I Am a Strange Loop (2007)

non-fiction

Holy crap. If I could give this more than 5 stars, I would. What a mind-blower. ( )

My Jan. 2009 review:

This book admittedly starts out slow, as many LT readers have pointed out, so I recommend to start reading on pg. 147, and referring to Index the as needed. For the mathematically inclined, pgs. 125-142 give an amazingly good explanation of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. But pg. 147 is where the big picture ideas that I cared most about really started to start flowing.

I Am a Strangel Loop is a scientific discussion on the immortality of the soul. Or perhaps it’s a poetic discourse on the physiology of the brain. It floats between a diverse array of ideas that readers will either find fascinating or infuriating. Here's my attempt at a condensed summary of his message:

Our ancestors created stories that placed humans in the middle, in between the animals on one side, and the angels on the other. This picture illustrates our dual nature [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory] our biological needs and impulses and our less fixed, but potentially stronger social nature. Our biological nature is relatively fixed and unchanging, but our social nature, being relatively new on the scene, is currently much more varied and dynamic.

What is our social nature? What exactly do we want from society? (Of course, we want the needs of our biological nature to be satisfied, but that tells us nothing about the ultimate goals and desires of the social part of our being.) While we've learned much about our biological nature (thanks to Darwin and evolutionary theory), our understanding of our social nature is still largely mystical, based largely on the accumulated wisdom passed on through religion and literature.

I Am a Strange Loop takes the first steps toward formulating a well-defined understanding of our social nature.

That's the over-arching purpose of the book. To accomplish this Hofstadter spells out, in grand fashion, a theory of consciousness: what it is and how it develops.

Think of man 10,000 years ago compared to where he is today. It would have taken biological evolution 10,000,000 years to achieve as much progress. Don't think that I'm talking primarily about technology. Although technological innovation has greatly increased the average individual's capacity for self-expression, technology is only a means to an end, not an end itself. Near universal literacy, the ease of travel, and political freedoms have greatly increased the life possibilities for the modern individual. Shakespeare, Muhammad Ali, J.K. Rowling and countless other lives are the shining achievements of our civilization. Humanity's greatest achievement has always been man himself. (`Man' in the gender-neutral sense of the word--couldn't figure out a good gender-neutral way to phrase this sentence.)

What is the source of this relatively rapid progress? What forces are behind this social evolution?

Hofstadter has built a framework for exploring our ever-still-emerging self-consciousness, ultimately the starting point of our social nature, in well-defined terms.

-----Hofstadter's theory of consciousness-----------------------------

A basic definition of `consciousness' is `awareness of one's desires'. Hofstadter believes that our desires ultimately are caused by the interaction of neurons obeying the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics. The catch is that our consciousness, our "I", by its very nature is required to view things differently. Our "I" automatically sees itself as the cause of desires. "I" decides it wants something (say a peanut butter and jelly sandwich), our bodies move about in certain ways, and often that desire is fulfilled (if we have access to a pantry and a refrigerator at least). The cause and effect relationship couldn't be more obvious! And yet, in Hofstadter's view, that first assumption, that "I" decides what it wants, is basically illusory. "I" automatically views things in terms of higher level symbols, in terms of billiard balls and pressure fronts, rather than particles and molecules. But "I" is no more the cause of our desires than a pressure front determines the behavior of individual air molecules (rather than the other way around). "I" automatically turns causality upside down with regards to itself in the world.

So we are left with the question: Does causality start on the small level or the large level? Does the interaction of particles--particles, electrons, and molecules--determine the behavior of our billiard balls, computers, and pressure systems, as science claims they do? Or is science wrong about causation--does causation ultimately start on the symbolic, large level, the level of billiard balls, pressure systems, and "I"s?

Judging from the fact that I'm trusting the technology of laptops, wireless radio signals, and the internet to communicate this review, it's hard to claim that science is wrong. And Hofstadter, as one would expect form the son of a Nobel prize winning physicist, sees no choice but to choose the scientific, particle level as the ultimate source of causation, and claim that "I"ness is ultimately illusory--an extremely convincing, extremely necessary hallucination.

We are tempted to say: "Well maybe it can be both: maybe for non-conscious objects, like billiard balls and pressure systems, causation starts on the small level, but once consciousness kicks in, it is endowed with a causal ability of its own." But this goes against Hofstadter's whole conception of what consciousness is. Consciousness is not made out of some separate, "specially-endowed" material; it is made out of astoundingly complex patterns of the same particles, neurons, and molecules as everything else.

The last two paragraphs of the book, he says:
Pg. 363 - "In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference... Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems--vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.
"To see ourselves this way is probably not as comforting as believing in ineffable other-worldly wisps endowed with eternal existence, but it has its compensations. What one gives up on is a childlike sense that things are exactly as they appear, and that our solid-seeming, marble-like `I' is the realest things in the world; what one acquires is an appreciation of how tenuous we are at our cores, and how wildly different we are from what we seem to be. As Kurt Gödel with his unexpected strange loops gave us a deeper and subtler vision of what mathematics is all about, so the strange-loop characterization of our essences gives us a deeper and subtler vision of what it is to be human. And to my mind, the loss is worth the gain."

I won't try to go any further into Hofstadter's explanation of consciousness for now. (It involves a brilliant analogy to a mathematical proof written by Kurt Gödel in 1931. If you're at all mathematically inclined, he gives an excellent, understandable explanation of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, which by itself makes the book worth a look.) But here are some of Hofstadter's more interesting, possibly controversial conclusions:

1. He provides reasoning behind claiming that birds, mammals, and possibly some fish or reptiles have a self-consciousness that is qualitatively similar to human consciousness. Although even for these animals, he explains their consciousness is clearly limited compared to ours. (pp. 83-84)

2. He claims that human embryos and even probably human infants are not self-conscious as their minds have not taken in enough perceptions in order to construct the mental symbols necessary for a sense of "I"ness. He does however, also point out the potential that lies within a human embryo. (pg. 209) (The obvious conclusions being that abortion is not equivalent to murder, but is nevertheless wiping out a huge amount of potential and is therefore still a tragic occurrence.)

3. We are immortal to the extent that we live on within those that love us and to the extent that our life's achievements continue to impact future generations. As Hofstadter explains in this interview [http://tal.forum2.org/story?id=88&NewOnly=1&LastView=1970-01-01 02%3A00%3A00] "I would also say that I think that music comes much closer to capturing the essence of a composer's soul than do a writer's ideas capture the writer's soul." A prominent example Hofstadter uses in the book is how the thoughts, and therefore pieces of the soul (which he terms "soul shards"), of long-dead composers are preserved on sheets of music through which they sometimes are kept alive in other minds. And: "autobiographical story-telling is not nearly as effective a means of soul-transmission as is living with someone you love for many years of your lives, and sharing profound life goals with them -- that's for sure!" ( )

Douglas Hofstadter is, well, a bit loopy--but this book is a nice statement of his notion of selfhood and personal identity. He nicely locates consciousness in the self-referential symbol processing of the brain, and offers some very plausible analogies to explain just what being conscious might involve. But I'm ultimately unconvinced that he can dispel the evident gap between the "I" and the brain. For example, Hofstadter writes: 'The dance of symbols in the brain has to be perceived at that level [the level of symbols, rather than neurons:] for it to constitute consciousness.' And then, on the same page, he criticizes opponents: 'In other words, people seeking the "reader" for configurations of activated symbols...refuse to call that internal churning "consciousness" because now they want the symbols themselves to be perceived.' Is there a perceiver, or not? And if so, where is it located? That's the crucial question--how to avoid the infinite regress wherein an "I" is kicked endlessly upwards through levels of abstraction-- and he seems to be sidestepping it. But there's certainly a lot of interesting discussion here, and a lot of original thinking. The notes and bibliography are excellent guides to further reading. ( )

I am very interested, though as a general reader, in all aspects of consciousness and find the general concept of this book intriguing, which is what prompted me to buy it. However I find it a difficult book to get to grips with. Unlike some of the other critics who find the writing to have great clarity, I find that reading this book is like walking through treacle. The author is very critical of John Searle and maybe rightly so; however, I find Searle's prose to have far greater clarity than that of Hofstadter.' ( )