Status
Available
Call number
Library's review
Indeholder "Dedication", "A note from the Publisher", "Words of thanks", "Preface - An Author and His Book", " Facing the Physicality of Consciousness", " The Mirage", " A Shout into a Chasm", " From the Majestic Dolomites to Gentle Bloomington", " An Author and His Audience", " The
Meget gennemarbejdet bog om bevidsthed og hvad der mon egentlig skal til for at noget er bevidst.
Show More
Horsies-and-Doggies Religion", " A few Last Random Observations", " A Useful Youthfulness", "Prologue - An affable Locking of Horns", " Dramatis personæ: Plato and Socrates", "Chapter 1 - On Souls and Their Sizes", " Soul-Shards", " What Is It Like to Be a Tomato?", " Guinea Pig", " Pig", " Revulsion, Revelation, Revolution", " Reversion, Re-evolution", " The Mystery of Inanimate Flesh", " Give Me Some Men Who Are Stouter-souled Men", " Small-souled and Large-souled Humans", " Hattie the Chocolate Labrador", " Ollie the Golden Retriever", " Where to Draw that Fateful, Fatal Line?", " Interiority — What Has it, and to What Degree?", " The Gradual Growth of a Soul", " Lights On?", " Post Scriptum", "Chapter 2 - This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream", " What Is a "Brain Structure"?", " A Simple Analogy between Heart and Brain", " Can Toilet Paper Think?", " The Terribly Thirsty Beer Can", " Levels and Forces in the Brain", " Who Shoves Whom Around Inside the Cranium?", " Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics", " Thinkodynamics and Statistical Mentalics", "Chapter 3 - The Causal Potency of Patterns", " The Prime Mover", " The Causal Potency of Collective Phenomena", " Neurons and Dominos", " Patterns as Causes", " The Strange Irrelevance of Lower Levels", " A Hat-tip to the Spectrum of Unpredictability", " The Careenium", " Simmballism", " Taking the Reductionistic View of the Careenium", " Taking a Higher-level View of the Careenium", " Who Shoves Whom Around inside the Careenium?", " The Dance of the Simmballs", "Chapter 4 - Loops, Goals, and Loopholes", " The First Flushes of Desire", " A Soccer Ball Named Desire", " The Slippery Slope of Teleology", " Feedback Loops and Exponential Growth", " Fallacy the First", " Fallacy the Second", " Feedback and Its Bad Rap", " God, Gödel, Umlauts, and Mystery", " Savoring Circularity and Self-application", " The Timid Theory of Types", " Intellectuals Who Dread Feedback Loops", "Chapter 5 - On Video Feedback", " Two Video Voyages, Three Decades Apart", " Diary of a Video Trip", " Enigmatic, Emergent Reverberation", " Feeding "Content" to the Loop", " A Mathematical Analogue", " The Phenomenon of "Locking-in"", " Emergent New Realities of Video Feedback", "Chapter 6 - Of Selves and Symbols", " Perceptual Looping as the Germ of "I"-ness", " Varieties of Looping", " Reception versus Perception", " Mosquito Symbols", " Mosquito Selves", " An Interlude on Robot Vehicles", " Pondering Dogthink", " The Radically Different Conceptual Repertoire of Human Beings", " Episodic Memory", "Chapter 7 - The Epi Phenomenon", " As Real as it Gets", " Concrete Walls and Abstract Ceilings", " The Many-faceted Intellectual Grounding of Reality", " No Luck, No Soap, No Dice", " An Out-of-the-Blue Ode to My Old Friend Epi", " No Sphere, No Radius, No Mass", " Where the Buck Seems to Stop", " The Prime Mover, Redux", " God's Eye versus the Careenium's Eye", " I Am Not God", "Chapter 8 - Embarking on a Strange-Loop Safari", " Flap Loop, Lap Loop", " Seeking Strange Loopiness in Escher", " Seeking Strange Loops in Feedback", " Seeking Strange Loops in the Russellian Gloom", " Mr Berry of the Bodleian", " I Can't Tell You How Indescribably Nondescript It Was!", " Blurriness Buries Berry", " A Peanut-butter and Barberry Sandwich", " An Autobiographical Snippet", " Idealistic Dreams about Metamathematics", " Post Scriptum", "Chapter 9 - Pattern and Provability", " Principia Mathematica and its Theorems", " Mixing Two Unlikely Ideas: Primes and Squares", " Pattern-hunting", " People who Pursue Patterns with Perseverance", " Where There's Pattern, There's Reason", " Sailing the Ocean of Primes and Falling off the Edge", " The Mathematician's Credo", " No Such Thing as an Infinite Coincidence", " The Long Search for Proofs, and for their Nature", "Chapter 10 - Gödel's Quintessential Strange Loop", " Gödel Encounters Fibonacci", " The Caspian Gemstones: An Allegory", " A Tiny Spark in Gödel's Brain", " Clever Rules Imbue Inert Symbols with Meaning", " Mechanizing the Mathematician's Credo", " Miraculous Lockstep Synchrony", " Flipping between Formulas and Very Big Integers", " Very Big Integers Moving in Lock-step with Formulas", " Glimmerings of How PM Can Twist Around and See Itself", " Prim Numbers", " The Uncanny Power of Prim Numbers", " Gödelian Strangeness", " How to Stick a Formula's Gödel Number inside the Formula", " Gödel's Elephant-in-Matchbox Trick via Quine's Analogy", " The Trickiest Step", " An Elephant in a Matchbox is Neither Fish Nor Fowl", " Sluggo and the Morton Salt Girl", "Chapter 11 - How Analogy Makes Meaning", " The Double Aboutness of Formulas in PM", " Extra Meanings Come for Free, Thanks to You, Analogy!", " Exploiting the Analogies in Everyday Situations", " The Latent Ambiguity of the Village Baker's Remarks", " Chantal and the Piggybacked Levels of Meaning", " Pickets at the Posh Shop", " Prince Hyppia: Math Dramatica", " Analogy, Once Again, Does its Cagey Thing", " How Can an "Unpennable" Line be Penned?", " "Not" is Not the Source of Strangeness", " Numbers as a Representational Medium", "Chapter 12 - On Downward Causality", " Bertrand Russell's Worst Nightmare", " A Strange Land where "Because" Coincides with "Although"", " Incompleteness Derives from Strength", " Bertrand Russell's Second-worst Nightmare", " An Endless Succession of Monsters", " Consistency Condemns a Towering Peak to Unscalability", " Downward Causality in Mathematics", " Göru and the Futile Quest for a Truth Machine", " The Upside-down Perceptions of Evolved Creatures", " Stuck, for Better or Worse, with "I"", " Proceeding Slowly Towards the Bottom Level", " Of Hogs, Dogs, and Bogs", "Chapter 13 - The Elusive Apple of My "I"", " The Patterns that Constitute Experience", " Reflected Communist Bachelors with Spin 1/2 are All Wet", " Am I a Strange Marble?", " A Pearl Necklace I Am Not", " I Am My Brain's Most Complex Symbol", " Internalizing Our Weres, Our Wills, and Our Woulds", " I Cannot Live without My Self", " The Slow Buildup of a Self", " Making Tosses, Internalizing Bounces", " Smiling Like Hopalong Cassidy", " The Lies in our I's", " The Locking-in of the "I" Loop", " I Am Not a Video Feedback Loop", " I Am Ineradicably Entrenched...", " ...But Am I Real?", " The Size of the Strange Loop that Constitutes a Self", " The Supposed Selves of Robot Vehicles", " A Counterfactual Stanley", "Chapter 14 - Strangeness in the "I" of the Beholder", " The Inert Sponges inside our Heads", " Squirting Chemicals", " The Stately Dance of the Symbols", " In which the Alfbert Visits Austranius", " Brief Debriefing", " Soaps in Sanskrit", " Winding Up the Debriefing", " Trapped at the High Level", " First Key Ingredient of Strangeness", " Second Key Ingredient of Strangeness", " Sperry Redux", "Chapter 15 - Entwinement", " Multiple Strange Loops in One Brain", " Content-free Feedback Loops", " Baby Feedback Loops and Baby "I" 's", " Entwined Feedback Loops", " One Privileged Loop inside our Skull", " Shared Perception, Shared Control", " A Twirlwind Trip to Twinwirld", " Is One or Two Letters of the Alphabet?", " Pairsonal Identity in Twinwirld", " "Twe"-tweaking by Twinwirld-twiddling", " Post Scriptum re Twinwirld", " Soulmates and Matesouls", " Children as Gluons", "Chapter 16 - Grappling with the Deepest Mystery", " A Random Event Changes Everything", " Desperate Lark", " Post Scriptum", "Chapter 17 - How We Live in Each Other", " Universal Machines", " The Unexpectedness of Universality", " Universal Beings", " Being Visited", " Chemistry and Its Lack", " Copycat Planetoids Grow by Absorbing Melting Meteorites", " How Much Can One Import of Another's Interiority?", " Double-clicking on the Icon for a Loved One's Soul", " Thinking with Another's Brain", " Mosaics of Different Grain Size", " Transplantation of Patterns", "Chapter 18 - The Blurry Glow of Human Identity", " I Host and Am Hosted by Others", " Feeling that One is Elsewhere", " Telepresence versus "Real" Presence", " Which Viewpoint is Really Mine?", " Where Am I?", " Varying Degrees of Being Another", " The Naïve Viewpoint is Usually Good Enough", " Where Does a Hammerhead Shark Think it is?", " Sympathetic Vibrations", " Am I No One Else or Am I Everyone Else?", " Interpenetration of National Souls", " Halos, Afterglows, Coronas", "Chapter 19 - Consciousness = Thinking", " So Where's Consciousness in my Loopy Tale?", " Enter the Skeptics", " Symbols Trigger More Symbols", " The Central Loop of Cognition", "Chapter 20 - A Courteous Crossing of Words", "Chapter 21 - A Brief Brush with Cartesian Egos", " Well-told Stories Pluck Powerful Chords", " What Pushovers We Are!", " Teleportation of a Thought Experiment across the Atlantic", " The Murky Whereabouts of Cartesian Egos", " Am I on Venus, or Am I on Mars?", " The Radical Nature of Parfit's Views", " Self-confidence, Humility, and Self-doubt", " Morphing Parfit into Bonaparte", " The Radical Redesign of Douglas R. Hofstadter", " On "Who" and on "How"", " Double or Nothing", " Trains Who Roll", " The Glow of the Soular Corona", "Chapter 22 - A Tango with Zombies and Dualism", " Pedantic Semantics?", " Two Machines", " Two Daves", " The Nagging Worry that One Might Be a Zombie", " Consciousness Is Not a Power Moonroof", " Liphosophy", " Consciousness: A Capitalized Essence", " A Sliding Scale of Élan Mental", " Semantic Quibbling in Universe Z", " Quibbling in Universe Q", "Chapter 23 - Killing a Couple of Sacred Cows", " A Cerulean Sardine", " Bleu Blanc Rouge = Red, White, and Blue", " Inverting the Sonic Spectrum", " Glebbing and Knurking", " The Inverted Political Spectrum", " Violets Are Red, Roses Are Blue", " A Scarlet Sardine", " Yes, People Want Things", " The Hedge Maze of Life", " There's No Such Thing as a Free Will", "Chapter 24 - On Magnanimity and Friendship", " Are There Small and Large Souls?", " From the Depths to the Heights", " The Magnanimity of Albert Schweitzer", " Does Conscience Constitute Consciousness?", " Albert Schweitzer and Johann Sebastian Bach", " Dig that Profundity!", " Alle Grashüpfer Müssen Sterben", " Friends", "Epilogue - The Quandary", " Not a tall!", " The Pull and Pitfalls of Dualism", " The Lure and Lacunas of Nondualism", " Rainbows or Rocks?", " Thrust: The Hard Problem", " Riposte: A Soft Poem", " A Billion Trillion Ants in One's Leg ", " I Am a Strange Loop", "Notes", "Bibliography", "Acknowledgements", "Index".Meget gennemarbejdet bog om bevidsthed og hvad der mon egentlig skal til for at noget er bevidst.
Show Less
Publication
Basic Books (2007), Hardcover, 412 pages
Description
Hofstadter's long-awaited return to the themes of Gödel, Escher, Bach--an original and controversial view of the nature of consciousness and identity. What do we mean when we say "I"? 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? This book argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. Deep down, a human brain is a chaotic soup of particles, on a higher level it is a jungle of neurons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call "symbols." The most central and complex symbol in your brain or mine is the one we both call "I." But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real--or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction?--From publisher description.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member JollyContrarian
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
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.
Show More
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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member jalanb
What a load of sentimental, self-obsessed, repetitive rubbish.
LibraryThing member xenchu
In Logic, I find that I cannot refute Hofstader's thesis that the soul is an ephemera, an illusion of the mind. But I definitely do not like it. I suppose it is a flaw in myself that I want to refute it.
In a technical sense, it is well-written, clear and informative. I found it much easier to read
The book is worth reading if you don't mind having your basic beliefs deeply questioned.
In a technical sense, it is well-written, clear and informative. I found it much easier to read
Show More
than his book Godel, Escher and Bach which I could not finish. This book makes me want to try that one again.The book is worth reading if you don't mind having your basic beliefs deeply questioned.
Show Less
LibraryThing member bobbieharv
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
Show More
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. Show Less
LibraryThing member fpagan
(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
Show More
dualism, he dwells on closely associated people harboring small rough copies of each other's "I"-ness. Show Less
LibraryThing member nbmars
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
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)
Show More
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)
Show Less
LibraryThing member downstreamer
Very hard to get into this book. I ended up having to put it aside.
LibraryThing member normaleistiko
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
Show More
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. Show Less
LibraryThing member leonardr
Not really convinced that our representations of other people are strange loops a la our self-representation.
LibraryThing member TomSlee
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
Show More
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. Show Less
LibraryThing member jcopenha
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.
LibraryThing member Cygnus555
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!
LibraryThing member liberality
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.
LibraryThing member simonaries
I'd like to find the Albert Schweitzer recording of Bach's G minor fugue (BWV 542).
LibraryThing member caldara
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
Show More
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.' Show Less
LibraryThing member ben_h
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
Show More
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. Show Less
LibraryThing member chaosmogony
Holy crap. If I could give this more than 5 stars, I would. What a mind-blower.
LibraryThing member David_David_Katzman
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
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 minds 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.
Show More
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 minds 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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member KirkLowery
Once more Douglas tries to convince us that consciousness is merely a complex algorithm(s). Although he fails in this, his readers learn a lot.
LibraryThing member mrgan
Smart and well written, but a bit bland and meandering for Hofstadter's standards.
LibraryThing member Paul_S
I liked the idea of distributed consciousness. It reminds me of the idea of electron's position being a probability cloud where even though there's a small area where it's likely to be technically the probability is stretched out thinly to everywhere. Even though we are mostly in our brain there we
Show More
are thinly stretched out to everything and everyone we have interacted with. Show Less
LibraryThing member JamesBeach
This is Pop, painless to read but mostly nonsense. Hofstadter tells a fairy tale about how minds are made, and I cannot recall a single claim from the text that is testable. The work is unserious. Science is bold and serious philosophers would like to pick a fight with your beliefs. This book
Show More
challenges the reader to a pillow fight. Show Less
LibraryThing member seanpmurray
Doug Hofstadter has long mainained that the idea of a conistent, continuous self is an illusion. "I Am a Strange Loop" provides strong evidence for that argument--this is not the same man who write "Godel, Escher, Bach".
In that book, Hofstadter's stylistic fireworks display was matched only by the
Readers who have exhausted "Themas", "Analogies" and the inter-chapter commentares in "Mind's I" will enjoy getting to spend more time wth Hofstadter, but those still dizzy from the ride of "Godel, Escher, Bach" might be better served checking out his older, more focused work.
In that book, Hofstadter's stylistic fireworks display was matched only by the
Show More
bustling zoo of subject matter. Here, form and content are far less ambitious and more subdued. This book feels less like a heady shit-session with a precocious researcher than a porch-front chat with a (rapidly aging) grandfather.Readers who have exhausted "Themas", "Analogies" and the inter-chapter commentares in "Mind's I" will enjoy getting to spend more time wth Hofstadter, but those still dizzy from the ride of "Godel, Escher, Bach" might be better served checking out his older, more focused work.
Show Less
LibraryThing member sisyphus_happy
This book was one of my favorites many years ago, and I wanted to reread it from my very different perspective a few decades later. It is kind of a "little sister" to Hofstadter's more famous "Gödel, Escher, Bach", which I definitely plan on reading but have never gotten through previously. At
I also softened on my views on the earlier part of the book. His over-explanation was not filler, but his insistence on making sure his ideas were truly and deeply understood by the reader, as they were crucial to not only the rest of the theory, but to him personally. I also over-explain sometimes and unfortunately have seen eyes glaze over as I go into more and more detail. "Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood." After this part, the pace and the balance was a bit more palatable to me and new ideas came more frequently with explanations and analogies that were not so painful. As I reached its conclusion, not only did I feel that I deeply understood his view of consciousness, but I agreed. That was his goal after all. It also occurred to me that the audience was possibly his wife, or rather the echo of her consciousness that continued in himself.
I am subtracting half a star because of one opinion of his that I find distasteful, the idea that there is a spectrum of the "size" of souls (using his reinterpretation of the word soul that rejects dualism). I think this is a slippery slope to racism, even though that may not have been his intention. Also, his views on musical taste at the end were pretty gatekeep-y, and while I get what he was going for, I've tried to eliminate these kind of thoughts in myself because such things are so subjective. OK, some people don't "get" Bach the way you do, but maybe their understanding of Kendrick Lamar's lyrics are on a level you will never quite grok. Side note: as a computer science-y person my brain kept returning to machine learning and AI, which is touched upon abstractly but not directly. My question is, what happens when GPT-3 (or another large language model) "perceives" itself? There has to be some kind of feedback loop and recursion going on; is the result similar to the strange loop he describes? This book definitely whet my appetite for Gödel, Escher, Bach, and I can't wait to read that one and contrast it to this one.
Show More
first I was somewhat frustrated by the pace of this book. It seemed to spend far too little time on actual ideas and overdid it with analogies. I felt it was too verbose and repetitive and seemed to contain a lot of "filler". My conclusion was that it would benefit from an editor, as the tidbits of new (to me) ideas were overwhelmed by explanation. I wondered who his audience was intended to be, the tone seemed to fluctuate, sometimes aimed at those with no math or science background whatsoever, and sometimes appealing to the more "logical" among us. However, when I got to his chapter on his wife's passing, my opinion changed. I noticed that another reviewer on this site found that this part negated part or all of his theory of consciousness because it introduced bias. However I was deeply moved by it and it brought me to tears at one point. In my mind his "theory of consciousness" has at its heart a "theory of empathy" which resonates with me deeply. I believe that empathy is a key part of consciousness, and Hofstadter's theory resolves some of the issues I had squaring this view with a scientific viewpoint. A distributed "I" is more intuitive to me than an isolated one, and I found his explanation of thought and understanding being a manipulation of symbols regardless of substrate to be compelling. I also softened on my views on the earlier part of the book. His over-explanation was not filler, but his insistence on making sure his ideas were truly and deeply understood by the reader, as they were crucial to not only the rest of the theory, but to him personally. I also over-explain sometimes and unfortunately have seen eyes glaze over as I go into more and more detail. "Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood." After this part, the pace and the balance was a bit more palatable to me and new ideas came more frequently with explanations and analogies that were not so painful. As I reached its conclusion, not only did I feel that I deeply understood his view of consciousness, but I agreed. That was his goal after all. It also occurred to me that the audience was possibly his wife, or rather the echo of her consciousness that continued in himself.
I am subtracting half a star because of one opinion of his that I find distasteful, the idea that there is a spectrum of the "size" of souls (using his reinterpretation of the word soul that rejects dualism). I think this is a slippery slope to racism, even though that may not have been his intention. Also, his views on musical taste at the end were pretty gatekeep-y, and while I get what he was going for, I've tried to eliminate these kind of thoughts in myself because such things are so subjective. OK, some people don't "get" Bach the way you do, but maybe their understanding of Kendrick Lamar's lyrics are on a level you will never quite grok. Side note: as a computer science-y person my brain kept returning to machine learning and AI, which is touched upon abstractly but not directly. My question is, what happens when GPT-3 (or another large language model) "perceives" itself? There has to be some kind of feedback loop and recursion going on; is the result similar to the strange loop he describes? This book definitely whet my appetite for Gödel, Escher, Bach, and I can't wait to read that one and contrast it to this one.
Show Less
Subjects
Awards
LA Times Book Prize (Finalist — Science & Technology — 2007)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
2007
Physical description
436 p.; 24.2 cm
ISBN
0465030785 / 9780465030781
Local notes
Omslag: Nicole Caputo
Omslaget viser et eksperiment med at lade et kamerabillede være motivet for et kamerabillede. Når man så stryger hånden hen over skærmen, får man et Droste-effekt billede.
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
Omslaget viser et eksperiment med at lade et kamerabillede være motivet for et kamerabillede. Når man så stryger hånden hen over skærmen, får man et Droste-effekt billede.
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
Similar in this library
Pages
436
DDC/MDS
| 153 |