I was looking forward to.
January 20, 2011
This is merely a re-hash of Hofstadter's justly famous Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, with some ideas from Le Ton Beau de Marot thrown in but most of the fun stuff taken out; if you've read those, you don't need to read this. If you've only read GEB, then read this instead of Le Ton Beau de Marot unless you have a particular interest in the art/skill of translation.
This isn't a bad book, apart from the constant use of reference to the "dear reader", it's just redundant because of the above and not nearly as much fun as GEB.
Here's what it's about: minds - specifically what they are/where they come from. Hofstadter's thesis is very plausible to me, despite my disagreeing with some specific things he says. It seems like it might be scientifically testable, too. My beef with Hofstadter is that his research does not seem focused on testing what seems to be the crux axiom of his theory. I'm not sure off the top of my head to do it but Hofstadter has had since some time in the 1970s to think of a way...maybe it isn't testable after all, but if it isn't then it's just a waste of time and money.
Also Hofstadter HATES mosquitos because they bite him and I think that he subconsciously believes they have no minds simply because of this!
This isn't a bad book, apart from the constant use of reference to the "dear reader", it's just redundant because of the above and not nearly as much fun as GEB.
Here's what it's about: minds - specifically what they are/where they come from. Hofstadter's thesis is very plausible to me, despite my disagreeing with some specific things he says. It seems like it might be scientifically testable, too. My beef with Hofstadter is that his research does not seem focused on testing what seems to be the crux axiom of his theory. I'm not sure off the top of my head to do it but Hofstadter has had since some time in the 1970s to think of a way...maybe it isn't testable after all, but if it isn't then it's just a waste of time and money.
Also Hofstadter HATES mosquitos because they bite him and I think that he subconsciously believes they have no minds simply because of this!
July 12, 2011
I agree. He is a strange loop. The first third of this book is the Hofstadter that I expected to read - dragging me through a layperson's guide to prime numbers, squares, the Fibonacci series, Principia Mathematica and Bertrand Russell's attempt to banish paradox from mathematics, and finally, Godel's discovery of the ultimate self reflective mathematical string which shattered Russell's dreams. This was tough going, but ultimately worth it for this non-mathematician. Along the way we learned that a young Hofstadter played around with video cameras - daring to point the camera back at the TV screen to create swirling loops, endless corridors and infinite regressions.
The Fibonacci series begins somewhat arbitrarily with the numbers 1 and 2. Such a series could start with any 2 numbers, but once it has started, it can go on to infinity. The swirling loops made by the self reflective video camera will only start after a movement is inserted, any movement, and once started maintains the loopy image forever - or until another movement changes it.
The connection to consciousness comes through a theory of development and evolution. As brains get bigger and more complex, able to hold more and more images and symbols, a critical mass is reached and consciousness appears. Like the swirling feedback or the Fibonacci series, we don't know how it starts, but once started it is self sustaining and permanent - as long as the physical brain continues to work normally. I can see it, and believe it.
Then, like the self reflective numbers and riddles that Hofsatder likes to observe and understand, he tells us about his own life, his wife and family, and the loop widens. I didn't expect this, and as Hofstadter himself worries, it is hard not to think that the sections about his family and the idea that two consciousnesses can share the same brain or many consciousnesses can share many brains, came from his own need to share his suffering, not from a need to teach us anything about consciousness. Yet, he points out that his musings on the subject predated his own personal tragedies.
Hofstadter shows his imagination in Godel, Escher, Bach, and he continues to teach with creativity and imagination in this book. He is a wonderful teacher - he got me to understand - oh, how briefly - Godel's ideas and how they translate into the real world, I think! As we learn about his life, his teenage fascination with self reflective images and the meaning of life, his family, his friends, we get a more complete picture of this wonderful teacher.
I don't agree with all of his conclusions about the looseness of the connection between brain and consciousness and some of his ideas about symbols and the physical structure of the brain - I don't think that the loop can escape the system in which it is created, but I applaud Hofsatder for his imagination in creating his theories and explaining them, and especially for his courage in bringing himself fully into the loop. I do have a few questions: why doesn't our consciousness reboot when we sleep or wake from a coma? How can we always wake up as the same person? How do we come back to the same loop, not a different one? And what is sleep about anyway? Why do we need to sleep? And why dream?
I am a strange loop and so is Douglas Hofstadter, and so, most likely, are you.
The Fibonacci series begins somewhat arbitrarily with the numbers 1 and 2. Such a series could start with any 2 numbers, but once it has started, it can go on to infinity. The swirling loops made by the self reflective video camera will only start after a movement is inserted, any movement, and once started maintains the loopy image forever - or until another movement changes it.
The connection to consciousness comes through a theory of development and evolution. As brains get bigger and more complex, able to hold more and more images and symbols, a critical mass is reached and consciousness appears. Like the swirling feedback or the Fibonacci series, we don't know how it starts, but once started it is self sustaining and permanent - as long as the physical brain continues to work normally. I can see it, and believe it.
Then, like the self reflective numbers and riddles that Hofsatder likes to observe and understand, he tells us about his own life, his wife and family, and the loop widens. I didn't expect this, and as Hofstadter himself worries, it is hard not to think that the sections about his family and the idea that two consciousnesses can share the same brain or many consciousnesses can share many brains, came from his own need to share his suffering, not from a need to teach us anything about consciousness. Yet, he points out that his musings on the subject predated his own personal tragedies.
Hofstadter shows his imagination in Godel, Escher, Bach, and he continues to teach with creativity and imagination in this book. He is a wonderful teacher - he got me to understand - oh, how briefly - Godel's ideas and how they translate into the real world, I think! As we learn about his life, his teenage fascination with self reflective images and the meaning of life, his family, his friends, we get a more complete picture of this wonderful teacher.
I don't agree with all of his conclusions about the looseness of the connection between brain and consciousness and some of his ideas about symbols and the physical structure of the brain - I don't think that the loop can escape the system in which it is created, but I applaud Hofsatder for his imagination in creating his theories and explaining them, and especially for his courage in bringing himself fully into the loop. I do have a few questions: why doesn't our consciousness reboot when we sleep or wake from a coma? How can we always wake up as the same person? How do we come back to the same loop, not a different one? And what is sleep about anyway? Why do we need to sleep? And why dream?
I am a strange loop and so is Douglas Hofstadter, and so, most likely, are you.
September 17, 2008
This book, on consciousness and what makes a human an "I," is methodical and exuberant, technical and personal. Reading it was a long, thoughtful journey. It's not an easy book. The workings of the human brain are described metaphorically (and not physiologically), and often those metaphors are mathematical. Sometimes, too, Hofstadter employs playful analogies to show how consciousness works, and how it doesn't work. (He is not a dualist; consciousness arises from physical laws and not from a kind of essence.)
You can read summaries of this book elsewhere; I won't write one. What I loved about it was how challenging and yet accessible it is (if you put in the time), and how willing Hofstadter is to make it personal in ways that are really relevant. (That our ability to be friends, to have empathy and affection for others, are aspects of our higher-level consciousness, according to H., is very affirming to me.) He's a scientist, and a brilliant one, but a human, too, and he's frank about his fascination and struggles with the same knowledge.
From the epilogue:
"The key problem is, it seems to me, that when we try to understand what we are, we humans are doomed, as spiritual creatures in a universe of mere stuff, to eternal puzzlement about our nature. I vividly remember how, as a teen-ager reading about brains, I was forced for the first time in my life to face up to the idea that a human brain, especially my own, must be a physical structure obeying physical law... In a nutshell, our quandary is this. Either we believe that our consciousness is something other than an outcome of physical law, or we believe it is an outcome of physical law--but making either choice leads us to disturbing, perhaps even unacceptable, consequences" (357).
This book unfolds in layers of concepts and insight. H. builds his argument gracefully. His attention to a reader like me, studying consciousness for first time, is thoughtful and steady. Not easy stuff, he makes learning (one model of) it possible.
p.s. Buddhists, beware. He admires the "noble goal" (295), yet dismisses the possibility that the self can be dismantled.
You can read summaries of this book elsewhere; I won't write one. What I loved about it was how challenging and yet accessible it is (if you put in the time), and how willing Hofstadter is to make it personal in ways that are really relevant. (That our ability to be friends, to have empathy and affection for others, are aspects of our higher-level consciousness, according to H., is very affirming to me.) He's a scientist, and a brilliant one, but a human, too, and he's frank about his fascination and struggles with the same knowledge.
From the epilogue:
"The key problem is, it seems to me, that when we try to understand what we are, we humans are doomed, as spiritual creatures in a universe of mere stuff, to eternal puzzlement about our nature. I vividly remember how, as a teen-ager reading about brains, I was forced for the first time in my life to face up to the idea that a human brain, especially my own, must be a physical structure obeying physical law... In a nutshell, our quandary is this. Either we believe that our consciousness is something other than an outcome of physical law, or we believe it is an outcome of physical law--but making either choice leads us to disturbing, perhaps even unacceptable, consequences" (357).
This book unfolds in layers of concepts and insight. H. builds his argument gracefully. His attention to a reader like me, studying consciousness for first time, is thoughtful and steady. Not easy stuff, he makes learning (one model of) it possible.
p.s. Buddhists, beware. He admires the "noble goal" (295), yet dismisses the possibility that the self can be dismantled.
February 17, 2016
As reading experiences go, I'd rate this a 4-star book. It's highly repetitive and speculative; its digressions can annoy; it's cutesy (typical DH) in a way that can grate after a while; and it takes repeated pot shots at a towering intellect -- Bertrand Russell -- on whose shoulders the author un(sufficiently)self-acknowledgedly stands. (Goedel, DH's guiding muse, is rightly lionized in this and other DH books; Russell -- standing in for Whitehead as well -- is all but judged a moron for failing to have seen, in the logical edifice he built, what Goedel later saw. There's a whiff of ad hominem in this book that I found distasteful.)
All that said, the idea DH develops in this book is so compelling, and so beautifully constructed, that I can only in good conscience award the book and its author 5 stars. In all my reading of the popular literature on theory of mind and consciousness, only a very few books have made me feel as though, reading them, I were seeing a bit of the veil pulled back. DH makes as persuasive a case for a non-dualistic theory of mind, and provides as convincing an account (albeit, a substantially metaphorical one) of what minds do, how selves form, and what it means to perceive as any I have come across. The jury may be out on the validity of the hypotheses and models he sets forth. I for one, however, can't help but think DH (and like-minded theorists) are onto something big.
All that said, the idea DH develops in this book is so compelling, and so beautifully constructed, that I can only in good conscience award the book and its author 5 stars. In all my reading of the popular literature on theory of mind and consciousness, only a very few books have made me feel as though, reading them, I were seeing a bit of the veil pulled back. DH makes as persuasive a case for a non-dualistic theory of mind, and provides as convincing an account (albeit, a substantially metaphorical one) of what minds do, how selves form, and what it means to perceive as any I have come across. The jury may be out on the validity of the hypotheses and models he sets forth. I for one, however, can't help but think DH (and like-minded theorists) are onto something big.
April 3, 2008
Hofstadter, I fear, has jumped the shark. More than fifty pages into this book, he had yet to offer an intriguing idea worth pursuing this book fully through. A lot of this feels like pale egocentricism.
September 26, 2007
I love Hofstadter but the good parts of this book were a rehashing of GEB and The Mind's I, and the parts I struggled through were off the mark as believable cognitive philosophical theory.
December 22, 2008
A bit redundant in prose, and just GEB lite when all is said and done. Not really recommended.
June 3, 2008
I got about three-quarters of the way through and by then it seemed like Hofstadter had completely lost the plot.
He makes some bold claims about the nature of consciousness, but he doesn't use his terms and concepts rigorously enough to keep his arguments straight, and he doesn't do much work to back them up anyway.
It amounts to listening to some friend who got stoned and had an amazing idea. If that friend happens to be Douglas Hofstadter, it's probably worth your while to stick around for a while, have another hit, and relax in the comfy chair. It ought to be a good ride. But don't expect much more than that.
Still there's plenty of thought-provoking stuff in the earlier sections, even if much of it is a retread of material he's covered before (it's been long enough that I was ripe for reruns). While reading, you'll probably pursue some of your own lines of thought, tangent to the ideas he lays down, that are as interesting and fun as the ones he pursues.
He makes some bold claims about the nature of consciousness, but he doesn't use his terms and concepts rigorously enough to keep his arguments straight, and he doesn't do much work to back them up anyway.
It amounts to listening to some friend who got stoned and had an amazing idea. If that friend happens to be Douglas Hofstadter, it's probably worth your while to stick around for a while, have another hit, and relax in the comfy chair. It ought to be a good ride. But don't expect much more than that.
Still there's plenty of thought-provoking stuff in the earlier sections, even if much of it is a retread of material he's covered before (it's been long enough that I was ripe for reruns). While reading, you'll probably pursue some of your own lines of thought, tangent to the ideas he lays down, that are as interesting and fun as the ones he pursues.
July 29, 2009
The meat of this book, which uses an analogy with Godel's critique of the Principia Mathematica to explain how the concept of an "I" might be an emergent phenomenon of self referential loops in the brain, is interesting. I had a lot of issues with the structure of the argument, which was too dependent on the analogy. I think there are much better ways to make this point than by talking about math. Like, I don't know, maybe talking about BIOLOGY.
The last hundred pages or so of the book annoyed me so much that I did a lot of skimming. It is basically an argument against dualism through a celebration of how we can still have souls or greatness or whatever even though we are only made of particles. Hofstadter accepts materialism but isn't comfortable in its embrace, so he ends up sounding ridiculous.
The last hundred pages or so of the book annoyed me so much that I did a lot of skimming. It is basically an argument against dualism through a celebration of how we can still have souls or greatness or whatever even though we are only made of particles. Hofstadter accepts materialism but isn't comfortable in its embrace, so he ends up sounding ridiculous.
June 5, 2018
I'm writing this review as I go along because the book is long. I read GEB in college and liked it, though I suspected that his idea that consciousness is a kind of self-referential loop might not bear close scrutiny. That's why I picked up this book when I saw it.
However, my hopes have been lowered within the first few pages when Hofstadter tells the reader that some living things have bigger souls/more valuable souls than others. In particular mosquitoes don't have much of a soul that you could speak of. And for people who haven't read the book, 'soul' doesn't mean the Christian or religious soul, only a kind of cognition and introspection that seems to be uniquely developed in humans (so if you think of humans as having the biggest souls, and define a soul as that human quality of thinking and introspection, then you really are talking about a self-referential loop!) (I'm kidding.)
Hofstadter takes it for granted that readers must have some line on the spectrum from humans to rocks where they demarcate those living things with souls we care about from those things that don't have enough of a soul to concern ourselves with. Though the line is kind of arbitrary, it must exist for each person. Even moral vegetarians are killers. After all, plants are living things.
But I actually don't agree with the position which I think is setting up the rest of this book, though I'm sure there will be more details coming. I don't actually see much of difference between inanimate and animate things. I don't see human thought as fundamentally different in nature than other physical phenomena such as the orbit of planets or weather, though it's expressed in a different way. I'm not sure that we're necessarily in safe territory if we say that something like a plant doesn't have consciousness. That's a very biased way of looking at things. Isn't it at least possible that things like plants or worms have a kind of consciousness that is very important to them, but which, being so physically different from them, we can't understand? Might we not lead ourselves into error by assuming that human consciousness is the highest attainment yet along a one-dimensional scale running from 'no soul' to 'maximum soul?'
-----
Starting again because I put it down. I've only gotten as far as I was before, but I had an additional thought, which is that Hofstadter is basically trying in his vegetarianism discussion to evade the moral culpability that one incurs in killing. The vegetarian/vegan solution to this dilemma is to draw a demarcation line between "conscious things" and "unconscious things," and rest on the side of eating unconscious things.
Not only is this a potentially flawed way of thinking, as I said above, it's also an abdication of responsibility for killing. Although there are myriad good reasons to be vegetarian or vegan, such as environmental and health concerns, the more enlightened position is to recognize that in order for one being to live, others must be constantly dying. Except that plants don't usually kill other beings in order to live. I found it strange that Hofstadter is trying to so hard not to admit this point. One must recognize and come to accept one's responsibility in killing to see life correctly. Those who won't kill a deer would kill dozens of chickens or thousands of plants to get the same nutrition that a single deer supplies. Who eats farmed produce kills beasties large and small by the dozen, chemically, mechanically, and by displacement. One can say "I'm resting on the right side of my demarcation line" when one goes vegetarian, but one can only believe it through willful ignorance. Better to draw some other kind of line than a soul-based line, and base it on environmental concerns or cruelty concerns, I think.
---
End of Chapter 6
I don't see why the author is so insistent that we admit that animals don't think like we do. When he's talking about how ideas might be represented by patterns in the brain, I'm on board, But then he keeps mixing in some pretty unconvincing bits about why humans are in a completely different class in symbolic understanding (according to his definition of "symbol" as, basically, an idea in the brain).
You can take it as a general rule that when someone puts a stake in the ground and says "this is where humans are different from animals," that in short order a bunch animals will be found that infringe upon that boundary. But Hofstadter, probably aware of this phenomenon, wants us not to decide whether a mosquito has "interiority," which is debatable, but to admit that some living things don't and therefore justify his "soul" scale.
But I can't. This is an oversimplification. He puts the words of someone who objects into the book, saying "I can't say for sure that a mosquito doesn't have as rich an internal life as I do!" and concludes that such objections are not sincere. Maybe not, but my objection is that this idea of "interiority" is not shown to be the only meaningful expression of consciousness or "souledness." Even beings that act almost as simply as computer programs nevertheless try desperately to feed and mate, often to protect their young, and to survive. Is this not a refutation of the idea that small-souled animals are edible? Even if they only have one single goal, to reproduce as much as possible before dying, be it pursued by reflex, cognition, or even (as in plants) by genetic design, it's that very idea that one violates in swatting the mosquito or eating the chicken or pulling out the weed.
I tried to find a textual justification for this position wherein he states that, in his estimation, "interiority" is the same or largely corollated to soul size. This idea seems to be implicit at this point, but I couldn't find it stated directly. But whether he believes this or not, it's problematic for me, because conflating "interiority" with "soul-size" is basically begging the question of what things have big souls by defining "souls" as essentially the thing that we think humans have the most of, and if he's not making that point, then why all of the animal comparisons and asking the readers to admit that animals don't have souls as big as those of humans? If we took an ant's point of view and tried to define "souls" according to the capacities that make ants unique, humans would come out looking poorly, unable to serve their allotted function in the hive or sacrifice themselves unthinkingly when necessary. So what's the significance?
And my complaint specifically is why we're being asked to concede the point. It doesn't seem to be necessary for his argument, which I think is going to be that the idea of rich "interiority" is essentially a matter of being able to build ideas out of ideas in a self-referential fashion. Does this argument require that we also say that animals without much "interiority" are "small-souled?"
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Page 210
GEB made such a big impression on me in college, but I think I better not reread it if I want to keep the memories intact. One could make the argument that I'm not qualified to complain about the reasoning going in this book. Fair enough. Hofstadter is a respected academic, and I'm a dingus with a Goodreads account. We both struggled with the "abstraction wall" in higher mathematics, but I won't concede to Hofstadter here, because ultimately it was my slapdash proofwriting style that was my downfall, not the ideas themselves. And I challenge anyone to take as many good ideas as I had and make such bad grades out of them. I must have set some kind of record. How do 5 people working together on a proof all agree on the correct approach, and then 4 get 100% and one gets 50%? The one who came up with the idea in the first place? I'm bitter.
And I'm bringing all that frustration to this book, because if I made half. as many confusing or unsupported claims as Hofstadter does, they would have told me I had a future in the Business school.
But I can't explain it. Obviously Hofstadter is a logically-inclined man of good standing...do his analogies seem so irrelevant to the argument due to a surfeit of simplification? The book is heavily annotated, yet it feels like on most of the claims where I seek citations or explanations, those are the lines where no annotations exist.
But stepping back from the level of simms (the murky argumentation and missing citations and overreliance on a handful of rather limited analogies) to the simmbllic level (heh), I'm finding it hard to understand the significance of the argument, which seems to go something like this: the brain is made up of neurons that act at such a low-level that one can't interpret symbolic meaning from them. However, because they have the ability to persistently represent external events, and to manipulate those "symbols" in such a way that ideas can accrete to other ideas, where a high-level concept like "sitcom" might include "television" which includes "screen" which includes "image", etc, it reaches a threshold where the system is able to conceive of itself in symbolic terms, even though at the symbolic level of thought, there one doesn't observe the individual neurons that physically cause that phnomenon. This self-reference at a more complex level of representation is the eponymous "strange loop."
As in GEB, he does an 80-page summary of Gödel's proof, which is the inspration for strange loops. But I wonder if Hofstadter, enthusiastic as he is over the idea of self-referencing systems, isn't overstating his point. Gödel's genius was, basically to create a mapping from formal symbol logic to whole numbers so that each statement in B. Russell's logical system corresponded to exactly one whole number. In this way, one could embed statements about statements into the system, not just statements about numbers, because statements about numbers could also be statements about numbers that were standing in for other statements. So you could, in effect, say "This statement is unprovable" by making a logical statement about the whole number that uniquely identifies the very statement in question. The details of how to accomplish this are difficult, but the idea is easy. "This statement is unprovable" is true because of how it refers to itself. If you can prove it, then it's false. so obviously you can't prove it and it's true.
Foundation-shattering as that is for mathematics, I don't really see the significance of the analogy to consciousness, except in that Gödel's proof also applies to all systems sufficiently powerful to define exponents within them. The brain is such a system, but it has so many properties so utterly divergent from formal systems that the analogy is not very instructive. For example, human brains can deduce false ideas starting with true premises because of errors of construction. I wonder if Hofstadter will address this. For example "Fat is the word for the flubby stuff around the stomach, and fat is also listed as a macronutrient on nutrition labels, so eating fat adds fat to your stomach." One could earnestly belive this based on the foregoing true statements, but the conclusion is wrong.
And for this reason, it strikes me as less significant that a brain can think of itself, because brains clearly have flexibilities that formal systems don't have. Computers don't have opinions or preferences, for example. The surprise of Gödel's proof, for me, is not so much that it can be interpreted as being self-referential, but what it said about logical systems themselves--that they are incomplete. There are truths that can not be proved.
What came next is also relevant, and I hope I relate this right. For some time, Gödel's proof was considered a kind of tricky corner case, a "gotcha" that could create statements that were unprovable due to their twisty logic, but that non-trivial assertions would have proofs. But Greenblatt? (check on the name) was able to prove that a certain non-trivial theorem was unprovable as well, putting a final bullet in the shiny dome of mathematical completeness. The truth is, nobody knows how many statements are true but unprovable. We just know that such assertions exist. How many famous open questions can never be proved? The response so far has basically been to ignore this inconvenient fact and hope that it's not so inconvenient that people begin to notice.
Which is to say that Gödel could conceivably have found an unprovable statement without trickery that would have been even more shattering. The self-reference was a tool, not really the end in itself. It was just a clever mapping.
So Hofstadter is here to say...that certain patterns of neurons can be mapped to so-called symbols in the brain, and that there is a mapping of neurons that becomes the concept of the brain itself? It makes sense, assuming that this is really how the brain works, but...was this unexpected? And why does he keep bringing animals into it? He also keeps saying things like there is a scale from small soul, with not much of a strange loop, to a big soul, where the self-concept is rich. But again I fail to see the significance. Is it true that beings that don't reflect on themselves are somehow less important than ones that do? After all, when we kill, it's not really the 'I' of the victim that we're hurting-it's those who survive who valued that thing that we should care about, if the injunction is to not cause pain.
I jus really hope at this point that the author doesn't attempt a proof of free will.
---
End of Chapter 16
I realize now what's wrong with this book. Hofstadter doesn't believe his own argument. That's why the arguments are so murky--because they don't quite connect. And he knows they don't quite connect. But he really wishes they did, not only because they're his ideas.
It's clear that he was deeply moved not only by the death of his wife, for which reason he would naturally be inclined to believe, like R. Pirsig, that a person is a "pattern" that in some way survives their death, but by his love even before her death, which was probably sweeping all logic before it.
If it were true that his interest in nested selves predated any emotional perturbation, positive or negative, wouldn't there be more consideration of more germane cases of people who literally switch selves, like multiple personality cases, method actors, or more discussion of authors, as opposed to the couples-first approach? And beyond this, the postscript to chapter 16 should be unnecessary if he knew that his argumentation were solid. Instead of telling us that he had many of the foregoing thoughts prior to his wife's death, he should have said "Go on, try to poke a hole in this argument if you think I'm crazy."
For completeness, I'll do so now: he's trying to have it two ways by refusing to define "soul." He refers to it at times as a kind of metaphor for a real brain pattern, and other times quite plainly in metaphysical sense. He's muddying the issue by on the one hand making an equivalence between a "soul" and "interiority," which is the self-concept, the strange loop, and on the other hand invoking "soul" as the vital essence of an individual, indefinable but definitely present, what gives a being worth, in Hofstadter's eyes. But these senses of the word "soul" are not equivalent. The latter sense is not demonstrated to definitely exist in the first place, nor is it conclusively argued that interiority itself is a meaningful measure from which to judge the "size" of a soul. Ultimately, my first complaint keeps wringing true--the whole premise is flawed. If you don't believe in a metaphysical soul like I don't, then the argument collapses to merely an observation that brains can think about themselves, which is not terribly exciting. And if you do believe in a metaphysical soul, you're being asked to tie it directly to how much a being thinks about itself. But this is not an obvious equivalence, I dare say.
---
Sorry to those people who "liked" this review recently, as it was incomplete. An update that I had tried to submit when I finished the book appears not to have saved.
I wanted to say that in the end, Hofstadter makes his position on several existential questions clear. He does not believe in free will, which makes sense, and he doesn't believe either in mystical, incorporeal souls. So that means that he and I agree on the basics after all, but it makes much of what went before in the book all the more confusing. I am able to grant him that the overgrown ganglion which is the brain can, at a certain point, conceive of an idea or a "symbol" of itself, but since I incorporeal souls don't exist, this is a trivial proposition. The human body, being the only unit associated to each self-aware person, is clearly capable of conceiving of itself, because we all conceive of ourselves.
More intriguing is the idea that the capacity for this kind of abstraction is associated with brain complexity, where certain beings with small brains just don't have the neural power to conceive of such an idea. This, I think, is what he meant to illustrate with his insistence that some animals don't have "souls" or "interiority."
But my original complaint still seems relevant to me. If Hofstadter and I both grant that consciousness is a totally physical phenomenon, like lightning striking or sand dunes, then we have to grant that other beings undergoing complex physical processes might be experiencing other kinds of consciousness no less valid than our own. The question, then, becomes why is the "I" concept uniquely significant? In what way does it imply a being's worth or dispensability? If there were a creature with no "I" concept, whose entire neural network was nothing but pain receptors, and it writhed and screamed at even the slightest touch, would you touch it? Is it a biological machine, only pretending to feel pain? I wouldn't touch it, whether it thinks about itself or not. The "I" concept is just something that seems to be uniquely developed in "higher" animals, so it's a convenient standard to take up as a measure of worth, because we as humans are sure to come out on top. How things would be different if the standard of worth favored a being like the mosquito. It would be our moral duty to let ourselves be sucked dry then, and swatting would be an unforgivable crime.
However, my hopes have been lowered within the first few pages when Hofstadter tells the reader that some living things have bigger souls/more valuable souls than others. In particular mosquitoes don't have much of a soul that you could speak of. And for people who haven't read the book, 'soul' doesn't mean the Christian or religious soul, only a kind of cognition and introspection that seems to be uniquely developed in humans (so if you think of humans as having the biggest souls, and define a soul as that human quality of thinking and introspection, then you really are talking about a self-referential loop!) (I'm kidding.)
Hofstadter takes it for granted that readers must have some line on the spectrum from humans to rocks where they demarcate those living things with souls we care about from those things that don't have enough of a soul to concern ourselves with. Though the line is kind of arbitrary, it must exist for each person. Even moral vegetarians are killers. After all, plants are living things.
But I actually don't agree with the position which I think is setting up the rest of this book, though I'm sure there will be more details coming. I don't actually see much of difference between inanimate and animate things. I don't see human thought as fundamentally different in nature than other physical phenomena such as the orbit of planets or weather, though it's expressed in a different way. I'm not sure that we're necessarily in safe territory if we say that something like a plant doesn't have consciousness. That's a very biased way of looking at things. Isn't it at least possible that things like plants or worms have a kind of consciousness that is very important to them, but which, being so physically different from them, we can't understand? Might we not lead ourselves into error by assuming that human consciousness is the highest attainment yet along a one-dimensional scale running from 'no soul' to 'maximum soul?'
-----
Starting again because I put it down. I've only gotten as far as I was before, but I had an additional thought, which is that Hofstadter is basically trying in his vegetarianism discussion to evade the moral culpability that one incurs in killing. The vegetarian/vegan solution to this dilemma is to draw a demarcation line between "conscious things" and "unconscious things," and rest on the side of eating unconscious things.
Not only is this a potentially flawed way of thinking, as I said above, it's also an abdication of responsibility for killing. Although there are myriad good reasons to be vegetarian or vegan, such as environmental and health concerns, the more enlightened position is to recognize that in order for one being to live, others must be constantly dying. Except that plants don't usually kill other beings in order to live. I found it strange that Hofstadter is trying to so hard not to admit this point. One must recognize and come to accept one's responsibility in killing to see life correctly. Those who won't kill a deer would kill dozens of chickens or thousands of plants to get the same nutrition that a single deer supplies. Who eats farmed produce kills beasties large and small by the dozen, chemically, mechanically, and by displacement. One can say "I'm resting on the right side of my demarcation line" when one goes vegetarian, but one can only believe it through willful ignorance. Better to draw some other kind of line than a soul-based line, and base it on environmental concerns or cruelty concerns, I think.
---
End of Chapter 6
I don't see why the author is so insistent that we admit that animals don't think like we do. When he's talking about how ideas might be represented by patterns in the brain, I'm on board, But then he keeps mixing in some pretty unconvincing bits about why humans are in a completely different class in symbolic understanding (according to his definition of "symbol" as, basically, an idea in the brain).
You can take it as a general rule that when someone puts a stake in the ground and says "this is where humans are different from animals," that in short order a bunch animals will be found that infringe upon that boundary. But Hofstadter, probably aware of this phenomenon, wants us not to decide whether a mosquito has "interiority," which is debatable, but to admit that some living things don't and therefore justify his "soul" scale.
But I can't. This is an oversimplification. He puts the words of someone who objects into the book, saying "I can't say for sure that a mosquito doesn't have as rich an internal life as I do!" and concludes that such objections are not sincere. Maybe not, but my objection is that this idea of "interiority" is not shown to be the only meaningful expression of consciousness or "souledness." Even beings that act almost as simply as computer programs nevertheless try desperately to feed and mate, often to protect their young, and to survive. Is this not a refutation of the idea that small-souled animals are edible? Even if they only have one single goal, to reproduce as much as possible before dying, be it pursued by reflex, cognition, or even (as in plants) by genetic design, it's that very idea that one violates in swatting the mosquito or eating the chicken or pulling out the weed.
I tried to find a textual justification for this position wherein he states that, in his estimation, "interiority" is the same or largely corollated to soul size. This idea seems to be implicit at this point, but I couldn't find it stated directly. But whether he believes this or not, it's problematic for me, because conflating "interiority" with "soul-size" is basically begging the question of what things have big souls by defining "souls" as essentially the thing that we think humans have the most of, and if he's not making that point, then why all of the animal comparisons and asking the readers to admit that animals don't have souls as big as those of humans? If we took an ant's point of view and tried to define "souls" according to the capacities that make ants unique, humans would come out looking poorly, unable to serve their allotted function in the hive or sacrifice themselves unthinkingly when necessary. So what's the significance?
And my complaint specifically is why we're being asked to concede the point. It doesn't seem to be necessary for his argument, which I think is going to be that the idea of rich "interiority" is essentially a matter of being able to build ideas out of ideas in a self-referential fashion. Does this argument require that we also say that animals without much "interiority" are "small-souled?"
---
Page 210
GEB made such a big impression on me in college, but I think I better not reread it if I want to keep the memories intact. One could make the argument that I'm not qualified to complain about the reasoning going in this book. Fair enough. Hofstadter is a respected academic, and I'm a dingus with a Goodreads account. We both struggled with the "abstraction wall" in higher mathematics, but I won't concede to Hofstadter here, because ultimately it was my slapdash proofwriting style that was my downfall, not the ideas themselves. And I challenge anyone to take as many good ideas as I had and make such bad grades out of them. I must have set some kind of record. How do 5 people working together on a proof all agree on the correct approach, and then 4 get 100% and one gets 50%? The one who came up with the idea in the first place? I'm bitter.
And I'm bringing all that frustration to this book, because if I made half. as many confusing or unsupported claims as Hofstadter does, they would have told me I had a future in the Business school.
But I can't explain it. Obviously Hofstadter is a logically-inclined man of good standing...do his analogies seem so irrelevant to the argument due to a surfeit of simplification? The book is heavily annotated, yet it feels like on most of the claims where I seek citations or explanations, those are the lines where no annotations exist.
But stepping back from the level of simms (the murky argumentation and missing citations and overreliance on a handful of rather limited analogies) to the simmbllic level (heh), I'm finding it hard to understand the significance of the argument, which seems to go something like this: the brain is made up of neurons that act at such a low-level that one can't interpret symbolic meaning from them. However, because they have the ability to persistently represent external events, and to manipulate those "symbols" in such a way that ideas can accrete to other ideas, where a high-level concept like "sitcom" might include "television" which includes "screen" which includes "image", etc, it reaches a threshold where the system is able to conceive of itself in symbolic terms, even though at the symbolic level of thought, there one doesn't observe the individual neurons that physically cause that phnomenon. This self-reference at a more complex level of representation is the eponymous "strange loop."
As in GEB, he does an 80-page summary of Gödel's proof, which is the inspration for strange loops. But I wonder if Hofstadter, enthusiastic as he is over the idea of self-referencing systems, isn't overstating his point. Gödel's genius was, basically to create a mapping from formal symbol logic to whole numbers so that each statement in B. Russell's logical system corresponded to exactly one whole number. In this way, one could embed statements about statements into the system, not just statements about numbers, because statements about numbers could also be statements about numbers that were standing in for other statements. So you could, in effect, say "This statement is unprovable" by making a logical statement about the whole number that uniquely identifies the very statement in question. The details of how to accomplish this are difficult, but the idea is easy. "This statement is unprovable" is true because of how it refers to itself. If you can prove it, then it's false. so obviously you can't prove it and it's true.
Foundation-shattering as that is for mathematics, I don't really see the significance of the analogy to consciousness, except in that Gödel's proof also applies to all systems sufficiently powerful to define exponents within them. The brain is such a system, but it has so many properties so utterly divergent from formal systems that the analogy is not very instructive. For example, human brains can deduce false ideas starting with true premises because of errors of construction. I wonder if Hofstadter will address this. For example "Fat is the word for the flubby stuff around the stomach, and fat is also listed as a macronutrient on nutrition labels, so eating fat adds fat to your stomach." One could earnestly belive this based on the foregoing true statements, but the conclusion is wrong.
And for this reason, it strikes me as less significant that a brain can think of itself, because brains clearly have flexibilities that formal systems don't have. Computers don't have opinions or preferences, for example. The surprise of Gödel's proof, for me, is not so much that it can be interpreted as being self-referential, but what it said about logical systems themselves--that they are incomplete. There are truths that can not be proved.
What came next is also relevant, and I hope I relate this right. For some time, Gödel's proof was considered a kind of tricky corner case, a "gotcha" that could create statements that were unprovable due to their twisty logic, but that non-trivial assertions would have proofs. But Greenblatt? (check on the name) was able to prove that a certain non-trivial theorem was unprovable as well, putting a final bullet in the shiny dome of mathematical completeness. The truth is, nobody knows how many statements are true but unprovable. We just know that such assertions exist. How many famous open questions can never be proved? The response so far has basically been to ignore this inconvenient fact and hope that it's not so inconvenient that people begin to notice.
Which is to say that Gödel could conceivably have found an unprovable statement without trickery that would have been even more shattering. The self-reference was a tool, not really the end in itself. It was just a clever mapping.
So Hofstadter is here to say...that certain patterns of neurons can be mapped to so-called symbols in the brain, and that there is a mapping of neurons that becomes the concept of the brain itself? It makes sense, assuming that this is really how the brain works, but...was this unexpected? And why does he keep bringing animals into it? He also keeps saying things like there is a scale from small soul, with not much of a strange loop, to a big soul, where the self-concept is rich. But again I fail to see the significance. Is it true that beings that don't reflect on themselves are somehow less important than ones that do? After all, when we kill, it's not really the 'I' of the victim that we're hurting-it's those who survive who valued that thing that we should care about, if the injunction is to not cause pain.
I jus really hope at this point that the author doesn't attempt a proof of free will.
---
End of Chapter 16
I realize now what's wrong with this book. Hofstadter doesn't believe his own argument. That's why the arguments are so murky--because they don't quite connect. And he knows they don't quite connect. But he really wishes they did, not only because they're his ideas.
It's clear that he was deeply moved not only by the death of his wife, for which reason he would naturally be inclined to believe, like R. Pirsig, that a person is a "pattern" that in some way survives their death, but by his love even before her death, which was probably sweeping all logic before it.
If it were true that his interest in nested selves predated any emotional perturbation, positive or negative, wouldn't there be more consideration of more germane cases of people who literally switch selves, like multiple personality cases, method actors, or more discussion of authors, as opposed to the couples-first approach? And beyond this, the postscript to chapter 16 should be unnecessary if he knew that his argumentation were solid. Instead of telling us that he had many of the foregoing thoughts prior to his wife's death, he should have said "Go on, try to poke a hole in this argument if you think I'm crazy."
For completeness, I'll do so now: he's trying to have it two ways by refusing to define "soul." He refers to it at times as a kind of metaphor for a real brain pattern, and other times quite plainly in metaphysical sense. He's muddying the issue by on the one hand making an equivalence between a "soul" and "interiority," which is the self-concept, the strange loop, and on the other hand invoking "soul" as the vital essence of an individual, indefinable but definitely present, what gives a being worth, in Hofstadter's eyes. But these senses of the word "soul" are not equivalent. The latter sense is not demonstrated to definitely exist in the first place, nor is it conclusively argued that interiority itself is a meaningful measure from which to judge the "size" of a soul. Ultimately, my first complaint keeps wringing true--the whole premise is flawed. If you don't believe in a metaphysical soul like I don't, then the argument collapses to merely an observation that brains can think about themselves, which is not terribly exciting. And if you do believe in a metaphysical soul, you're being asked to tie it directly to how much a being thinks about itself. But this is not an obvious equivalence, I dare say.
---
Sorry to those people who "liked" this review recently, as it was incomplete. An update that I had tried to submit when I finished the book appears not to have saved.
I wanted to say that in the end, Hofstadter makes his position on several existential questions clear. He does not believe in free will, which makes sense, and he doesn't believe either in mystical, incorporeal souls. So that means that he and I agree on the basics after all, but it makes much of what went before in the book all the more confusing. I am able to grant him that the overgrown ganglion which is the brain can, at a certain point, conceive of an idea or a "symbol" of itself, but since I incorporeal souls don't exist, this is a trivial proposition. The human body, being the only unit associated to each self-aware person, is clearly capable of conceiving of itself, because we all conceive of ourselves.
More intriguing is the idea that the capacity for this kind of abstraction is associated with brain complexity, where certain beings with small brains just don't have the neural power to conceive of such an idea. This, I think, is what he meant to illustrate with his insistence that some animals don't have "souls" or "interiority."
But my original complaint still seems relevant to me. If Hofstadter and I both grant that consciousness is a totally physical phenomenon, like lightning striking or sand dunes, then we have to grant that other beings undergoing complex physical processes might be experiencing other kinds of consciousness no less valid than our own. The question, then, becomes why is the "I" concept uniquely significant? In what way does it imply a being's worth or dispensability? If there were a creature with no "I" concept, whose entire neural network was nothing but pain receptors, and it writhed and screamed at even the slightest touch, would you touch it? Is it a biological machine, only pretending to feel pain? I wouldn't touch it, whether it thinks about itself or not. The "I" concept is just something that seems to be uniquely developed in "higher" animals, so it's a convenient standard to take up as a measure of worth, because we as humans are sure to come out on top. How things would be different if the standard of worth favored a being like the mosquito. It would be our moral duty to let ourselves be sucked dry then, and swatting would be an unforgivable crime.
December 23, 2007
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.
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.
January 11, 2009
I've been reading "I Am A Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter. The development of his theme is slow, so I read the epilogue to find out if he was coming to anything other than where he seemed to be going. The epilogue seems to be about the same as the first few chapters.
I skipped around the book a little and found this intriguing discussion on page 322 called 'Two Daves.' He presents a mental experiment of two universes, identical in every detail except that universe Q has the stuff of consciousness, and universe Z (zed, zombie) is missing the stuff of consciousness. In both universes Dave talks about his possession of consciousness but in universe Z he is lying without knowing it, (sound familiar?). His next section is titled 'The Nagging Worry that One May Be a Zombie." This is a promising title but he detours into fluff on this issue and dismisses it.
I would suggest that with careful work, he could learn to observe both universes in his own life and experience. I know I do. I have occasional moments of consciousness that make me aware of the long intervals of unconsciousness that I suffer.
I suspect that Mr. Hofstasdter has not done the experiment, followed the procedures, practiced the practices, that allows one to approach an awareness of the Self. Yet as a scientist he must have the habit of experimental verification of results. Results have no meaning without the formula, procedure, recipe, for generating them. In the index to his book the word 'meditation' is not listed, neither is 'yoga.' On page 297 his characterization of Zen 'They resent words,...' sounds more like someone who read the lab report but didn't bother to do the experiment. I would have been surprised to find Gurdjieff listed in his index.
See: www.gurdjieff-legacy.org.
I look forward to reading the remainder of the book and perhaps finding a few nuggets of value. But I'm afraid it is too soon to go beyond Ayn Rand's statements of the fundamental axioms of philosophy: Existence exits, and I am conscious.
See: www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagen...
OK, I finished Hofstatder's book months ago and I have been pondering his ideas. My final conclusion is that his book is more autobiographical than a scholarly or scientific work. I did a cursory review of the field in terms of modern western scientific writing and found several writers who published significantly better works than his on this problem of the "I."
One key example is :
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio. I haven't finished this book yet, or really I haven't started it, but the result of skimming it is that this book, written 14 years before "I Am A Strange Loop" is at a much higher level than H's maudlin rendering of his senile? meanderings about Strange Loops. H should know better than to publish ideas that are half a century out of date. Or if you read Aristotle, perhaps a millennia out of date. But then again, he is a parochial computer scientist.
I skipped around the book a little and found this intriguing discussion on page 322 called 'Two Daves.' He presents a mental experiment of two universes, identical in every detail except that universe Q has the stuff of consciousness, and universe Z (zed, zombie) is missing the stuff of consciousness. In both universes Dave talks about his possession of consciousness but in universe Z he is lying without knowing it, (sound familiar?). His next section is titled 'The Nagging Worry that One May Be a Zombie." This is a promising title but he detours into fluff on this issue and dismisses it.
I would suggest that with careful work, he could learn to observe both universes in his own life and experience. I know I do. I have occasional moments of consciousness that make me aware of the long intervals of unconsciousness that I suffer.
I suspect that Mr. Hofstasdter has not done the experiment, followed the procedures, practiced the practices, that allows one to approach an awareness of the Self. Yet as a scientist he must have the habit of experimental verification of results. Results have no meaning without the formula, procedure, recipe, for generating them. In the index to his book the word 'meditation' is not listed, neither is 'yoga.' On page 297 his characterization of Zen 'They resent words,...' sounds more like someone who read the lab report but didn't bother to do the experiment. I would have been surprised to find Gurdjieff listed in his index.
See: www.gurdjieff-legacy.org.
I look forward to reading the remainder of the book and perhaps finding a few nuggets of value. But I'm afraid it is too soon to go beyond Ayn Rand's statements of the fundamental axioms of philosophy: Existence exits, and I am conscious.
See: www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagen...
OK, I finished Hofstatder's book months ago and I have been pondering his ideas. My final conclusion is that his book is more autobiographical than a scholarly or scientific work. I did a cursory review of the field in terms of modern western scientific writing and found several writers who published significantly better works than his on this problem of the "I."
One key example is :
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio. I haven't finished this book yet, or really I haven't started it, but the result of skimming it is that this book, written 14 years before "I Am A Strange Loop" is at a much higher level than H's maudlin rendering of his senile? meanderings about Strange Loops. H should know better than to publish ideas that are half a century out of date. Or if you read Aristotle, perhaps a millennia out of date. But then again, he is a parochial computer scientist.
May 29, 2025
much pondering about thinking and writing about musing about thinking, and crafting apt analogies for analogues of analogues of physical and visual phenomena, and cracking jokes about self-reference.
It may blow your mind in such a way that it will never return to an un-blown state.
in audiobook form, it mostly works.
A bit uneven in density. But it's nice to get some breathers amid the math discussion. A mix of logic and what not. It deals heavily with the term 'soul' without caring about spirituality or the contexts of religion.
More about particles than people. Good to know that a lot of scientists subscribe to 'emergence.' but I'm not convinced, nor will I ever likely be, that all larger than life systems arise by such means.
Philosophy of caring, about others, the world, animals, the self. The self as a changing, amorphous self-defined, borderless zone of influence.
About as interesting as several VSauce videos.
I look forward to delving into his other books more seriously. Maybe revisiting this one one day. I could've done with more personal anecdotes. They seemed extraneous at the time, but when it shifts to the universal, I tend to respond abstractly.
Controversial talk about worth of souls. And the whole thing could've been organized and presented more succinctly with unnecessary wordplay and semantic quirks. The free-flowing style lightens the whole tone.
Nonetheless it will leave a lingering impression, with some core tenets that remain unforgettable.
It may blow your mind in such a way that it will never return to an un-blown state.
in audiobook form, it mostly works.
A bit uneven in density. But it's nice to get some breathers amid the math discussion. A mix of logic and what not. It deals heavily with the term 'soul' without caring about spirituality or the contexts of religion.
More about particles than people. Good to know that a lot of scientists subscribe to 'emergence.' but I'm not convinced, nor will I ever likely be, that all larger than life systems arise by such means.
Philosophy of caring, about others, the world, animals, the self. The self as a changing, amorphous self-defined, borderless zone of influence.
About as interesting as several VSauce videos.
I look forward to delving into his other books more seriously. Maybe revisiting this one one day. I could've done with more personal anecdotes. They seemed extraneous at the time, but when it shifts to the universal, I tend to respond abstractly.
Controversial talk about worth of souls. And the whole thing could've been organized and presented more succinctly with unnecessary wordplay and semantic quirks. The free-flowing style lightens the whole tone.
Nonetheless it will leave a lingering impression, with some core tenets that remain unforgettable.
September 21, 2020
I found this to be painfully uninteresting and tedious. The author asks interesting questions but he almost never answers them and instead uses each to talk about himself or some side story. Huge portions of this felt aimless and did not contribute to the overall thesis. In fact, the overall point of his hypothesis could have been stated and argued in about 10 pages. Instead, Hofstadter could write 100 pages about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich ("but what is it, really....? Is it a taste? An experience!") Definitely recommend skipping unless you're a fan of the author's other writing and even then it might be a miss.
November 12, 2020
- Inainte sa ma apuc de "review", am zis sa dau o tura prin "review"-urile altora. Mai bine o lasam balta.
- De ce? Uneori gasesti inspiratie si asa poti scrie si tu ceva inteligent.
- Ai dreptate. Insa de data asta unele recenzii m-au cam inhibat. Cel putin cele de o stea sunt atat de amanuntite, cum se iau ele de DRH ca nu le-a explicat clar si precis ce este constiinta, cand de fapt el asta si-a propus.
- Dar de ce te gandesti astfel. Oamenii aia sunt doar dezamagiti ca nu primit o formula clara pe baza careia sa isi calculeze cantitatea de constiinta pe care o au in diverse momente ale zilei, ale lunii, ale anului.
- Intr-adevar. Ori asa ceva nu se poate.
- Hei, inceteaza cu banalitatile. Ce ai de zis tu despre carte.
- Pai, este cea mai desteapta carte pe care am citit-o vreodata si pe care in mare parte am si inteles-o. Este drept, partea cu Gödel si Principia mathematica m-a chinuit mult, dar pana si acolo am inteles cat de cat.
- Deci cine esti tu?
- Pai cred ca sunt un sistem care se percepe pe sine insusi la nesfarsit. Doar cand dorm intra sistemul reticulat activator ascendent in actiune si bucla escheriana face o pauza. Apropos, desenul "Drawing Hands" al lui M.C.Escher este senzational.
- Crezi ca e prea stiintifica cartea? sau prea plina de dulcegarii gen sufletul unei persoane nu se afla doar intr-o persoana, el se imprastie de-a lungul vietii si in alte capete.
- Da, sunt niste chestii pe care le spune foarte frumos si imi par mai corecte decat supa de suflete a lui Socrate. La aceasta perspectiva asupra sufletelor nu ma gandisem.
- Adica tu esti acum aici, scrii recenzia, dar te afli si in capul jumatatii de acasa in momentul in care isi pune problema "Alex in aceasta situatie ar zice cutare si cutare" si te afli si in capul mamei tale care ii raspunde prietenei la telefon asa cum crede ea ca ar raspunde Alex si in capul fostei colege de la Fundeni care rezolva o situatie asa cum ar fi rezolvat-o Alex.
- Da, cam asa ceva. Pe langa toate astea, analogiile din carte sunt extrem de interesante. Am notat o gramada de citate si scriitori de citit - Derek Parfit, Dan Dennett, Hofstadter, Albert Schweitzer
- Te pomenesti ca vrei sa il asculti si pe Bach.
- Categoric. Bai, DRH a reusit in cartea asta sa integreze o gramada de filozofie, matematica, fizica, biochimie cu o mare doza de sentimente si ganduri subiective, totul intr-o maniera inteligibila, umoristica pe alocuri si accesibila. Povestile legate de moartea primei sotii Carol sunt impresionate. In afara de asta, nu am simtit nicaieri profesorul condescendent, limbaje de lemn sau sloganuri autistice. Ce mai, 5 stele pe bune.
- Bagi un citat asa de incheiere?
- Da
Seen at its highest, most collective level, a brain is quintessentially animate and conscious. But as one gradually descends, structure by structure, from cerebrum to cortex, to column to cell to cytoplasm to protein to peptide to particle, one loses the sense of animacy more and more until, at the lowest levels, it has surely vanished entirely.
the "I" is a hallucination, and yet, paradoxically, it is the most precious thing we own
In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference...our very nature is such to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature...we human beings...are unpredictable self-writing poems - vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful
- De ce? Uneori gasesti inspiratie si asa poti scrie si tu ceva inteligent.
- Ai dreptate. Insa de data asta unele recenzii m-au cam inhibat. Cel putin cele de o stea sunt atat de amanuntite, cum se iau ele de DRH ca nu le-a explicat clar si precis ce este constiinta, cand de fapt el asta si-a propus.
- Dar de ce te gandesti astfel. Oamenii aia sunt doar dezamagiti ca nu primit o formula clara pe baza careia sa isi calculeze cantitatea de constiinta pe care o au in diverse momente ale zilei, ale lunii, ale anului.
- Intr-adevar. Ori asa ceva nu se poate.
- Hei, inceteaza cu banalitatile. Ce ai de zis tu despre carte.
- Pai, este cea mai desteapta carte pe care am citit-o vreodata si pe care in mare parte am si inteles-o. Este drept, partea cu Gödel si Principia mathematica m-a chinuit mult, dar pana si acolo am inteles cat de cat.
- Deci cine esti tu?
- Pai cred ca sunt un sistem care se percepe pe sine insusi la nesfarsit. Doar cand dorm intra sistemul reticulat activator ascendent in actiune si bucla escheriana face o pauza. Apropos, desenul "Drawing Hands" al lui M.C.Escher este senzational.
- Crezi ca e prea stiintifica cartea? sau prea plina de dulcegarii gen sufletul unei persoane nu se afla doar intr-o persoana, el se imprastie de-a lungul vietii si in alte capete.
- Da, sunt niste chestii pe care le spune foarte frumos si imi par mai corecte decat supa de suflete a lui Socrate. La aceasta perspectiva asupra sufletelor nu ma gandisem.
- Adica tu esti acum aici, scrii recenzia, dar te afli si in capul jumatatii de acasa in momentul in care isi pune problema "Alex in aceasta situatie ar zice cutare si cutare" si te afli si in capul mamei tale care ii raspunde prietenei la telefon asa cum crede ea ca ar raspunde Alex si in capul fostei colege de la Fundeni care rezolva o situatie asa cum ar fi rezolvat-o Alex.
- Da, cam asa ceva. Pe langa toate astea, analogiile din carte sunt extrem de interesante. Am notat o gramada de citate si scriitori de citit - Derek Parfit, Dan Dennett, Hofstadter, Albert Schweitzer
- Te pomenesti ca vrei sa il asculti si pe Bach.
- Categoric. Bai, DRH a reusit in cartea asta sa integreze o gramada de filozofie, matematica, fizica, biochimie cu o mare doza de sentimente si ganduri subiective, totul intr-o maniera inteligibila, umoristica pe alocuri si accesibila. Povestile legate de moartea primei sotii Carol sunt impresionate. In afara de asta, nu am simtit nicaieri profesorul condescendent, limbaje de lemn sau sloganuri autistice. Ce mai, 5 stele pe bune.
- Bagi un citat asa de incheiere?
- Da
Seen at its highest, most collective level, a brain is quintessentially animate and conscious. But as one gradually descends, structure by structure, from cerebrum to cortex, to column to cell to cytoplasm to protein to peptide to particle, one loses the sense of animacy more and more until, at the lowest levels, it has surely vanished entirely.
the "I" is a hallucination, and yet, paradoxically, it is the most precious thing we own
In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference...our very nature is such to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature...we human beings...are unpredictable self-writing poems - vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful
Read
July 28, 2025This book is unfortunately going to be the book that requires me to make an "on-hiatus" bookshelf here on Goodreads.
Whilst undoubtedly intriguing, I was already struggling somewhat with this science-based, philosophical, high-concept non-fiction, but the upcoming few chapters are on exclusively Number Theory, prime sequencing and the symbol-manipulation of Principia Mathematica... I am not above admitting when I am not smart enough for something, and this feels like a bit of a philosophical deep-end for a relative novice such as myself.
I plan to return to this book when I have more of the fundamentals of the field under my belt.
Whilst undoubtedly intriguing, I was already struggling somewhat with this science-based, philosophical, high-concept non-fiction, but the upcoming few chapters are on exclusively Number Theory, prime sequencing and the symbol-manipulation of Principia Mathematica... I am not above admitting when I am not smart enough for something, and this feels like a bit of a philosophical deep-end for a relative novice such as myself.
I plan to return to this book when I have more of the fundamentals of the field under my belt.
September 26, 2024
This was by far the most enriching book I've read in a long while. The ideas, the writing style, the structure of the book, all of it is right up there. I haven't read Godel Escher Bach, but I hear this is an updated version of it. In any case, I highly recommend it to everyone.
The book deals with the most basic and yet deepest question of our own consciousness and our perception of a soul in every individual. I could never have imagined building up an analogy between that and Godel's self-referential statements. That was quite novel for me.
The book starts off slowly telling me things I know, and yet Douglas Hofstadter gives a lot of examples for you to build up an imagery of how things function. He then builds up to Godel's work, leading up to self-consciousness. The gist is largely consistent with my own view of emergent phenomena, but he does a fabulous job of doing it in a technically sound yet not so daunting way.
However, this book wouldn't have been as amazing if it weren't for the emotionally deep explorations. The author delves into the emotions and thoughts he went through in coming to terms with his wife's death. Such vulnerability made it feel like a conversation with a close friend. The author is also brutally honest in his bashing of other popular authors like Russell and Searle, clear in expressing his subjective likes and dislikes as well. This is what makes the book amazing.
There is a particular story he builds up that I found brilliant, which is where he imagines a world where twins are the norm. All of culture and language is built around this idea, the natural unit of a soul is a duo. Tying this back in with our world, he then makes a brilliant case for how the slogan of "one individual, one soul" is far from the truth. This allows him to go further and discuss how one's soul lives on in other people after their death, all dealt with in a highly scientific way. This is a book I'd love to keep on my bookshelf to read every once in a while for comfort.
The book deals with the most basic and yet deepest question of our own consciousness and our perception of a soul in every individual. I could never have imagined building up an analogy between that and Godel's self-referential statements. That was quite novel for me.
The book starts off slowly telling me things I know, and yet Douglas Hofstadter gives a lot of examples for you to build up an imagery of how things function. He then builds up to Godel's work, leading up to self-consciousness. The gist is largely consistent with my own view of emergent phenomena, but he does a fabulous job of doing it in a technically sound yet not so daunting way.
However, this book wouldn't have been as amazing if it weren't for the emotionally deep explorations. The author delves into the emotions and thoughts he went through in coming to terms with his wife's death. Such vulnerability made it feel like a conversation with a close friend. The author is also brutally honest in his bashing of other popular authors like Russell and Searle, clear in expressing his subjective likes and dislikes as well. This is what makes the book amazing.
There is a particular story he builds up that I found brilliant, which is where he imagines a world where twins are the norm. All of culture and language is built around this idea, the natural unit of a soul is a duo. Tying this back in with our world, he then makes a brilliant case for how the slogan of "one individual, one soul" is far from the truth. This allows him to go further and discuss how one's soul lives on in other people after their death, all dealt with in a highly scientific way. This is a book I'd love to keep on my bookshelf to read every once in a while for comfort.
August 28, 2022
Want to read a book where a white dude with big Nice Guy Energy talks at you for 363 pages about how he defines consciousness? Then definitely check out I Am A Strange Loop.
I came really close to not finishing this book, which is rare for me. It started strong, and I was genuinely interested in the stuff about Gödel and Principia Mathematica. But in retrospect, that was just one in a whole mess of unnecessary topics Hofstadter talked about, seemingly to show off. He strikes me as someone who loves hearing himself talk, which is why a book that probably could have been 150 pages ended up being more than double that. Not only that, but he doesn't seem to realize that he comes across as an elitist. Like dude, we get it, you like classical music, and you've always been so moved by Bach and Prokofiev, even from a young age, and why are you bringing this up multiple times throughout the book when it has a tenuous-at-best connection to consciousness? Tell me you grew up privileged without telling me you grew up privileged.
To make things worse, his central thesis was, at best, unoriginal, and at worst, not convincing. Boiled down, it basically states that consciousness arises from the human brain's ability to recognize, interpret, and categorize patterns, which ultimately leads to a sort of feedback loop where it tries to categorize itself. Or something. I don't even know, I got lost in all the-
-Oh wow, I almost forgot about all the little dialogues and plays he made up! No one needed that! You wrote a dialogue between Plato and Socrates when you were a teenager and thought it warranted inclusion? That doesn't make you seem precocious, it makes you seem like an arrogant and conceited... um... loop. (He used it as the Prologue, so really, maybe it's my fault for not spotting the red flag early on.)-
-lost in all the unnecessary stories and tangents. At any rate, that doesn't seem like some radical new view of consciousness.
But then, around the second half of the book, when he gets into all his thoughts about his dead wife (let her rest in peace!), things start getting more difficult to believe. His thesis morphs into something about how our souls (or consciousnesses or whatever), while mostly concentrated in our own brains, are also spread out across the brains of those who are close to us. How? Because those people are able to periodically see things through our eyes or imagine how we would react to a certain joke or piece of music. This idea seems invented largely to help Hofstadter cope with the death of his wife, as it allows him to take comfort in the fact that her soul lives on (not in a figurative sense, which I could accept, but in a literal sense) in him and her other family and friends. I had a much more difficult time getting behind this extension of his thesis, which he does a poor job of supporting. Then he tells you he's a good Samaritan because he doesn't kill bugs (except mosquitos) and then the book is over and mostly you just feel irritated.
Got carried away there. I'm just aggro because I spent so much time with this book and got so little out of it, aside from frustration. At some point, I noticed I was unconsciously pulling my hair out while I read it. Then I ran out of my own hair and had to start pulling out other people's hair. No one was happy.
P. S. Am I the only one who caught this sentence in the book?
I'm sorry what now?
I came really close to not finishing this book, which is rare for me. It started strong, and I was genuinely interested in the stuff about Gödel and Principia Mathematica. But in retrospect, that was just one in a whole mess of unnecessary topics Hofstadter talked about, seemingly to show off. He strikes me as someone who loves hearing himself talk, which is why a book that probably could have been 150 pages ended up being more than double that. Not only that, but he doesn't seem to realize that he comes across as an elitist. Like dude, we get it, you like classical music, and you've always been so moved by Bach and Prokofiev, even from a young age, and why are you bringing this up multiple times throughout the book when it has a tenuous-at-best connection to consciousness? Tell me you grew up privileged without telling me you grew up privileged.
To make things worse, his central thesis was, at best, unoriginal, and at worst, not convincing. Boiled down, it basically states that consciousness arises from the human brain's ability to recognize, interpret, and categorize patterns, which ultimately leads to a sort of feedback loop where it tries to categorize itself. Or something. I don't even know, I got lost in all the-
-Oh wow, I almost forgot about all the little dialogues and plays he made up! No one needed that! You wrote a dialogue between Plato and Socrates when you were a teenager and thought it warranted inclusion? That doesn't make you seem precocious, it makes you seem like an arrogant and conceited... um... loop. (He used it as the Prologue, so really, maybe it's my fault for not spotting the red flag early on.)-
-lost in all the unnecessary stories and tangents. At any rate, that doesn't seem like some radical new view of consciousness.
But then, around the second half of the book, when he gets into all his thoughts about his dead wife (let her rest in peace!), things start getting more difficult to believe. His thesis morphs into something about how our souls (or consciousnesses or whatever), while mostly concentrated in our own brains, are also spread out across the brains of those who are close to us. How? Because those people are able to periodically see things through our eyes or imagine how we would react to a certain joke or piece of music. This idea seems invented largely to help Hofstadter cope with the death of his wife, as it allows him to take comfort in the fact that her soul lives on (not in a figurative sense, which I could accept, but in a literal sense) in him and her other family and friends. I had a much more difficult time getting behind this extension of his thesis, which he does a poor job of supporting. Then he tells you he's a good Samaritan because he doesn't kill bugs (except mosquitos) and then the book is over and mostly you just feel irritated.
Got carried away there. I'm just aggro because I spent so much time with this book and got so little out of it, aside from frustration. At some point, I noticed I was unconsciously pulling my hair out while I read it. Then I ran out of my own hair and had to start pulling out other people's hair. No one was happy.
P. S. Am I the only one who caught this sentence in the book?
"... and no one I know considers prisons to be immoral institutions per se..."
I'm sorry what now?
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