I am currently reading this book and I like his explanation on how he became a vegetarian. I must say here that I too am a vegetarian and for many of the same reasons. The book looks to be a fascinating read and I look forward to it. ( )

I'd like to find the Albert Schweitzer recording of Bach's G minor fugue (BWV 542).

Hofstadter definitely needs professional help. ( )

A very engaging, cleverly written book. It is rare that a book in Science is written in such a way as to pull you in. Can't say I thoroughly enjoyed it, but that's more my loop than anyone else's! ( )

I started this, and then library school happened. I intend to finish it. I want to be best friends with Douglas Hofstadter--he is a super nice person, in addition to being very intelligent and witty.

It didn't have the flare that GEB did but it was still interesting reading. I really dig the idea of a strange loop and how it leads to "I". I'm not so sure about his idea of dispersed copies of self though. I'll go back and read some chapters in a couple of years and see what's what.

A deeply frustrating book with many hidden gems. Hofstadter is clearly very very smart, and at its best this book is very very good. His key argument is that one can reject dualism and accept that there is nothing here but us atoms, and at the same time reject reductionism. So higher-level structures (loops) emerge from lower-level elements and yet are not "less fundamental". His argument of this point, based on Godel's Theorem, is entrancing apart from the endless divergences. It takes the first two-thirds of the book. The final third, more personal, is less interesting and betrays something of an agenda - a wish to deny the finality of death. ( )

Not really convinced that our representations of other people are strange loops a la our self-representation. ( )

completely incomprehensible- did not understand a single thing in it....

Philosophy, to those who are disdainful of it, is a sucker for *a priori* sleights of hand: purely logical arguments which do not rely for grip on empirical reality, but purport to explain it all the same: chestnuts like "cogito ergo sum", from which Descartes concluded a necessary distinction between a non-material soul and the rest of the world.

Douglas Hofstadter is not a philosopher (though he's friends with one), and in "I am a Strange Loop" he is mightily disdainful of the discipline and its weakness for cute logical constructions. All of metaphysics is so much bunk, says Hofstadter, and he sets out to demonstrate this using the power of mathematics and in particular the fashionable power of Gödel's incompleteness theory.

Observers may pause and reflect on an irony at once: Hofstadter's method - derived *a priori* from the pure logical structure of mathematics - looks suspiciously like those tricksy metaphysical musings on which he heaps derision. As his book proceeds this irony only sharpens.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, for I started out enjoying this book immensely. Until about halfway I thought I'd award it five stars - but then found it increasingly unconvincing and glib, notably at the point where Hofstadter leaves his (absolutely fascinating) mathematical theorising behind and begins applying it. He believes that from purely logical contortion one may derive a coherent account of consciousness (a purely physical phenomenon) robust enough to bat away any philosophical objections, dualist or otherwise.

Note, with another irony, his industry here: to express the physical parameters of a material thing - a brain - in terms of purely non-material apparatus (a conceptual language). In the early stages, Professor Hofstadter brushes aside reductionist objections to his scheme which is, by definition, an emergent property of, and therefore unobservable in, the interactions of specific nerves and neurons. Yet late in his book he is at great pains to say that that same material thing *cannot*, by dint of the laws of physics, be pushed around by a non material thing (being a soul), and that configurations of electrons correspond directly to particular conscious states in what seems a rigorously deterministic way (Hofstadter brusquely dismisses conjectures that your red might not be the same as mine). Without warning, in his closing pages, Hofstadter seems to declare himself a behaviourist. Given the excellent and enlightening work of his early chapters, this comes as a surprise and a disappointment to say the least.

Hofstadter's exposition of Gödel's theory is excellent and its application in the idea of the "Strange Loop" is fascinating. He spends much of the opening chapters grounding this odd notion, which he says is the key to understanding consciousness as a non-mystical, non-dualistic, scientifically respectable and physically explicable phenomenon. His insight is to root consciousness not in the physical manifestation of the brain, but in the patterns and symbols represented within it. This, I think, is all he needs to establish to win his primary argument, namely that Artificial Intelligence is a valid proposition. But he is obliged to go on because, like Darwin's Dangerous Idea, the Strange Loop threatens to operate like a universal acid and cut through many cherished and well-established ideas. Alas, some of these ideas seem to be not ones Douglas Hofstadter is quite ready to let go.

The implication of the Strange Loop, which I don't think Hofstadter denies, is that a string of symbols, provided it is sufficiently complex (and "loopy") can be a substrate for a consciousness. That is a Neat Idea (though I'm not persuaded it's correct: Hofstadter's support for it is only conceptual, and involves little more than hand-waving and appeals to open-mindedness.)

But all the same, some strange loops began to occur to me here. Perhaps rather than slamming the door on mysticism, Douglas Hofstadter has unwittingly blown it wide open. After all, why stop at human consciousness as a complex system? Cconceptually, perhaps, one might be able to construct a string of symbols representing God. Would it even need a substrate? Might the fact that it is conceptually possible mean that God therefore exists?

I am being mendacious, I confess. But herein lie the dangers (or irritations) of tricksy *a priori* contortions. However, Professor Hofstadter shouldn't complain: he started it.

Less provocatively, perhaps a community of interacting individuals, like a city - after all, a more complex system than a single one, QED - might also be conscious. Perhaps there are all sorts of consciousnesses which we can't see precisely because they emerge at a more abstract level than the one we occupy.

This might seem far-fetched, but the leap of faith it requires isn't materially bigger than the one Hofstadter explicitly requires us to make. He sees the power of Gödel's insight being that symbolic systems of sufficient complexity ("languages" to you and me) can operate on multiple levels, and if they can be made to reference themselves, the scope for endless fractalising feedback loops is infinite. The same door that opens the way to consciousness seems to let all sorts of less appealing apparitions into the room: God, higher levels of consciousness and sentient pieces of paper bootstrap themselves into existence also.

This seems to be a Strange Loop Too Far, and as a result we find Hofstadter ultimately embracing the reductionism of which he was initially so dismissive, veering violently towards determinism and concluding with a behavioural flourish that there is no consciousness, no free will, and no alternative way of experiencing red. Ultimately he asserts a binary option: unacceptable dualism with all the fairies, spirits, spooks and logical lacunae it implies, or a pretty brutal form of determinist materialism.

There's yet another irony in all this, for he has repeatedly scorned Bertrand Russell's failure to see the implications of his own formal language, while apparently making a comparable failure to understand the implications of his own model. Strange Loops allow - guarantee, in fact - multiple meanings via analogy and metaphors, and provide no means of adjudicating between them. They vitiate the idea of transcendental truth which Hofstadter seems suddenly so keen on. The option isn't binary at all: rather, it's a silly question.

In essence, *all* interpretations are metaphorical; even the "literal" ones. Neuroscience, with all its gluons, neurons and so on, is just one more metaphor which we might use to understand an aspect of our world. It will tell us much about the brain, but very little about consciousness, seeing as the two operate on quite different levels of abstraction.

To the extent, therefore, that Douglas Hofstadter concludes that the self is that is an illusion his is a wholly useless conclusion. As he acknowledges, "we" are doomed to "see" the world in terms of "selves"; an *a priori* sleight-of-hand, no matter how cleverly constructed, which tells us that we're wrong about that (and that we're not actually here at all!) does us no good at all.

Neurons, gluons and strange loops have their place - in many places this is a fascinating book, after all - but they won't give us any purchase on this debate. ( )

While some passages in this sequel are quite beautiful, I don't think the book as a whole really measures up to Godel, Escher, Bach. That book was fun and original, but this one just seems dogmatic in lots of areas. ( )

A tombstone for what was once a fine mind. Now...ugh. Hoftsatadter takes 363 pages to say very little, and none of it new. He also makes about half the book autobiographical anecdotes, which gets old fast. And he goes political, telling us that, e.g., he’s pro-abortion and feels nauseated when he sees people waving flags. Oh my God! Someone waving a flag! Quick, cover your children’s eyes! He tries to cram in all this stuff as if it has something to do with consciousness, with an elephantine lack of subtlety that would be funny to someone who hadn’t just paid $16.95 for the book. What is it about people that makes them go political - and crudely, unsubtly political - when cognitive decline sets in?
Sigh. Where is the man who wrote the brilliant Godel Escher Bach? I wish we could have that man back. ( )

I AM A STRANGE LOOP

No, it's not a confession (though I can see how you might be confused), it's a book by Douglas Hofstadter. In the forward, he mentions several other possible titles such as the accusatory, “You are a Strange Loop,” and the gawky, “'I' is a Strange Loop.”

Ok, I admit it, I really like the title... it's one of the main reasons I bought the book.... Oh right, and also because I enjoyed Hofstadter's other book, Godel, Escher, Bach, and I was in the mood for something thought-inducing (or thought-reducing, if you are into reductionism)...

I'm currently on page 110 out of 363. The subtitle “Idealistic Dreams about Metamathematics” leers at me from underneath my bookmark.

So, what is it about? It's about the self; self-reflection, self-perception, self-realization, and let's not forget, SELF-REFERENCE. It's about consciousness and the strange loopy-things that happen in your brain (or someone else's brain, if YOU are not self-aware..) Above all, it makes me think that creating a robot that has the same level of consciousness as an average adult human (instead of just acting like it does) will be (very)^infinity difficult.

That's what I'm getting out of it anyways.

http://tragicomictales.blogspot.com/2... ( )

See my review in Science Magazine:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content... ( )

The best thing about this books is its about loops and paradox. It is about how the thought process works. The author has an odd ball type of humor which I love. " What is it like to be a tomato" is one of the questions he asks himself. "Pondering Dogthink" is another. I do not really know what the books is about, but I am interested in how cognition works from this point of view and how we live with paradox and what is real to one person and not to another.

Douglas Hofstadter's "I am a Strange Loop" tackles THE Hard Problem of the Philosophy of Mind, namely, how can consciousness arise from inanimate substances like atoms, or as he would rephrase the question, "What could ever make a mere physical pattern be Me." The book also tackles Hofstadter's fascination with Kurt Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem, tying the notion of Strange Loops (which arise in the proof of the Theorem) to the concept of what it means to be a self. Ultimately, he concludes that consciousness arises when extremely complicated patterns of sense perception and the formation of symbols turn inward and apply themselves to themselves. He rejects dualism, the theory that there is some spiritual or magical entity that exists over and above the physical systems we can observe at a molecular level.

He brings the reader along very slowly, but inexorably to his conclusion. We are not born with self awareness. That quality evolves as infants experience more of the world and begin to form analogies and manipulate symbols. Looking at behavior at a sufficiently detailed level, he notes that "mere" physics could explain what we do if we knew enough about the starting places and velocities of all the trillions of molecules that compose our bodies, particularly our brains. However, that would be irrelevant because it would not be the level at which cognitive comprehension takes place. Rather, we understand at only at a much higher level of abstraction.

The author demonstrates that patterns can develop a "life of their own" within any substrate. He cites the example of how the fact that the number 641 is prime can explain completely why some dominoes fall or do not fall in a theoretical arrangement that acts like a computer. It takes two pages in the text to explain my previous sentence, so in the interest of brevity, I will simply cite pages 37 and 38 for a full explication. The cause of the behavior observed is much more understandable at the high level of abstraction (the primeness of the number 641) than at the level of individual dominoes (or atoms, or quarks). Yet, causation truly lies at both levels.

The author concludes that selves (or souls) ARE the complex patterns of brain activity that emerge, persist, and loop back upon themselves. Having concluded that the selves ARE the patterns, the author speculates that the selves could be reproduced to the extent that the patterns can be reproduced. Thus, to the extent the complex patterns present in human brains can be reproduced in mechanical substrates like electronic computers, the computers themselves will become conscious. He thinks of humans as persisting (to some small extent) in the memories of other humans. The weakest part of the book occurs when he speculates that his dead wife somehow continues to exist because of and to the extent that he and others can recreate the patterns of thought that once WERE her.

I liked the book for its insights into how Goedel toppled the edifice erected by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica. Goedel showed how the real number system can be made isomorphic to human language, and thus any sentence can be mapped identically onto some number. He also showed that when some sentences are formulated to apply to themselves or become recursive, some of the propositions generated could not be proven within any logical system.

This is a lucidly written book that carries its premises to their extreme conclusions. Thought provoking if not completely convincing.

(JAB) ( )

Haiku Review:

Look in, now look out
Inverse, Oppose, Scale, Repeat
You are a strange loop.

I am. I am not
constrained by system symbols.
Page one forty five.

Intellectual
Double backflips to save the
one you loved in life.

Very hard to get into this book. I ended up having to put it aside. ( )

What a load of sentimental, self-obsessed, repetitive rubbish. ( )

Relax, It’s Just Physicalist Functionalism: I became interested in philosophy of mind about three years ago, and have since read a variety of books written by philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists and computer experts. About a year ago I heard about Douglas Hofstadter and his [then] forthcoming book “I Am A Strange Loop”. I also discovered his 1979 work “Godel, Escher, Bach”, where the strange loop concept was expounded in great detail. While GEB did indeed attempt to apply strange loops to the workings of the mind, IAASL promised to focus this idea with laser intensity upon the mysteries of human consciousness. Given what I had already read about the importance of circular processes within the brain, especially regarding the “binding” of multiple sense and memory data into a “unified impression”, I looked forward to IAASL with great anticipation. I hoped that it would provide cutting insights that would help dispel the fog surrounding the current consciousness debate. In the end, however, Dr. Hofstadter provided little more than a warmed-over version of an old theory, i.e. PHYSICALIST FUNCTIONALISM; albeit with a quasi-mathematical twist to it, i.e., the Godel / strange-loop approach.

Although Hofstadter is a computer scientist, his first love appears to be mathematics. He gives a great description of what mathematicians do, i.e. finding and analyzing patterns amidst groups of numbers. He gives examples of how this is done, and then shows how these patterns are analyzed and formally documented via axioms and theorems and strings of logical symbols. He then kicks it up a notch by explaining what number theory is, i.e. the foundation for those theorems and logical constructs. Not content with stopping there, he takes you to the next level by explaining how mathematician Kurt Godel performed a brilliant meta-analysis of number theory in 1931 and found that it breaks down when “indexicals” are considered (i.e., self-referential propositions such as “this quote is untrue”). By now, most of us reasonably-intelligent readers are gasping for mental oxygen, as though we’re way up in the Andes. But Hofstadter then pushes us up to the peak, i.e. the “strange loop”, which is an abstraction and generalization of what Godel did to number theory.

Yikes! How many levels up have we gone? Numbers can be called first-order abstractions of reality. Identified number patterns would be a second-order; documentation of these by theorems would represent a third. Number theory is four levels up, and Godel hits the fifth floor elevator button. So a “strange loop” is a sixth-order abstraction from everyday reality. No wonder it seems somewhat “strange” to mere mortals.

But strangeness doesn’t mean that an idea is useless. Hofstadter makes it clear (more so in GEB) that mathematicians have come up with all sorts of abstract ideas, which often sit for years in dusty library books until some physicist comes along looking for a way to describe something rather peculiar about the data he or she has gathered from the lab. All of a sudden, an ignored system or obscure concept is found to be exactly what is needed to solve the problem of, say, electrical superconductence at room temperature. The question here is just how useful the strange loop concept would be in solving problems. It is not a logically formal idea, in the way that a math construct such as the proof of Fermat‘s Last Theorem is. The strange loop paradigm is really more of a philosopher’s construct, something a bit looser around the edges. Hofstadter tries to do with math what the late, great David Bohm attempted with quantum physics, i.e. to stretch it into a bigger, more holistic thought system that extends to the far corners of the human mind. What Hofstadter and Bohm found once they reached those far corners are quite different however; instead of localized loops, Bohm saw “implicate universal order”. (Bohm’s 1987 book Science, Order and Creativity is to “implicate order” what GEB is to strange loops).

This is important to keep in mind if you choose to climb the mountain of thought with Hofstadter. Right up through Godel’s intellectual craftwork, Hofstadter stays on the pathways of formal logic. But that last jump is different, and Hofstadter does not warn you. It’s easy (for those of lesser minds like myself) to be impressed by the strict methods used to get to level number five, and believe that such intellectual acuity carries through right to the top. So keep your eyes open (even though it’s difficult at such intellectual heights); Hofstadter is very impressive as a wanna-be mathematician, but may not be as skilled when he shifts to philosophy, where the “strange loop” proposition actually resides.

In GEB, Hofstadter attempts to give real-world examples of strange-loop situations. Not surprisingly, the results are of mixed efficacy. He first refers to the Escher paintings so liberally sprinkled throughout his first book (a few of which show up in IAASL). But he gains little traction – those are just optical illusions. He then refers to what almost happened during the Watergate crisis during Richard Nixon’s presidency; i.e. the Supreme Court interpreting the Constitution for the Executive Branch, and the Executive Branch contrarily interpreting the Constitution regarding the Judiciary. In fact, such political situations don’t loop around very much; they are resolved rather quickly by riots and bullets (luckily Nixon backed off in 1974). Hofstadter’s greatest success with strange loops in GEB came in a wonderful chapter about the workings of DNA in living beings.

Hofstadter also took on the problems of the mind in GEB. However, his efforts in that field were overshadowed by the expansive brilliance of the book. And thus, in IAASL Hofstadter conveys his disappointment about not being taken more seriously by the brain-mind-consciousness crowd. He calls GEB a “shout into a chasm” – although Hofstadter did in fact team up with one of the most formidable “mind philosophers”, Daniel Dennett, soon after GEB (e.g., their 1981 book “The Mind’s I”). I read GEB only recently, but it was rather clear to me that Hofstadter’s strange-loop concept of the mind was really nothing more than physicalist functionalism, a viewpoint that has been around since the mid-1960s. Not surprisingly, Dennett is quite sympathetic to this approach. For a good introduction to functionalism and its materialist interpretation, I’d recommend David Papineau’s “Introducing Consciousness”.

In applying strange loops to the workings of the brain, Hofstadter establishes that the mind works “recursively”. Sense data flows in from the body and drives the neurons; and yet this “bottom level” activity works its way through a hierarchy to the upper levels of the mind, where sensations are felt and decisions are made. Those decisions are then “passed back down” to the neurons and synapses, completing the strange loop from low-level to high-level and back again.

The brain is thus seen as having “mind states” that exist between sensory input and behavioral output. These states are loopy and recursive; their present status is as much a function of what they were like an instant ago, as of what new sense data was just inputted into them. Through devices such as memory, they tend to stabilize human behavior, allowing a longer-term perspective. E.g., if you are chasing a rabbit for food, and the rabbit temporarily disappears behind a tree, you don’t stop running just because you no longer see it – you hold a belief that it will soon reappear. Brain states, as an intermediary between stimulus and response, obviously have a function, one that contributes to survival. And thus the case for functionalism. The physicalist part rejects any dualist notions about the ontological independence of “qualia” and inner experience, and equates our mind states and their functional interactions with consciousness itself. In GEB, Hofstadter used the strange loop abstraction to get to functionalism. In IIASL, he concentrates somewhat more on the physicalist agenda.

As such, Hofstadter wears the philosopher’s hat more frequently in IIASL, while in GEB he mostly kept the mathematician’s cap on. But the new hat doesn’t fit as well. First off, he doesn’t seem to be aware that he’s pouring the old wine of functionalism into the new skin of strange loopiness (to reverse the Biblical metaphor). He seems a bit too sure of himself, too ready to summarily ridicule those who have argued against functionalism, most notably philosopher John Searle. (He may be doing the bidding of his partner Daniel Dennett, who has had rather vitriolic debates with Searle over the years; but unlike Hofstadter, Dennett has spelled out in great detail his position relative to Searle’s. Hofstadter, in turn, is mostly yelling insults at the enemy of his friend). He spends many pages setting up and attacking a straw man, i.e. substance dualism, a position that has not been seriously espoused since Sir John Eccles passed away.

Professor Hofstadter doesn’t show any appreciation for the subtleties of modern property dualism and its hope that future progress in understanding the nature of “deep reality” may eventually close the “explanatory gap” between physics and consciousness, e.g. the “information substrate to reality” and the hologram paradigms that physicists such as John Wheeler now discuss, and which David Bohm anticipated. Hofstadter admires, yet refuses to adopt the self-doubt that his fellow materialist Derek Parfait expresses after Parfait strictly identifies qualia and self-awareness with brain electrochemistry.

Hofstadter as philosopher shows no knowledge of the “mysterian” position of Colin McGinn and Thomas Nagel; this is especially regrettable given Hofstadter’s words in GEB about the human brain ultimately being a Turing algorithmic system subject, one that at some point faces a determinability limit similar to what Godel found in number theory. Is it possible that our questions regarding our own consciousness are the ultimate indexicals? Hofstadter also seeks to kill some “sacred cows” of philosophy that are antithetical to the functionalist viewpoint, such as the “inverted spectrum” thought experiment. (Hofstadter swears in the book to be a vegetarian pacifist, but I suppose that philosophic sacred cows are still fair game.) Interestingly, though, he does not attempt to “kill” the thought-experiment denizen who should trouble him the most: i.e., Frank Jackson’s “Mary”, the formerly color-blind neuroscientist (also explained well by Papineau, cited above).

Even when explaining his own paradigms, Hofstadter can be a bit confusing. He spends a lot of time telling us that human consciousness is like a television with a camera pointed at it (he even provides pictures of what the frame-within-frame results looks like). The implied infinite series of frames-within-frames is claimed to be much like the strange loops that power our consciousness. But if so, then how far is this paradigm from the much reviled “Cartesian theater” idea of the homunculus (tiny little person) within the brain watching a screen tied to our sense organs, with a homunculus within him/her watching a screen, with a homunculus . . . . in the end, just another infinity of screens. Nonetheless, after a lot of words about TV cameras pointed at monitors, Hofstadter then tells us that it’s not the infinity of screen frames that is important; infinity would have sunk Godel had he not gotten around the problem with a finite reference to infinity. The given example of a finite reference to the infinite is the girl on the Morton Salt container, holding an identical salt container under her arm so that her image, and an infinite regress, is blocked but still implied. OK, fine, but I didn’t see how the TV/screen system was squared with the salt container. Are they both kinda-sorta like indexical consciousness, but in differing ways?

And then there’s Hofstadter’s illusion of the marble in the box of envelopes – proving that our everyday notions regarding self-consciousness are just illusions, anyway. But illusions to who? Don’t ask, just be satisfied that the illusion is had by an illusion which is perceived by another illusion . . . . ad infinitum / ad absurdum.

IAASL is an intensely personal book – it could almost be sub-titled “Please Understand Me”, with apologies to David Keirsey and his work on Myers-Briggs and human temperaments (Hofstadter is clearly an INTP “architect” – an architect of numbers, ideas and systems). You learn a lot about the life and times of Douglas Hofstadter while climbing the intellectual heights with him. He makes a lot of entertaining little jokes and quips along the way, but becomes very serious as he discusses Carol, his beloved late wife. His word are truly moving until he tries to convince you that Carol lives on in his mind, almost as much as Douglas Hofstadter does. She is still conscious within him – certainly not to the same degree that he is, but according to his hyper-functional concept of “consciousness”, just as qualitatively conscious. He goes through a rather convoluted thought experiment (regarding “Twinwirld”) to justify the notion that one consciousness can be shared among more than one brain.

To truly grasp what is going on here, you need to be familiar with a certain tenant of physicalist functionalism: i.e., that consciousness is “platform independent”. Platform independence has been used to support the notion that living protoplasm is not a sine qua non for consciousness, and that there is no reason why artificial intelligence researchers (such as Hofstadter) will not eventually reproduce consciousness “in silico”. Hofstadter has put a rather innovative twist on the platform independence theory here: why not a person-to-person transfer of conscious awareness? One could think of all sorts of skeptical questions in response, but I would like to ask something more personal: is this really healthy? At some point, don’t we need to learn to let go after we lose something or someone we love? (Or am I taking Hofstadter too seriously, since he feels that all human consciousness is just a “marble in an envelope box” anyway?)

Given all the psychological sharing in IAASL, one can see how much even a brilliant person’s views are shaped by their own personal history and circumstances. It’s not surprising that the wrapping of physicalist functionalism with a strange loop bow comes from a fellow of prodigious intellectual talents who, as a young boy, bought math treatises and who got goose bumps thinking about self-referential propositions, and whose teenage music thrills came from Albert Schweitzer doing Bach’s greatest hits. (I wonder if Hofstadter considered calling this book “Godel, Schweitzer and Bach”?) Professor Hofstadter didn’t know that Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes also recorded a song using the refrain “it ain’t the meat, it’s the motion”, which Hofstadter uses to mockingly attack Searle’s consideration of the idea that living protoplasm might be essential to consciousness. Hofstadter is being unfair here, as Searle is in fact quite cautious in discussing this. As to Southside and Mr. Popeye, well, they will probably get over the slight eventually . . . .

I’d give this book two stars from the perspective of the general reader who might want an overview on the current debate regarding how our brains, minds and consciousness relate. If you are already familiar with philosophy of mind, then perhaps Hofstadter earns a third star – he will at least give YOUR mind a work-out. And if you enjoyed GEB and more-or-less understood it, then IAASL could be a four or even five-star read for you. So I’ve averaged it out to three stars overall. As with Hofstadter’s sense of humor, which is liberally sprinkled throughout the book (aside from the Carol chapters), some will enjoy and benefit from Hofstadter’s approach, but many won’t.

A final note about Douglas Hofstadter’s admittedly touching tribute to his late wife. Despite his heartfelt attempts to weave his theories into something of beauty in her honor, recursive mathematical constructs still pale in comparison with Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”:

I trust I have not wasted breath:
I think we are not wholly brain,
Magnetic mockeries; not in vain,
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death;

Not only cunning casts in clay;
Let Science prove we are, and then
What matter Science unto men,
At least to me? I would not stay.

As Dr. Parfait realized, dualism will not be easily vanquished. Like Professor Hofstadter, I too am a vegetarian romanticist computer geek, albeit a considerably less brilliant one. But as to being a strange loop . . . no way. ( )

July 20, 2007
OP-ED COLUMNIST; A Partnership of Minds
By DAVID BROOKS

Douglas Hofstadter was a happily married man. After dinner parties, his wife Carol and he would wash the dishes together and relive the highlights of the conversation they'd just enjoyed. But then, when Carol was 42 and their children were 5 and 2, Carol died of a brain tumor.

A few months later, Hofstadter was looking at a picture of Carol. He describes what he felt in his recent book, ''I Am A Strange Loop'':

''I looked at her face and looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes and all at once I found myself saying, as tears flowed, 'That's me. That's me!'

''And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before, about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity, about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that wielded us into a unit, the kind of unit I had but dimly imagined before being married and having children. I realized that though Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all, but that it had lived on very determinedly in my brain.''

The Greeks say we suffer our way to wisdom, and Hofstadter's suffering deepened his understanding of who we are, which he had developed as a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University.

Hofstadter already understood that the mind is not a centralized thing. There are dozens of thoughts, processes and emotions swirling about and competing for attention at any one time. It's like a quantum mechanics light show.

Carol's death brought home that when people communicate, they send out little flares into each other's brains. Friends and lovers create feedback loops of ideas and habits and ways of seeing the world. Even though Carol was dead, her habits and perceptions were still active in the minds of those who knew her.

Carol's self was still present, Hofstadter sensed, even though it was fading with time. A self, he believes, is a point of view, a way of seeing the world. It emerges from the conglomeration of all the flares, loops and perceptions that have been shared and developed with others. Douglas's and Carol's selves overlapped, and that did not stop with her passing.

I bring all this up in an Op-Ed column because most political and social disputes grow out of differing theories about the self, and I find Hofstadter's social, dynamic, overlapping theory of self very congenial.

It emphasizes how profoundly we are shaped by relationships with others, but it's not one of those stifling, collectivist theories that puts the community above the individual.

It exposes the errors of those Ayn Rand individualists who think that success is something they achieve through their own genius and willpower.

It exposes the fallacy of the New Age narcissists who believe they can find their true, authentic self by burrowing down into their inner being. There is no self that exists before society.

It explains why it's so hard to tackle concentrated poverty. Human beings are permeable. The habits that are common in underclass areas get inside the brains of those who grow up there and undermine long-range thinking and social trust.

It illuminates the dangers of believing that there is a universal hunger for liberty. That universal hunger may exist in the abstract, but we're embedded creatures and the way specific individuals perceive liberty depends on context.

It lampoons political zealotry. You may be a flaming liberal in New York, but it's likely you'd be a flaming conservative if you grew up in Wyoming.

Finally, it points toward a modern way of understanding how people fit into society. In the 19th century, Marx thought that people were organized according to their material interests and their relationship to the means of production.

In the information age, it seems fitting that we'd see people bonded by communication. It's not exactly new to say that no man is an island. But Hofstadter is one of hundreds of scientists and scholars showing how interconnectedness actually works. What's being described is a vast web of information -- some contained in genes, some in brain structure, some in the flow of dinner conversation -- that joins us to our ancestors and reminds the living of the presence of the dead.

Where the Seventies and Eighties saw a species of popular science labelled "psycho-babble", the late Nineties and "Naughties" have spawned a genre of what might be termed "reducto-babble." While Hofstadter deals with philosophical ideas, he does so only to sermonize on what he takes to be the fact that the self is an illusion. Such a view is hardly controversial philosophically, but it is elaborated with an astonishing reductionism.

Yes, my consciousness may be an epiphenomenon, as may be the consciousness of those around me, but this *does nothing* to deepen my understanding of my relationships with others or with the world. Hofstadter proceeds with a characteristically North American academic political naivete and with little compass toward ethical or moral issues. This is typical of a reductionist strain in cognitive science in which the social realm is an irrelevance or distraction.

In reflecting on this infuriatingly written and structured book, I was reminded of Paul Ricoeur's famous dictum "the symbol gives rise to thought" ("Le symbole donne à penser"). Ricoeur catches everything Hofstader takes 400 pages to say and he does so both more succinctly and with infinitely more suggestiveness... ( )

(Strange loop: "paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.") Splendid, 28-years-delayed sequel to _Gödel, Escher, and Bach_. Concerned with analogies, the Gödel incompleteness-theorem construction, minds, and the analogy between the Gödel construction and minds. While having no truck with dualism, he dwells on closely associated people harboring small rough copies of each other's "I"-ness.

I met Doug when I was 19 - our parents were friends and we visited them in Palo Alto. He introduced me to stereo headphones, listening to Bach. It was a transporting experience. I made it through about half of Godel Escher Bach before giving up at the formulas; the reviews of Strange Loop made it seem more accessible since it dealt with his wife's death. It was more accessible, fascinating, bewildering in parts. He may be more brilliant than my father, who was the smartest person I ever knew. We are loopy creatures, operating under the delusion that our "selves" are somehow real; they are, he maintains, just a byproduct of our brain's ability to think in abstractions, including about itself. Yet somehow I'm not sure he really believes this. My only quibble is that sometimes his writing is a little arch. ( )