I Am a Strange Loop

Douglas Hofstadter is an exceptionally bright and witty man, with a gift for analogy. This no doubt makes him entertaining company and a pleasure to have as a teacher, but at the same time it sometimes gets in the way of the message he's trying to convey- the allegories and metaphors become the dominant message, and the core gets lost in translation.

This is of course exactly what happened with Hofstadter's 1979 tour-de-force "Godel, Escher and Bach"; it was roundly praised to the heavens by scores of reviewers, none of whom seemed to notice that it was in fact a very clever way of presenting a theory of conciousness and intelligence. This bothered Hofstadter as well, as he tells us in the introduction to "I Am a Strange Loop", and so he set out to tell the story again, this time in a more straightforward manner. I'm not so sure he succeeded.

The bulk of "I Am a Strange Loop" is devoted to explaining Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, with a minimum of math and a lot of allegory and allusion. Much of it seems repetitious, and all of it is, I think, wasted, as the end product of all this attmepted explanation seems to be simply one more metaphor- that what's going on in the brain/mind is something very much like what's going on in Godel's theory: That a theory, or a formula, or a sentance, or a "thing," can contain within it a complete representation of itself. Hofstadter calls this a "strange loop", and believes that, combined with input from outside that adds to this (and other) loops is the wellspring from which consciousness springs.

I first heard this notion expressed in the following manner (although I don't recall who wrote it): Every living thing has in it some representition of the outside world. A plant has in some sense a representation of the sun, that allows it to bend towards it. A bacterium moving along a gradient of nutrients contains within it a representation of this source of nutrition. A bee has representations of hive, flower, sun, and other concepts that guide it goal-seeking behavcior. And so on, up the evolutionary line. When that representation become complete and complex enough to include itself, that is the birth of consciousness. This is not a particularly original notion, although when Hofstadter wrote GEB back in the 70s it wasn't a particularly widely held idea in psychology. At the same time, it was't a completely alien idea, either.

In the last few chapters Hofstadter toys with some more or less current ideas in the philosophy of mind, like Chalmer's "zombie", and presents us with a few more allegories and clever tales, none of which, I think, end up clarifying this position terribly well. One is left with the feeling that Hofstadter has a very strong intuitive sense of how conciousness evolves from these strange loops of self-representation, and what's he's struggling to do is to let us share his intuitions. I find that I share some of these intuitions with him, particualrly with his notions of where the self is represented, and representations of others alongside the self, and I think there's a germ of some powerful explanation hiding in there, but I can't seem to provide any more illumination than can Hofstadter.

And that in turn reminds me of something I was told at the beginning of my teaching career: If you can't explain something clearly and simply to another person, then you don't fully undertsand it. I think that's where Hofstadter is with respect to consciousness: He has a lot of intutions and parallels he can pull out, but in the end, he doesn't really have a theory of conciousness.

In the "strange loop," Douglas Hofstadter has come up with a pretty fertile metaphor. The problem is that the book doesn't do a whole lot to explain it. If you can "dig" or "grok" or "intuit" that consciousness is a strange loop, then you won't need the long portions of this book that attempt to promote this thesis. If you cannot so grok, then reading those same portions will be confusing and unhelpful.

This is not Hofstadter's fault. Trying to understand consciousness in this way is like "the art of seeing one's own eye" - it pushes up at the limits of language and reason. Good writing can only get you so far.

There are other portions that are quite enjoyable and these are the ones that are less thesis-driven and more literary. Hofstadter's youthful attempt at his own Socratic dialogue is fun and -although he apologizes at length for its immaturity- actually pretty good. I could have read a book-length chat between his "Plato" and "Socrates" (who seem -anachronistically- to be aware of computers and fruit-canning machines).

But even these bits could have done with a bit more editorial direction. The main problem with this book is Hofstadter's isolation within the closed-universe of the academic philosophy of mind. He clearly attaches an undue importance to this vanishingly small world. Hofstadter's snipes at John Searle are embarrassingly frank in their personal bitterness. I have never thought Searle was worth taking very seriously, but Hofstadter has little sense of humor about him or his work.

The same problem colors Hofstadter's frequent digressions into ethics, since his ethical positions seem to stem more directly from the cultural values of the academy than from his own ideas. He makes clear that he is pro-animal rights and pro-choice, since animals have consciousness and fetuses do not. He proposes that there exists a hierarchy of consciousness, with "small-souled" beings (e.g. fetuses, vegetables, retarded human beings) at or near the bottom and "large-souled" beings (e.g. adult humans) at the top. I happen to agree with him here, but Hofstadter's ethical discussion would be greatly enlivened by a familiarity with mysticism and religion, especially Buddhism and Aristotle. Instead, his horizons seem limited to journal-page arguments with Dennett, Churchland and Searle (ethical geniuses none).

Specifically, Hofstadter conflates "degree of consciousness" with "relative right to exist." If he fails to recognize that this is a nonsequitur, he does at least acknowledge that it commits him to a troublesome implication: that 2-year old humans have less right to exist than adult humans. He deals with this as follows:

"Even though I sincerely believe there is much more of a soul in a twenty-year-old than in a two-year-old (a view that will no doubt dismay many readers), I nonetheless have enormous respect for the potential of the two-year-old to develop a much larger soul over the course of a dozen or so years."

It is entirely obvious that fetuses (not to mention spermatazoa) have this same potential, so to the extent that "potential" is the reason for Hofstadter's pro-choice views, his argument is unsatisfactory.

He gives another: cuteness. Perhaps, he suggests, the sensation of cuteness reflects a protective instinct in humans. But this is clearly a positive fact and not a normative one - Badtz Maru is cute, but this alone does not give him rights. Indeed, it seems to me that the OPPOSITE is often true. Babies are precious by virtue of their limited awareness, not in spite of it. (Which is a greater tragedy: the death of child or a highly realized being?) Viewed with a cold eye, the "strange loop" theory of consciousness simply has no necessary ethical implications. Like Dennett, Hofstadter is a terrific thinker but a hamfisted ethicist - an unreflective mouthpiece for the ideology of the academy.

By far, the most useful contribution here is Hofstadter's specific discussion of video feedback as a metaphor for consciousness. Again, you either "grok" this or you don't - there is just no explaining something this weird. In the most novel and interesting portion of the book, he uses Marvin Minksy's term "telepresence" to explore the notion that consciousness is not singular, discrete or correlated with a spatial location or any single "body." He suggests, I think rightly, that mind exists wherever there is sufficient feedback of information, and that it spills over from one feedback loop into another, without respect for bodies, matter, or location. However, in my view, the same prejudices that prevent Hofstadter from confronting the ethical implications of his views also commit him to a reductive, ateleological worldview (again, he is here in lockstep with Dennett here), and this forces him over and over again to explain mind as some sort of emergent (and therefore anomalous) property of information itself. It also forces him to spill gallons of ink unnecessarily in an (unsuccessful) attempt to salvage free will. Finally, it keeps him from exploring the teleological (and much more parsimonious) alternative: that information exists in order to facilitate the emergence of mind.

At the end of the day, this is a self-indulgent book-length footnote to Hofstadter's masterpiece, GEB. Rather than pick at these scraps, the reader should take the opportunity to read or re-read that work.

Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am A Strange Loop" is a follow up to his 1979 Pulitzer Prize winning book "Gödel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", so let me first say someting about GEB, which is a book about... about... about... Well, it`s about...

GEB is about Gödel`s proof that mathematicians will always have work because mathematics cannot be complete. It's about Escher's magic winding staircases that reached up to their base, and about waterfalls that fell into their own spring. It's about Bach's variations on a theme reapeating itself without anyone noticing. There, that's what GEB is about.

Except that GEB isn't about any of those things.

GEB is about the strange loops illustrated by those things. Gödel's proof constructs an impossible sequence of numbers that simultaneously states its own truth and the impossibility of proving its own truth, a self-referential theorem. Escher`s illustrations are either about themselves, eg a picture of two hands drawing each other, or about impossible perspectives. Bach's music rises to a crescendo that progresses to where it started from. All of these things are impossible and yet they all make sense. They are impossible curves that bend back into themselves while seeming to go ahead. They are strange loops and GEB's aim is to explore them.

But Hofstadter didn't mean for people to stop there and readers who did simply confused means and ends. The whole point of strange loops for Hofstadter is that they explain consciousness. Yet for some inexplicable reason many, if not most, readers failed to grasp this. So 29 years later, he writes a new book and this time gives it a title that screams out what it is about: I Am A Strange Loop.

Perhaps readers missed GEB's message that each person is a strange loop because it spends so much time on delightful puzzles and paradoxes. There are no puzzles in IAASL; instead Hofstadter describes strange loops using a variety of analogies. He replaces the careful working out of paradoxes with descriptions of the seeming contradictions within our minds. He replaces analogies with mathematics, illustrations, and music with an elegant description of how consciousness arises. Our "I" grows out of a brain that finds patterns in the world so that it can recognize food from predators, and it has become a brain that recognizes that it is itself a thing on the same level as those external patterns it sees in the world.

Hofstadter does spend time on Gödel so there is some math, but he only describes Gödel's work without illustrating it with either formulas or problems to solve. Gödel's theorem is central to explaining how strange loops arise and it buttresses Hofstadter's argument that a strange loop is much more than a self-referential loop. Gödel constructs an elaborate statement that refers to itself in a way that implies it must be true and yet it says it cannot prove itself. The statement carries meaning about itself.

In the same way, Hofstadter builds a model of the mind that thinks of itself as a thing within itself and yet cannot completely understand itself. That model is the Strange Loop.

Vincent Poirier, Montreal

The subject matter is very interesting, to be sure; this is hard to describe, but I guess I kind of felt like Hofstadter was a bit condescending and patronizing in his writing. That is, it almost felt like you get this sense that he's continuously enchanted with what he perceives as his own encompassing intellect and wit, and that, to him, it goes without saying that his readers aren't at that level (as he muses philosophically on how lonely it is at the top). So, "understandably," everything must be broken down and dumbed down to the point of near insult. I completely get that the book isn't written for academics, and of course I'm all for making the subject accessible-- but I guess to me it felt a bit like he went beyond just making it accessible, to the point where it almost surprises you he'd feel the need to talk down to you to THAT extent? (Also, not sure if this matters, but I felt like a few of his assumptions about the perspective of neurologists were a bit off). Overall still a worthwhile read.

That said, there are a few things that bothered me about the points he made; my background is in clinical neurology, neurobiology, and neuroscience, which includes cognitive neurology as well; while to me it's clear that consciousness arises from biological aspects (namely, the specific circuity of neurons), I still have a problem with the statement that "consciousness is an illusion." I wonder if anyone who says this truly understands what they're on about: doesn't the very definition of "illusion" include the requirement that a conscious entity will exist in the first place, in order to experience the illusion?

I get the idea that the consciousness of something ELSE can be no more than an illusion to an external observer; but that still requires that the observer have consciousness in the first place... or am I completely missing something?

Another thing I feel I'm missing the point on is Hofstadter's casual certainty that an adult is "more conscious" than a child; certainly he can't mean what it sounds like he means? That is, even without taking into account the stages of cognitive development early life, we all have the first experience of vivid memories from our childhood, of being self-aware; I have memories going back to babyhood, which were confirmed by my parents. Not only that, but I have memories in early childhood of specifically being self-aware, and of experiencing different states of consciousness. I remember vividly not having the words to describe what I experienced when I went through different states of consciousness, while trying to describe this to my mother-- and at that age I couldn't have been older than, say, three or four. I honestly don't feel that I'm more self-aware now at 37 than I was at that age. So clearly I must have misunderstood exactly what he had meant, as even he describes his vivid memories from boyhood?

The top reviewer on this page nailed it. I differ with him only on the number of stars awarded (5 for me, 3 for him). I suspect that as the intuition<-->falsity/truth continuum goes, I have greater confidence than Mr. Edelman in the soundness of DH's intuitions, but I can't take issue with the general tenor of Edelman's remarks. There is much to frustrate, titillate, and fascinate in this book. Having yet to read Goedel, Escher, Bach, I'm not sure whether those who have would benefit from reading this one (many reviewers think not; I'll take their word, though I still intend to read DH's earlier magnum opus). But if, as DH reports, few readers understood the aims of that book, then such readers may be well served by reading this one. Be that as it may, though DH in no way nails a theory of consciousness in Strange Loop, he does make a compelling go of limning its possible contours. As a piece of science reporting, Strange Loop falls short. As an extended think piece -- grounded in science -- I think it succeeds brilliantly. Only time may tell whether a materialist theory of mind holds water (more likely, the problem is undecidable), and whether DH's own ideas are on the right track. Whether or not they prove to be, they're certainly fascinating to contemplate.

There are already some really excellent reviews here that cogently point out the formidable shortcomings of the book. I can't resist trying to say much the same thing in a rather different way.

At the beginning of Chapter 4 Hofstadter takes the flush toilet as `probably the most familiar and the easiest to understand' example of `mechanical systems with feedback in them'. He describes how the interaction of its main components - tank, water, float, rod and valve - maintains a constant level of water in the tank. Then he goes on to talk about a `little rubber gizmo' which can cause the feedback system to malfunction. He doesn't explain what this `little rubber gizmo' is and how it interacts with the main components already described. So this is an explanation suitable for the reader who needs to know (or at least to be reminded of) the interaction of the main components of the flush toilet but who already knows about - and so needs no explanation of - the `little rubber gizmo'. Surely the author can't believe that any such reader exists; more likely, he just didn't think carefully about what he was writing.

The text continues with an anecdote about how a malfunction of the `little rubber gizmo' once cost Douglas Hofstadter an extra $300 water bill. What is the point of this whole one-page passage that contains both the feedback description and the anecdote? Is the author's purpose to describe the normal, effective working of a flush toilet, as one small but relevant step in the exposition of his theory of mind? (In that case, the stuff about the `little rubber gizmo' and the $300 anecdote are irrelevant and distracting.) Or is the purpose to present a simple example of how a mechanical system with feedback in it can malfunction, thus making its malfunctioning the main point of the example? (In that case, surely the text ought to have started off with a sentence such as `Here is a simple example of how a mechanical system with feedback can malfunction') Or did the author just not bother to think too hard about what role this example served in the book? (That is what I suspect.)

Next in Chapter 4 there is a passage about anthropomorphic language, ie saying that such a feedback system has `desires' and `goals'. The text seems to start by saying that this a bad thing but ends up by saying that it is `indispensable'. The reader gets the feeling that this is a mere hint of a theme that the book will probably cover in more depth later on (and indeed in a later chapter questions are asked such as whether a machine can perceive, be creative, have opinions etc). However, the author doesn't link up this short passage explicitly to any other part of the chapter or to the rest of the book; he just stops after two pages and goes on with something else.

Third comes description in about three pages of two different situations: where a microphone amplifies its own sound coming from a nearby loudspeaker, and where a videocamera is pointed at a screen that shows images of the camera. The reader might reasonably assume that the anthropomorphic passage just gone was an intermezzo and that this third passage was the next step after the opening passage about the flush toilet in developing the analysis of feedback that is necessary to explain the author's theory of mind. However, Hofstadter doesn't say that; he doesn't relate the flush toilet to the microphone/loudspeaker combination in any way, except that he uses the word `feedback' for both. But they are quite different cases: the first is one machine so designed that, if functioning properly, it ensures a constant level of something (in this case water); the second involves two quite distinct machines, not primarily concerned with maintaining a constant level of something, which, if by chance juxtaposed in a certain way, as occasionally happens, can produce interesting results. True the word `feedback' can reasonably be used of both cases, but that is nothing like enough linkage to be meaningful without further explanation: you might as well write a passage about coal mines and then one about explosive mines, and assume that the connection was obvious because both were about `mines'.

It may well be that in order to understand Hofstadter's theory of mind you have to understand the microphone/loudspeaker case and in order to understand that you must first understand the flush-toilet case; maybe, but if so, he should have explained that linkage. And if not, he should not have forced the reader to study the case of the flush-toilet - including malfunctions - for, as it turned out, no purpose at all.

These six pages (pp51-56) provide examples of several generic clarity-hindering faults that can crop up in any text that explains something complicated:
- Failure to explain something from a consistent level;
- Inclusion of material(such as personal anecdote, example from another field, analogy, parable, imaginary dialogue,thought experiment, or some adjacent but different topic) that is irrelevant to explanation of the main topic. The reader may waste a lot of mental energy before concluding that the material is irrelevant.
- Failure to explain specifically how some piece of material (anecdote, example etc) that plausibly does have some relevance fits into the explanation of the main topic. The reader struggles to the tantalising position of concluding that the material probably is relevant in some way, but being unsure exactly how.
- Failure to organise a chapter in a form that is both coherent and clear to the reader.

In the chapters beyond Chapter 4, ie most of the book, Hofstadter puts forward his ideas that `we ourselves .. are strange loops' and that `the quintessential example of this phenomenon', ie strange loops, was discovered by the logician Gödel (pp103-4). He then describes Gödel's work in a chunk of some 70 pages, and constantly refers to it in the 180 pages after that, while never missing a chance to be contemptuous about Russell's Principia Mathematica.

So then, if Hofstadter's explanation of the flush toilet is so poor, how does he do at using advanced concepts of mathematical logic to present his original ideas on the slippery subject of the nature of the mind? Not well. Going through the heavy part of the book, I don't find a clear explanation of a theory of mind, and I do find plenty of the generic clarity-hindering faults given above. There are some whoppers: for example, Hofstadter gives us his personal ethical views on such things as vegetarianism and Albert Schweitzer, as if that material will somehow make his theory of mind more clear and more convincing. But no, life is too short for any more of this.

The book attempts to explain the author's theory of mind. It fails to do that competently. Therefore it can't deserve any more than two stars.

This book has some good ideas in it, but its not amazing. When I ordered I was not expecting this to be so philosophical. It is easy to understand recursion, but its more difficult to understand whats beyond: a strange loop. I'm not sure the book has a test to pinpoint strange loops. The book says mosquitos are like a machine and humans are a conscious, strange loop. I'm sure if you studied mosquitoes, they exhibit complex behaviour more than what the book says. I don't see the proof of strange loops forming up and I'm more than halfway through. I understand that people are able to refer to themselves, but I need more than an analogy. Bottom line is that this is a subject that needs more study and this book is not a reference. Some of the ideas are creative and probably could have used pictures for comparison. I liked a lot of the stories. The enjoyability of reading this is not as high as I hoped. I recognize that that the author has a clear idea of his subject, but this book is not perfect.

This is not the sequel to the masterful Godel, Escher, Bach that so many had been hoping for. It's more like the DVD commentary: a more personal, casual and less focused journey through many of the same ideas, three decades later.

There are parts of the book that I enjoyed immensely: Chapters 9 and 10 give the clearest explanation of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem that I've ever seen, successfully filling some of the gaps in Hofstadter's earlier book. But the overarching theme of the book, the mystery of consciousness and how Gödel's work is analogous to it, is far less tightly argued, relying on an endless flood of analogies, many of which fall flat.

Hofstadter's warm voice and humor is always a treat: "After describing this sacred cow as accurately as I can," he says, referring to the famous inverted-spectrum riddle, "I shall try to slaughter it as quickly as I can. (It suffers from mad sacred cow disease.)" I laughed, but found myself unconvinced by the story-argument he laid out over the next few pages.

This is perhaps Hofstadter's most autobiographical work. He devotes Ch. 16 to his wife's death at the age of 42 and his ensuing numbness, as if a part of him had died. Hofstadter argues that this is literally the case: "One day, as I gazed at a photograph of Carol taken a couple of months before her death, I looked at her face and I 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!'" He makes a Socratic dialogue he wrote as a teenager the first chapter. He talks about his pleasure in killing mosquitoes even as he takes pride in saving the life of a grasshopper. But none of these things really contribute to his stated goal for this book: To convey exactly what he was trying to convey in GEB. As he says in the preface, "It sometimes feels as if I had shouted a deeply cherished message out into an empty chasm and nobody heard me."

Sadly, after reading this book, I feel that I've learned very little apart from what was in GEB. If there is a message that I missed in that masterpiece, then I fear I may never hear it.

In reading Douglas Hofstadter, one quickly realizes that Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem is for Hofstadter what foreign locales are for Ernest Hemingway...the mood setter and point of departure.

In his classic Godel Escher Bach this was fantastic as the mathematics of Kurt Godel juxtaposed with the art of Maurits Cornelius Escher and the music of Johann Sabastian Bach excellently served as but "three shadows emanating from the same source." For those new to Hofstadter or new to Godel's theorem, it basically was a mathematical discovery that said even the best of mathematical systems would still be unable to discover all existent truths. An English language version of the phenomenon would the sentence "This sentence is false" which is neither true nor false so therefore recursive. Escher prints reflect this because they depict impossible creations like two hands drawing eachother. Similarly Bach's music was recursive because -- like with his Crab Canon -- it could be played backwards or forwards.

As might be expected readers picking up later works by Hofstadter would be understandably excited about what, well, other mind blowing stuff Hofstadter might be thinking. However, as with his previous book, Metamagical Themas, one quickly realized that Hofstadter was merely a one trick pony seeing recursiveness in everthing, provided it was banal and uninteresting. (In Themas for example Hofstadter actually spends a couple chapters trying to create different variations on the "this sentence is false" theme...an exercise that quickly grows tiresome).

However, Themas was written back in the eighties, and hope does spring eternal so legitimate curiosity did and does attach to what this book is about.

Here permit me to be clear: To the extent Hofstadter intends an homage to his wife who died in 1993 of a brain tumor, only the greatest of empathy can attach. And to the extent that Hofstadter reveals a naked desire to pierce the veil of death and retain any connection with his wife, only hope can attach.

If he's found it, so much the better for him.

However, as a vehicle for the rest of us, this book functions neither as great philosophy or great science.

As to the science, those genuinely interested in the nature of consciousness would be better directed to Dan Dennett's Consciousness Explained or Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works.

As to the philosophy, human consciousness is wonderful and enigmatic in ways manifold beyond Godel's theorem. As creatures, we do indeed engage in periodic self referential activity. However, perhaps some of the grandest parts of the human experience occur when our attention is focused outward...to our loves our children and our creations. And while it may indeed be true in some greater philosophic sense that these things are but instances of self reflection perhaps it's this reviewers measure of self delusion that they are best viewed as products of selflessness and in that way the finest of what it is to be sentient.

As can be gleaned this writer has read a lot of Hofstadter and the more I read him and the more he talks about Kurt Godel the more I long for Hofstadter's glory days when his ideas really were new and original and not just a loopy rehash of the same stuff he's been saying for thirty years.

Once again, Hofstadter brings his unusual and very personal style to a serious subject. As with the title, "I" is a major player here, with stories, ruminations and specifics on what he thinks as a conscious human and a researcher. In many cases, I felt like we were almost in a dialog together.

The book is too long and repetitious, with its essence only a few key points. There is a complex thread on KG, incompleteness, Russell and how all that applies to looks and being inside and outside the system. It's a tough subject and the author makes a solid shot.

The other main topic is the degree of consciousness from humans to insects, with the lowly mosquito making many appearances. Hofstadter believes that consciousness gradually appears as you go up the chain, with no concrete dividing line. Fair enough.

Given that premise, he doesn't get into how that applies to different abilities and perceptions within humans, either as fully grown adults or as developing humans in the womb. A serious assessment of when humans become conscious and how consciousness evolves as we age (to be fair, he does use Ronald Reagan as a proxy for late-state decline) would have been welcome. Perhaps his highly-visible liberal views would have made that too dangerous, with a simple example being his brief mention of "The Bell Curve" that could have been more seriously assessed.

The riff on consciousness at a distance and replication was one of the highlights. A segue into science fiction concepts could have been a treat in his hands, such as Star Trek's "Borg" and so many other ideas of collective intelligence. How much technology could I insert into the brain and still be a conscious human, especially one who is still "me"?

Finally, computer science and artificial intelligence, one of Hofstadter's own fields, has quite the history of debate on what is intelligence. He is quite clear that many systems are far from conscious, such as chess players and feedback systems, without pushing the envelope for future possibilities. Do some pushing.

The book has its moments, and what a fertile mind he has. On this subject, I prefer Steven Pinker and more traditional writers.

"I am a strange loop" is a book that showers the reader with metaphors, some amusing, some challenging, some facetious, some rather vague. What they all have in common is that they constantly reiterate the theory of self that is succinctly stated in the title, and even the most elaborate one, concerning Gödel's analysis of Russell's Principia Mathematica, eventually leaves you just where you started. At the outset you may feel that Hofstadter will elaborate on his theory through his analogies, or deepen it, but no such thing really happens. Basically, after reading the first few chapters you know all there is to it without ever quite getting to know how it actually works.

Meanwhile I found the mathematical mind games in the first half of the book highly engrossing, and was rather disappointed when halfway through Hofstadter suddenly shifts gear. Out of the blue comes the tragic story of his wife's demise, that in this context, with all due respect, felt to me like a rather cheap coup de théâtre. From this point onward Hofstadter develops the idea that an I can exist in several brains simultaneously, but while his personal motivations for wanting such a theory are obvious, he rather fails to offer convincing underpinnings for it. This in turn leads to the non sequitur and surprisingly moralistic conclusion that only once we feel compassion for fellow human beings do we truly develop an I.

All this left me rather puzzled at the end; I don't quite know what the point is of this book, and I get a feeling that neither did the author. That said, many parts of it do make for reasonably entertaining reading.

The 1- and 2-star reviews here are quite well-written and nicely articulate the problems with this book. Please read them carefully before deciding to spend time and money on this title. I myself was extremely disappointed by this book. I was expecting it to contain the accumulated insight of Hofstadter's decades of thinking about minds, consciousness, and self. When I saw it in the bookstore, I immediately grabbed it and couldn't wait to dig in. However, it is strangely ineffective in articulating its central idea, although I'm open to the possibility that I just didn't understand Hofstadter's thesis.

The publisher gave Hofstadter perhaps too much freedom to write as much as he wanted on whatever he wanted. The book lacks cohesion and it is repetitive to the point of insulting your intelligence. I was also a bit put off by Hofstadter's elitist self-aggrandizement - at the end of the book he briefly suggests that the "size" of a person's soul may be related to musical taste, and naturally his own sophisticated appreciation of classical music is held up as an example of the pinnacle of human enlightenment. Earlier he even mentions a friendship that "diminished" after the friend in question recommended a piece of music that he turned out to dislike.

The philosophical part of the book is worth one star, at most, but I give the book a second star because of a moving interlude in which Hofstadter beautifully describes his thoughts and feelings about a tragedy that occurred in his personal life. This section is brief and painfully personal.

Overall however, I'm sorry but very strongly NOT recommended.

Remember being 12-years old and lying in bed and trying to observe yourself observing yourself thinking? Weird, huh? Hofstadter also had that "insight," and has decided to pad it with 100's of pages of self-indulgent reminiscences and asides.

The writing is just awful. Instead of saying "the cow jumped over the moon," Hofstadter might say "The cow, that emblem from ancient times of... my wife once saw a cow in Vermont, and.... the cow, (why not a goat, you might ask, well that's an interesting question I discussed once with my eminent friends....." etc., etc. I can't see how anyone can't get through this type of writing without developing hives.

We are just an illusion, Douglas Hofstadter would like us to believe; and I tend to agree with him. Hofstadter's book is loaded with metaphor, the most poignant one based on a story he tells about a box of envelopes. The envelopes are all lined in a row -- hundreds of them -- and because each envelope has a thin layer of adhesive, when they're all held together, the stack of adhesive inside the stack of envelopes gives the illusion of a marble. Hofstadter, throughout the course of I am a Strange Loop, claims that our consciousness is a similar type of illusion. Stimuli are processed into symbols, which then are used to interpret new stimuli, which then create an even "higher" level of symbols. The highest level of symbol is called "I." This recursive process is called a Strange Loop, and is what provides the illusion of consciousness. He takes 363 pages to unfold this thesis.

Central to Hofstadter's theory of consciousness is his claim that different living entities have different 'levels' of consciousness: mosquitos are low on the list, humans are highest (babies and psychopaths checking in lower than Ghandi and Mother Teresa). Some people might find umbrage in this idea. If you do, then you're just the type Hofstadter is trying to convert.

There are sections of this book that are important and thought provoking. At times, however, Hofstadter is too verbose. Based on his prior success (he won a prize for his 1979 work, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid), his editor seems to have given him some leeway -- and Hofstadter has taken this too far. What could have been stated once, in a 500 word section, gets repeated, in slightly different ways, two or three times. There are some organizational issues, too. At times, whole chapters that are not central to the thesis could have been omitted. Hofstadter also enjoys making up short fictional tales that he thinks help make a point, but sometimes they merely bore his (dear) reader. To top it off, Hofstadter eschews the American punctuation convention of placing punctuation marks inside quotations. Yes, it's more "logical" like Hofstadter arguees, but it is problematic in other ways -- especially for an American readership. It is ironic that Hofstadter went to great lengths to edit every page for visaual aesthetics (as he claims in the footnotes), but forgot to edit for literary aesthetics. Where was the editor?

The ideas, however, more than make up for the deficiencies of style. Other reviewers have claimed how this book is the culmination of Hofstadter earlier work, Godel, Escher, Bach. In many ways they are right. Hofstadter goes to lengths describing how the Incompleteness Theorem of Godel support his framework for strange loops. Hofstadter takes pains to show how recursion, the main idea behind his Strange Loop, relates to everyday life and even English grammar. He uses this recursive framework as an analog to his own ideas about consciousness. We, the (dear) reader, take a long, winding walk through Hofstadter's mind as he points out, like a tour guide, each intellectual tidbit that has fascinated him about consciousness over the years. The best part about this walk are the metaphors used, and the skilled way Hofstadter uses these metaphors to convince us about his way of thinking about the brain.

In one metaphor, Hofstadter claimed that a translated novel does not lose the meaning of a plot through translation; however, as I understand his point, I disagree on a technicality. Words are symbols that have meaning only within the domain of a specific culture. If we take those symbols out of their cultural milieu, we lose their full meaning. Most of their meaning might remain, but what is lost is the way the original symbols interact with other original symbols. The translated symbols just don't carry the exact same meaning. (Dear) reader, you'll have to go read this book to see what analogy I'm refering to. Do it. If you're interested in the philosophy of consciousness, or are a student of the brain, you will not be disappointed.

Fans of Hofstadter's style of writing may be pleased to have another tome to wander through, but fans of his ideas, such as I am, may be disappointed. In this book, DH attempts to focus on the question of identity: who or what am "I". DH firmly rejects both religious dualism and the pseudo-scientific dualism of Chalmers and others. Instead, DH calls upon the recursive loops he explored with us in GEB to expose identity for what it is: an emergent property of perceptual cognition turned in on itself.

Yet DH seems uncomfortable with his own conclusion, as if he still has one foot in the old dualist world where each of us has, if not an eternal, unchanging soul, then at least an animate "spiritual being" distinct from the "mere stuff" we are made of. He almost interchangeably uses the words "soul", "self", and "consciousness", and he spends a lot of time worrying about what living systems possess what amount of "soulness" (he seems to be certain, however, that mosquitos have no soul worth worrying about). He argues that people, too, must have "souls" which vary in "size" with their degree of self-consciousness. He ties this as well to empathy, arguing that people who are more exquisitely sensitive to the identities and feelings of others (e.g., Albert Schweitzer) have larger souls. Although he doesn't make it explicit, he seems to use the word "soul" when discussing judgments made about someone's identity by others, while using "self" or "I" when describing an entity's own awareness of itself.

One idea I found intriguing in this book was the concept of extended identity. There is the identity "I" continually construct for "myself" (the recursive act of self-identification), but there is also my identity held in the minds of others as a product of co-creation. DH explores the idea that my identity mirrored in the minds of others can be legitimately considered to be me in the same way that my many (often conflicting) self-images are me. I would have liked him to explore this idea further, particularly the hall-of-mirrors idea that I am very susceptible to adopting the images of myself constructed by others!

As with DH, the question of identity is a central obsession within my own identity, so of course I had to read this book. But I was frustrated by its rambling diversions and failure to attempt a concise, no-diversion summary of his thesis. I would rather have seen him start with, and end with, a very concise set of ideas. If I were DH [play on identity intended], I would have said it this way:

(1) The symbol for the self, "I", is not the individual. Rather "I" represents the individual, or whatever portion of that complex individual it is useful to represent in a particular context. The symbol "I" is thus linked to the current physical, emotional, and cognitive states of the individual, as well as to whatever memory structures are currently active. As states change and active memories cycle, the "I" changes with them. We do not notice this because, but just as we "fill in" our field of vision with what we "know" to be out there surrounding our focal point, we "fill in" the concept of "I" with a base-covering "and all the other aspects of myself that I am not thinking about at the moment".

(2) Each healthy human individual maintains a set of interlinked symbols to refer to people it knows well. If I think of my wife it might be her voice or her face that starts a cascade of memory impressions that I label with her name. I have a complex set of memories and expectations about her that define her for me. When she doesn't "live up" to those expectations, I either change them or attempt to change her (not a good idea, BTW).

(3) Each healthy human, as a social animal, is continually shaped and reinforced by the expectations of members of its social group. A social loop helps establish my identity not only as "friend of", "son of", "supporter of", but as "a father", "responsible", "creative", "reserved": I take my identity in large part from how others see me.

(4) So who am "I"? All the substance is in the system, not in the symbol. I am all that I am at any moment, or I am a remembered participant in a remembered event. I am not "I". "I" is a convenient symbol for a very real, but very complex and very changeable human.

Why the 5 star rating? Because the work is well thought out, very well written, entertaining and thought provoking.

I really enjoyed the personal writing style. Beyond Hofstadter relating personal experiences, he enters into a conversation with you, the reader (or "dear reader" as he often writes). Consciousness is a thick subject, and while he does not shurk the difficulties, he does a wonderful job of making them accessible.

If you are interested in the concepts surrounding consciousness - what makes you, you - the ideas of Descartes (I think, therefore I am) and the long line of philosophy that has followed from him, as well as the concepts of, or concerns with, Artificial Intelligence, then this book should be high on your list.

When GEB came out (1979) it rocked my world, as the fecund weaving of analogies, parallels, metaphors and unlikely connections brought new understanding to several fields and showed the "platform independence" of a whole lot of woolly concepts. Unfortunately Hofstadter's succeeding books (Metamagical Themas, The Mind's I, Fluid Concepts & Le Ton Beau de Marot) gradually lost me, as he became more-and-more enamored of arcana and twiddling details, and less-and-less able to illuminate big subjects with new insights. In short I found him increasingly self-centered and specialist, to the point where I could barely muster the will to follow his progressively abstruse writing. His last book I accused him (in my the store review) of being "seriously in need of an editor."

I almost didn't buy "I Am A Strange Loop" because of this. In the end a gift certificate, and the ten year interregnum in his output convinced me to give him another try.

On the surface the book appears to be an improvement -- no endless pages of typographic games, no fussy typesetting (to speak of), chapters laid out with some formal regularity. However, as I wormed my way into the book I began to feel the same confines and notice the same OCD disorders. He likes to make lists -- "with" "lots" "and" "lots" "of" "words" "in" "quotation" "marks" "and" "this" "can" "go" "on" "for" "a" "half" "a" "page" "or" "more." He likes to raise analogies and then repeat them, with minor variations, three, four, five or more times. I kept saying, "Okay Doug we get it, now move on willya?" In the Preface he mentions IAASL was written to distill some of the thoughts he'd been mulling since GEB, about the strange self-referential loop that is self-consciousness, a message he felt had gotten somewhat obscured by the numerous digressions and sidetracks generated by the succeeding books. Okay, I got this, and I agree with him. I was hoping IAASL would keep this in mind.

At a good 200 pages less than Ton Beau he makes a start at it, but his wheels still keep leaving the track. He still needs an editor to pull him back on-topic. He still hasn't written the book of clarion clarity he has in him.

I might buy his next book though. He's moving in the right direction again -- and he IS entertaining.

I Am A Strange Loop restates a lot of ideas from Hofstadter's earlier work, particularly the ones relating self-reference to consciousness, but improves upon them and puts them in a clearer context. Without the endless (though admittedly fascinating) digressions that made GEB such a tome to slog through, the central ideas about consciousness are a lot better framed.

And they're wonderful ideas. Hofstadter makes a very convincing case for self-reference forming an integral part of, if not the very basis of, human consciousness. His ideas about symbolic representation and levels of meaning manage to restate the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness in a way that makes dismissing it seem a lot less absurd than many philosophers would maintain. (He spends a fair bit of time good-naturedly bashing Nagel in particular. I'm curious to see what Nagel's said about this book, actually.)

There are a few sections that get tiresome: I don't think the video feedback loop analogy is as brilliant as Hofstadter seems to think it is; or at least I don't think the actual visual images of it are particularly instructive or interesting. The full-colour insert containing them would have been left out if I'd been his editor. And in one of the final chapters, Mr. Hofstadter comes dangerously close to self-serving elitist wankery when he starts positing on the higher consciousness of those people who appreciate the deep cosmic significance of Bach fugues. It reminded me uncomfortably of hearing Bill Hicks wax condescending on the "obvious" wonders of LSD. Hofstadter's deep passion for certain things, especially when it comes to music, sometimes makes him a little too sure of the objective merits of a clearly subjective personal preference.

But these are relatively minor quibbles, and don't detract from the main arguments of the book. If nothing else, you should read it for the beautifully clear explanation of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, the best treatment of it that I've seen. It's a mind-expanding idea, but only if you can understand it, and too many books get bogged down in the details of Gödel Numbers and the vagaries of the Principia Mathematica without properly getting across the elegant, though twisted, simplicity of what Gödel accomplished. Whether or not you buy that something analogous to it is the key to consciousness, I think any understanding of mathematics that doesn't take Gödel into account is much poorer for it.

still trying to digest all the twists and turns and what this book ultimate means and what it serves within the mind and soul, however it makes for some interesting thoughts and its a thinking person's book from start to finish i'll say that much. so many metaphors and appear over and over again. RIP to his Wife who passed away far too soon and you feel her pressence is this book. i felt all the different aingles and purposes he was coming with and from with this book and its quite interesting and will make you pay attention to all the details be it big or small. everything to digest and mentally replay which makes a book compelling and a story worth sharing.

There are a number of reasons I found this book lacking, even though I agree with its major premises.

(1) It brings no new arguments to the table. He simply restates arguments he and others have made before.

(2) Bad puns, dumb analogies, unfunny jokes. Sorry.

(3) More seriously, he fails to treat opposing arguments with the seriousness they deserve. Instead, he dismisses them by begging the question. In his world, non-functionalist-materialist accounts of the mind are false. Why? Because, silly, materialist-functionalist accounts are correct! The zombie problem that he and Dennett enjoy dismissing as nonsense deserves more credit than he gives it, and their continually having to face it points to their failure to provide a convincing account for interiority. Dismissing it on the basis that it is not compatible with your theory of the mind does not suffice.

He simply fails to understand Searle. Searle is a materialist who argues that the brain might not be a computer or an information processing device. So his examples of turing machines running on unlikely physical substrates are in fact highly relevant and not merely dishonest rhetoric. If Searle is in fact correct, current thinkers who see the brain as a computer of sorts (and thus capable of being "run" on any turing machine) may one day be looked at the way we look at 19th century thinkers who saw the brain as a kind of steam engine. It may be that computers are just our latest neat toy, and not a profound explanation of consciousness and life.

Many, many brilliant thinkers hold views other than those put forward by Dennett and Hofstader. Not all of them are blinkered philosophers: I'd look to Roger Penrose as one example.

I loved GEB and the Metamagical Themas columns. However brilliant Hofstader is, though, here he comes close to trying to do pure philosophy. He fails.

I Am a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter turned out to be just what the doctor ordered.

Hofstadter is perhaps most famous for Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (GEB), a book that guides the reader through the study of music and art and logic problems to an understanding of Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which states that any system of logic, at least as complicated as integer arithmetic will either be self-contradictory or be incomplete (containing some theorems that cannot be proven either true or false, some of which will be true and others false). It as a wonderful read, Hofstadter is a master of pun, analogy, and parable.

Strange Loop picks up where GEB left off. Hofstadter was disappointed that people missed some of the implications of GEB, namely for understanding human consciousness. Strange Loop is an attempt to redress that.

Strange Loop slices and dices John Searle (the fellow who wrote the book that caused me to awaken with a panic attack because humans cannot have free will according to him). It builds strongly in the direction that I thought one could look for understanding how we can have physical minds that are equal to our brains (as opposed to some non-physical mind that interfaces with the world through our brains) and not be simple automatons.

Along the way, he tells deep and touching stories about his own life and the loss of his wife to cancer. An (unintended) outcome of his reasoning is a "Proof for the Existence of god" that is just as strong as his reasoning about the existence of human consciousness.

This is an incredibly rich book. As I kept reading it, new ideas and points of view kept spinning off from the text. I don't always agree with Hofstadter. For example, I find his reasoning about the "Inverted Spectrum Theory" of the experience of colors overly simplistic. If he stuck by his guns, he'd see the analogy between knurking and glebbing and his different reactions to Prokovief and Bartok. It takes no special mathematic or philosophical training to follow or enjoy the work. Although I enjoyed it more than GEB, part of me sees GEB as the greater work, but it encompasses less than Strange Loop.

Any educated person should attempt GEB and force themselves through Strange Loop.

I had high expectations when I picked this book up but was very disappointed. In fact, I finally put it aside and will not finish it . . . after 230 pages I still don't know what the ultimate "up shot" of the strange loop theory is and I don't have the patience to find out.

Hofstader warns the reader in the beginning that the book is made up primarily of analogies, and he uses these to give insight to how consciousness works. Some of these are very interesting and helpful, like his discussion of video feedback loops. The major analogy of the first 200 pages, however, is tedious and difficult to understand. He spends a great deal of space explaining mathematical modeling, beginning with Bertrand Russel and through the developments of Godel. It is a long ride, and the point is to prove that self-referentiality actually exists in systems. I would have just taken his word for it.

In early reviews I read how Hofstader's work was eclectic, pulling from math, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and the like. Rather than enlightening, however, I found his jumping between them to be haphazard and distracting. Perhaps I will go back and tackle his earlier Pulitzer Prize winner, Godel, Escher, and Bach, but I can't recommend this one.

The whole premise of this book, is DH looking at what exactly is considered the self. He relates personal identity to the feedback produced by a tv camera or microphone/speaker. He also suggests to some degree it's all an illusion, brought about by learned response of the neurons in your head, and as such, other people can have a working representation of you that's almost as good as you. He uses this belief to console himself about his wife's death, that she is still somewhat alive in his head.
There are long tangents dealing with his various in depth analogies, and consideration of how much of a "soul" various being and things have. Overall, he doesn't break much new ground, doesn't take a stand in favor of any beliefs, and the reader comes away with what could have simply been a carefree dinner discussion probably involving several glasses of wine. His other books are much better, and though I'm a DH fan overall, I was rather disappointed with I am a Strange Loop.

I enjoyed this book, and learned from it.

I found many of the concepts discussed therein to be valid and highly relevant; however, they were, I thought, explored with somewhat narrow (and at times, flawed) logic and reasoning. After finishing 'I Am A Strange Loop,' I felt that with some broader thinking and a good dose of imagination, the book would have covered some truly intriguing territory.

Thanks to the author and the publisher.

When he was 27, Douglas Hofstadter wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach, a bestselling book loved by precocious teenagers and computer hackers. Its mixture of logic, music and visual art blended the richness of the humanities and the rigor of the sciences in an altogether unforgettable confection that won a Pulitzer Prize. But GEB, as it is affectionately known, was widely misunderstood. Now, at age 62, Hofstadter tries to get his message across more forcefully. Using invented dialogues, fanciful metaphors, mathematical analogies and light-hearted stories, he limns again and again his central point: The self is an illusion or, as he says, "a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination." While this may seem a depressing or, at least, odd conclusion (If the self is unreal, then who is reading this?), it's not. In fact, Hofstadter's conclusion has some surprisingly moving consequences about how human beings should regard themselves, other people and animals. This book is a punning, playful meditation on the logical, rather than neuro-biological, structure of the self. We highly recommend this gorgeous, rich, magical work to anyone who wants to see eye to eye with his or her "I."

Hofstadter isn't for everyone, and the subject of his musings is difficult, but he has a wonderful ability to make deep ideas accessible and he is full of fun. If you took great delight in Godel, Escher, Bach or The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul you will find renewed inspiration in Strange Loop. The author's facility in offering real world analogies to fairly abstruse philosophical puzzles is his forte. Having read fairly widely in the subject of the science of mind, I still experienced "aha!" moments reading this volume.

More than ever, I can now apprehend that my consciousness is an emergent property in a self-aware brain of sufficient capacity to infinitely categorize experience using symbols. "I" is, perhaps, the greatest and simplest symbol of all, condensing, as it does, the experience of each lifetime into a working hypothesis. "I" is illusory, yet highly useful, in the same way that it is useful for a gardener to know where the sun "comes up" and "goes down" in planning a garden, while the sun actually does neither. Like most convincing illusions, "I" is hard to shake, and there is the downside--the doomed feeling that one day "I" will die.

For my part, I find a great deal of comfort in bursting the illusion. If "I" never existed in the first place, it seems difficult to worry about what happens when my body drops. To the extent that I have loved and been loved, some vestige of my consciousness will drift on for a spell in others' memories, and that is enough.

Wonderful brain candy, for those of a certain appetite. Highly recommended.

How real is X to you...the moment you start taking X for granted, then it would seem you would consider X's reality highly dubious.

This, a book of analogies and metaphors, presents a plethora of academic notions in a down to earth way, spinning science subjects such as physics, mathematics at the logical level, chemistry, psychology, humanities, and a touch of theology, to describe the human experience, which Hofstadter calls a Strange loop. He brings in a lot of his humble personality and subtle sense of humor to help the reader feel like his best friend is telling you about a crazy dream he had the night before. In keeping with the spirit of the book I recognize that every reaction or review would carry the bias of the reviewer's life experience, whether that be one of science, business, art, sports, spiritual, or just a plain ordinary person...most of us. I am going with the human experience henceforth. With regard to the human experience Hofstadter suggests that in order to perceive our universe, you must have a soul, described in the book as that with the capability to interpret the symbols of the universe.

From small to large, while there is a DNA make up that begins things, Hofstadter puts forward the notion, backed with enough thought to be the foundation of a thesis, but not enough to make a boring academic read, that DNA must be capable eventually through development in chemical communication of powering enough energy to a.) Interpret symbols, b.) Share these symbols with other beings, and c.) Care about the other being. Please understand not I did not state the possibility of a soul to be strictly the domain human beings. Hofstadter, in no way suggests the human being as the center of thought but in many ways implies that souls are not dependent on the human form. This is clearly in sync with Emerson, and Jesus to name a couple souls, but is scientifically based in the 21st century.

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I enjoyed this fascinating book. I had the sense I was in the company of a great thinker, who sees things a bit differently from others, for interesting reasons. This book is interesting, and it has that great quality of a provocative idea. Whether you agree with the author or not you will have to think hard to justify either position.

The great thing this book achieves is to rescue thinking from the excessive reductionism of some neurophysiology. Yes we need neurones and brains to enable thinking, but our thoughts, feelings and beliefs are more than just neuro-chemical brain states. In his lead up to this conclusion Hofstadter is echoing the work of Bennett and Hacker (Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience). The strange loops that lead from basic reactive perceptions to the fully owned, conscious thoughts of a being that sees itself accurately as an "I" are well mapped out.

I was probably most disappointed when Hofstadter started to collapse his positive concept of the "I" as emergent property of the strange loops of neurological functioning back towards neurophysiology. (page xii)"What we call "consciousness" was a kind of mirage. It had to be a very peculiar kind of mirage to be sure, since it was a mirage that perceived itself, and of course didn't believe that it was perceiving a mirage" I enjoyed the ascent from basic neuronal activity far more. I think my consciousness is a basic property, and that neuronal activity is necessary for, but not sufficent to, explain my consciousness. But actually both levels of view have validity. As Hofstadter puts it, "It was almost as if this slippery phenomenon called, "consciousness" lifted itself up by its own bootstraps, almost as if it had made itself out of nothing, and then disintegrated back into nothing whenever one looked at it more closely." There is no consciousness centre in the brain. Consciousness is not localised or discrete, nor can it be isolated from the its bodily substrate. It is an abstract concept (you cannot put it in a wheelbarrow) but utterly real to you and I. And its lack is an unhealthy state.

This book is a fascinating one, it achieves a lot of insight into our human condition, and is a very good shot at "describing what, "the human condition" is. The integration of Godel's theorem with pattern analysis and some neurology allows interesting insight.

On the last page Hofstadter summarises, "our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature" This is true, but this book takes us a lot closer towards understanding ourselves and the human condition. I recommend it to readers.

I read Douglas Hofstadter"s "Godel, Escher, Bach" long ago - sometime in the early `80s, and I remember thinking "I really need to read this again. I liked this book, but there was a lot I think I missed."

When I saw a copy of "I Am a Strange Loop" in a used-book store, and Hofstadter said in the intro it was his update of "Godel, Escher, Bach," I figured this was my chance to rediscover the concepts in "Godel, Escher, Bach."

Well, I did, but I can't say I was happy with the result. Hofstadter's topic in "I Am a Strange Loop" is consciousness, and the concept of the "I" that we all carry around in our heads. And somewhat like Gilbert Ryle and the other black-box philosophers who believe that mental states are unimportant phenomena, and all that matters is physical behavior, Hofstadter concludes that there is no I there at all. Instead, there are just a bunch of competing desires that he says, using one of his many analogies, compete in the brain for votes, and the one with the most votes gets to see that desire translated into action.

Hofstadter's primary point is the problem that's haunted the mind-body dualists since Descartes: How does a thought or idea get transmitted from the non-corporeal plane of mental activity to the decidedly down-and-dirty mass of blood and bone that is human flesh? Hofstadter claims that the I we believe we have is just a convenient fiction our brains have constructed, and that there's no way our mental beliefs could be translated into physical action.

Of course, Hofstadter's own theory suffers from the same fundamental problem: How does the winner in the competition between various wishes and desires translate that specific wish and desire into physical action? What is the mechanism that bridges the gap between the world of spirit and the world of flesh?

Absent that key connection, Hofstadter's alternative to our ingrained belief in our own consciousness, and our own ability to make decisions that we then execute, lacks any real advantage. It's just another theory about mental states, but one that ignores the reality of our belief in our own identity.

Which leads to a second argument against Hofstadter's position that there's no I there: the evolutionary one. If the I really doesn't exist, why do we think it does? If we don't have free will, why did we develop this elaborate mental apparatus that makes us think we do? If free will is an illusion, wouldn't we as a species be better off applying the resources we spend believing in our ability to choose to something more practical, like running faster, or producing more sperm and eggs, or having a better sense of smell? Why would evolution have allowed this strong sense of our own consciousness to use up so much of our mental energy if it was just a figment of our imagination?

Another argument: In the 19th century, there was a great deal of philosophical debate, again going back to Descartes, about the validity of our perceptions about reality. Bishop Berkeley contended that all that existed were ideas, as whatever we perceive is mediated by our brains - and thus even if there were an objective reality, we could have no idea what it was because of the barrier set up by our brain's interpretation of what our senses transmitted.

Logically, there is no real answer to this contention, but pragmatist G.E. Moore finally simply said "This is my hand" - and the idealists, as they were called, cannot deny that the world operates as though our hands are real, and exist.

Finally, though I could go on, there's this question: Does Hofstadter himself believe that he doesn't make choices? Does he really live his life as though his own identity doesn't matter, and doesn't make decisions? Does he go to lunch with the other philosophers who believe our mental states cannot translate into action, and wind up just walking aimlessly until they find a Taco Bell? Or do they act as if they could decide that the local taqueria is a better choice?

All that said, I did find parts of "I Am a Strange Loop" well worth reading. Hofstadter's long explanation of precisely how Kurt Godel demolished the formalist mathematical theories of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead is fascinating (if sometimes difficult), and there are other segments early in the book that are very engaging.

But as the book goes on, Hofstadter's penchant for unusual analogies and his reductionist philosophy take over, and frankly, left me cold. I read the first 200 pages with interest, but it was a struggle to finish "I Am a Strange Loop."

Oh, and I am now cured of my desire to go back and re-read "Godel, Escher, Bach" - especially since, according to Hofstadter, I don't really exist at all.

Do you know what consciousness is? It is a mirage. Just a giant symbol in your brain, like one big complicated word that points to itself. Douglas Hofstadter first had this insight when he was 16 years old and has been trying ever since to get into words that hang together. As other reviewers have pointed out, he probably hasn't succeeded. There are several problems I see with this ideas in the book, which is otherwise a sensitive autobiographical work. The first is how the central topic of Godel's theorem connects to consciousness. The theorem, which shows how self-reference can reveal an interesting fact about arithmetic from the "top down," doesn't by any number of analogies explain how consciousness has arisen from matter. Hofstadter very briefly says that DNA uses the same "Godel Trick" in its self-replication process, but then he stops short and returns to the nether world of metaphors and life experiences. I do feel that I gained a better conceptual understanding of the notion of "I," but here Godel's theorem was of no help.

The second problem I had with this book is the writing. He simply leaves out too much scientific information for the reader to feel confident in the many analogies he offers. By knowing a bit of evolution, formal logic, and Daniel Dennett's related positions, I could make much more sense of the book than what Hofstadter was giving me. Hofstadter may not be a "greedy reductionist" in fact, but he sure is in his writing.

The final problem I had with this books is the scope. At the end of the book, the author rushes to tidy up several problems of interest to the field of philosophy, from the old problem of free will to the recent fad of zombies. This seems stretched and out of place. He then extends himself to political topics such as capital punishment, war, and his grand finale, compassion, which I found completely gratuitous. He seems to think that once one adopts his view of consciousness, ethical values and political stances should fall out almost trivially. They don't. Unfortunately, these are probably the issues closest to Hofstadter's heart, and it pains me to see him gamble on such high chances of disagreement before the book is set down. I much rather see these in different books, say a popular science book and an autobiography. A popular science book needs to relate and convince, while an autobiography need only relate. By reaching so far as to claim, for example, that musical taste (e.g. Bach or Tupac) may be a measure of how conscious someone is, Hofstadter truly boxes himself into his own world.

Thirty years ago I was blown away by the cleverness of GEB. Twenty-nine years ago I started pondering, "ok, but what's his point" and I had a hard time pinpointing that. Now, 30 years after GEB I pick up Strange Loop and wonder what Hofstadter has learned in the meantime, and I'm disappointed to say that I can't find anything new in this book.

Again, here we have a very smart man thinking aloud, and clearly having thought about matters of "self" and entangledness much longer than the rest of us. And what does it get him?

I read the first couple of chapters, started skipping sections when I was a quarter of the way through this book, and by the halfway point I was just leafing through it, when I got to this. On page 188 there is the crucial question "But Am I Real", and in answer he can not do better than "I think we need some good old-fashioned analogies here to help out". I think this is a cop-out.

Neurology is increasingly showing us that our sense of self is not at all what we think (pretend? hope?) it is. We think our perception of the world is continuous, but it's not: we take pictures and extrapolate between them. Hofstadter is still of the old school, with a sense of the "self" that is almost 19th century. And not only is he stuck where he was 30 years ago, experimental psychology and neurology is about to pass him by, making his observations irrelevant.

His approach to all things meta might be vindicated if he had been able to formalize it somehow, for instance in an AI program that somehow is convincingly "like us". No achievements of this kind are in the book either.

I was really hoping to find some new insights in this book, and I've been disappointed.

The mixed reviews here for Hofstadter's latest work reflect my mixed feelings about it. I am a HUGE fan of GEB - I read it as an impressionable 15 year old and it kick-started my profound interest in the nature of consciousness. So, as you would expect, I was giddy with excitement when I read the enticing blurb of "I am a Strange Loop" in my local bookstore. I bought it immediately. I was expecting something like a sequel to GEB, but it wasn't quite what I expected.

First of all, IAASL is not another GEB. IAASL is much less technical and much less challenging. A good portion of the book is devoted to Godel's theorem, but it is all discussed in very friendly plain English. Of course, this may be seen as a positive to those who do not have a strong mathematical/computer science background.

Second of all, IAASL is very rich in detailed analogies which serve as "intuition pumps". That is, the analogies lay the foundations (in your brain) for an intuitive understanding of some of the more difficult ideas that Hofstadter tries to articulate. Sometimes entire chapters are devoted to these intuition pumps. You may find all these analogies useful, but if you already have strong intuitions that consciousness has a mechanistic explanation, you may feel that the book is very bloated and verbose.

Third, IAASL is part thesis-on-consciousness, part autobiography. If you'd like to know more about Hofstadter and his life, then you may cherish this feature of the book. If you just want a direct discussion on the nature of consciousness, you may find the digressions into personal details a little bit annoying.

So why have I given this book 4 stars? It's because, despite the flaws (which you may not even see as flaws), I believe this is an important book that should be read by anyone who is seriously interested in understanding what consciousness is, and why it exists. In my opinion, Hofstadter's take on these thorny issues is pure genius and deeply enlightening. However, you must read IAASL (possibly multiple times) with an open mind. If you are a dogmatic dualist, then I doubt you will find the book anything but infuriating and insulting.

On the jacket of the book the author asks "Can a self, a soul, a consciousness, an "I" arise from matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here?" I bought this book from a store, and after reading the jacket thought it would be of interest. It wasn't. Wish I could think of something to write about this book that would lend some value ... but there simply isn't anything there!

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 ones Douglas Hofstadter is not quite ready to let go. Scientific realism, for example.

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.

Olly Buxton

The ideas of the book are an interesting extension of what I took away from GEB. Hofstadter's breaking down of the scale of perspective as a defining factor in how we understand phenomena of all kinds is interesting and well done. I also like his notion of the fundamental nature of analogy in all kinds of thought and reasoning, and the chapter on consciousness as a fundamental essence. He is as insightful and enlightening as ever, but I found myself having to wait a little longer for those insights than I'd like.

I haven't read any of Hofstadter's work between GEB and I Am A Strange Loop, so I don't know if those books represent a continuum in styles. In any case, I got the sense that decades of dealing with very enthusiastic people who he felt hadn't quite absorbed his message have taken their toll on Mr. H.

As demanding a read as GEB was, it lead with its ideas, and compensated for its difficulty with enthusiasm and the exciting implications of the material. In this book, he seems to be focusing on making these ideas available to a different audience, or as a kind of un-intimidating rehash for the people who he felt missed the core of his ideas in GEB. In doing so he takes a more coddling, almost apologetic tone, and takes his conversational writing style to greater lengths.

The result is something that I think might make for an interesting conversation, but was a little boring for me to get through as a book. I respect and appreciate his desire to communicate without wallowing in jargon or turning people off with pretentious style, but it distanced me from the material a little.

The ideas in the book are strong and provoking, but they are in a very different vehicle than I expected. I guess I was hoping for something with more of the intensity, or as thrilling a reading experience as GEB, and I found this a little more drawn out and slightly saccharine. Still, this book is full of ideas worth getting to, and his playfulness and sense of analogy make for some fun reading along the way, too.

With this work, Hofstadter is a work away, or perhaps already at the cusp, of a Nobel Prize in Literature, which would number him among an elite list of philosophers with style. In "I am a Strange Loop," Hofstadter presents a work of such varied style that I can hardly believe that he is capable of getting his very technical ideas across, as many an author has tried and failed to achieve such stylistic writing; yet Hofstadter is able to convey his technical philosophy, as though it required the style. Hofstadter brilliantly presents his ideas as analogies, metaphors, and, he goes a step further, by laying himself and his ideas completely open, in anecdotal form. On this latter point, I have never read a work of science where I felt the warmth of the author, and felt touched. Under the guise that he presents life stories from his own life because "this is the only one I know," what Hofstadter achieves is something that autobiographies often fail at, namely, giving the reader a taste of the author's "soul"; and this particular "(big) soul" is one is imbued with mathematical curiosity and physics-minded approaches to problems. In saying all of this, I wish to express the absolute joy I had in reading Hofstadter's philosophical and scientific views, both in terms of content and stylistic presentation, which, I assure you, you have never encountered, even in "G'del, Escher, and Bach."

The accessibility of this book is phenomenal, too. The chapters are broken up into compartmentalized subsections. On top of that, Hofstadter thoroughly explains every "heady" idea that he wants to bring into the discussion, but he doesn't do it by breaking things down; he uses metaphors, or some other methods, and builds the idea from the ground up. His prose reads very smoothly, also, a problem for so many (even the best) authors.

I have to comment on the pure philosophical brilliance of Hofstadter. It seems that Daniel Dennett --a remarkable philosophical mind, master of reason, and among my favorite authors-- gets more press than Hofstadter, and I think this book illustrates the scientific creativity that merits Hofstadter should be afforded like treatment. Where Dennett says "consciousness is an Indian magic rope trick," Hofstadter goes further, filling in the details, which is courageous --here, even Dennett treads carefully, as a wise philosopher must. In this sense, Hofstadter's work is as much swashbuckling as it is an aesthetic masterpiece, well worthy of at least some jealousy and applause from the philosophical and scientific communities.

Overall, without going into the actual details of the book, I found the loose ends that Hofstadter tied off (from "Godel, Escher, and Bach") to be the epitome of creativity. (I was, indeed, one of those unfortunate individuals that missed some of the points that Hofstadter was trying to make in this book's introduction and the new edition of GEB's preface.) All things considered, I expect that this book will be looked back upon as a classic.

Hofstadter wrote this book to expound on the ideas in Goedel, Escher, Bach, and that's exactly what this book does. It is full of new thought experiments and new examples of the same concepts that are in Goedel, Escher, Bach but there aren't many new ideas that weren't included in GEB.

The book is classic Hofstadter, and if you liked his previous books, then you will enjoy this one as well. I was left feeling a little disappointed due to the lack of fundamentally new material so many years later after the publication of GEB. Additionally, while the wordplay and intellectual games are often fun, sometimes they can make his more abstract points just more difficult to follow. Sometimes you're in the mood to follow a complex analogy through a fantasy example, and sometimes you're just not.

Don't get the wrong idea - this is a great book. My rating reflects my assessment of this book relative to Hofstadter's other work. Decent, but maybe not up to the (admittedly high) standard he has set for himself.

This is a very important book. It's by far, the most sincere, straightforward book you can find on the 'strange loop' issue, which I think is a central subject of any future science, and even society.

In this book you can find Douglas Hofstadter thoughts and also sincere expressions about his life. As I already knew the themes on the book, I've read other Douglas books, and I program computers, I can't really know if this is understandable for anyone, but I am sure it's enough clear to give insight to anyone really interested, as for me reading this book, gives me immediate empathy so I found myself rethinking over life itself, and that's more then I could ask to a book.

This book does a good job of explaining some very complex theories in a way the an average person can understand and get something out of. It's not quite on the level of Godel Escher Bach complexity wise, nor is it intended to be. In fact Hofstader says one of the reasons he wrote this book is that a lot of people who enjoyed GEB did not get the fundamental message of it.

Godel Escher Bach is a hard slog for the average person. I picked GEB up and put it down several times before reading this book. Reading and understanding I Am a Strange Loop has given me the motivation I need to complete GEB. Now I'm nearly finished with GEB, and I have a much better understanding of what is being illustrated.

The book can be a little tedious in spots, but it is necessary to get the message across. Of course, the message is complex enought that I cannot explain it in a short review. It does require reading the entire book, and it can change how you think.

The reason I rate this book 5 stars is because it makes the very important underpinnings of GEB much more accessible to a wider range of people. This is a very hard thing to do, but the author did a wonderful job of it.

Douglas Hofstadter fans will find this book fun and interesting to read. Although many of the GED ideas have been reshashed in this book but it includes some new learnings and evolution in thinking that the writer has gone through in last 30 years.

You may find the book using a bit to many analogies, but you should expect that from the writer of fluid concepts and creative analogies. Once again Hofstadter's description of Godel's incompleteness theorem is one of the best written explanation for non mathematicians.

Book maintains its focus on explanation of conciousness and overall does a decent job in making its point.

Shadman

When I received Hofstadter's book I Am a Strange Loopand read the title I immediately thought, "how obvious!" I hold a doctorate in library and information science and so have considerable experience with computers. I hold several masters degrees in philosophy, sociology, and education and so have given some thought to the human mind and to many documents that try to link the workings of the mind and the workings of the of computer. My hobby is physics, especially the quantum kind, so I know a bit about how strange the universe is. This strange loop that Hofstadter discusses rests on the insights of people who worked out systems theory, feedback, and other such systems. As I began reading the book I became frustrated by his constant references to rather childish experiments like the endless reflections in facing mirrors (I really loved to get a haircut when I was a child because the barbershop had facing walls that were mirrors) and the result of pointing a t.v. camera at a television set. Why spend hours working with such phenomena? Nonetheless, I think there is some value in reading the book if only to give one's self the opportunity to think seriously about self and consciousness and how real or unreal the world appears to be. I was disappointed that Hofstadter mentioned Descartes only once (page 267) and Hindu thought not at all. Both of those could have made the book much richer. I felt that he sensed that he was just missing the mark in the book and that his frustration revealed itself as the pages moved on. It is much like he has a very powerful vision but can't quite make it clear for others. That may be a limitation of his writing and his teaching might be much richer. Read the book if you'd like to spend some time thinking about self and reality, but do not be surprised if you come away feeling a little less than fulfilled.

This book was a compelling read for me since: it is very new at this time; it investigates the origin of consciousness; and it seemed to have less scientific or religious fervor behind it. Plus the author has won a Pulitzer and seems to be a well respected professor teaching this topic. Having read it, I find Hofstadter to be a master at using analogy to elicit deep insight into every topic he presents. And he writes from his heart. You will learn much about the man behind the words. Which shows he is fully accountable for any bias or personal perspectives he may have. Although he clearly expresses his hope that you will share in his perceptions. I surely do.

Is the mind a separate entity from the body? If not, then where does it come from? These questions are not immediately apparent but ultimately they are the questions he has written this book to address. The entire first half is spent introducing the reader to some background information that is presented in seemingly random fashion. But expressed in an entertaining, beautifully descriptive and informative way.

There are many examples he uses to show the occurance of loops in everyday life. He starts with simple ones, like the toilet flush valve loop. Then more identifiable ones like looking into parallel mirrors which create what seems to be a corridor of forever repeating images. Or a microphone's feedback squeal when placed too close to the speaker. My favorite was his experiments with a camcorder pointed at the monitor. The crux of this background knowledge is his presentation of the work of Gödel - the only part of the book I found difficult to fathom. But this example shows how even mathematics creates loops, and has the incredible consequence of rendering logic inconclusive.

This background information provides a perspective of thought that serves to show that the mind actually creates itself! He proposes that the mind does not exist until it becomes self aware. Before that, we are just unconscious beings on the level of base animals. His ideas about the levels of mindfullness of animals and even insects is also quite interesting to me, since it is something that most of us have considered but rarely speak about. His compassion has prompted him to become a vegetarian, yet interestingly, he has absolutely no respect for mosquitos!

But then he goes on to explain how our consciousness evolves as it experiences itself, and the selfs of others. Adding another wrinkle to his theory to shows that there is cross-talk between 'souls' and that seeing others is key to seeing ourselves. He brings up quite a few other interesting topics and perspectives that explain his reasoning, all of which he presents with great skill.

As you read this, without the tremendous insight of Hofstader, I don't expect you to take my word for it. And of course, I wouldn't have either, before reading this book. But perhaps, if you read it, you will learn something about yourself that right now, seems absolutely impossible.

I find that I have to read Hofstadter at least twice. The first time is for the pleasure of the language and the elegance of the book itself. Certainly in "Marot" this was the case; more so than with GEB where the physical construction of the book was less important. That first read of "Loop" brought a smile at the familiar tropes of typesetting that Hofstadter uses to inform the reader that he is really serious about each word, even when that word seems to lilt and jump off the page.

The next read is slower and more contemplative, following Hofstadter as he investigates "thought" while understanding his own thoughts. This is the most fun of all, because Hofstadter's brain is a great place to visit and he is unstinting in allowing us a window into it.

I ordered this book when I first learned about it in 2006 and endured several delays and promises that it is on the way. I am sure that the delays were because Hofstadter did not find the book to be just quite right yet. It is now.

Bearing in mind the thoughtful critiques already posted--of the verbosity, lack of focus, self-indulgent super cuteness,etc--those of us stymied in the past by DH's dazzling expertise in matters for which we have absolutely no clue, must rejoice simply because we can understand great gloopy chunks of what he has to say. If, at the close, we feel let down by what seems an inadvertent, certainly a non-malicious, bait-and-switch, it's been a fascinating partial revelation of The Soft Underbelly of Hofstadter, erse solid man. ( DH never actually serves up a nicely garnished Soul-on-a-platter, but rather simply flutters and flourishes under our noses, like a conjuring waiter in a restaurant whose kitchen is totally virtual, the world's longest menu.)

It's fitting that Hofstadter returns to the familiar theme of self-referential loops, and includes his own life story as the isomorphism we are asked to consider as we ponder self-reference. The thrust of the book is much the same as Godel, Escher, Bach. While interesting, challenging, and informative at times, all too often this book is overly-repetitive. Many of the attempts at whimsy fall flat and detract from the message (unlike GEB where the whimsical digressions were entertaining and brought a real joy to the reading).

Fittingly, Hofstadter appears to have drawn conclusions about how minds work, and tries to push this meaning through onto the reader by example, fancy, and imagined scenarios. The trouble here is that one can imagine other scenarios that can ring just as likely as the author's. A good example of this is his thought experiment of a world where twins are viewed as a single "self". While it is fun to ponder this universe, one can ponder multiple other outcomes and can reach very different conclusions about what is a "self".

While the process of such pondering is good (and is the work of philosophy), Hofstadter reaches firm conclusions about what he purports can't be known. He lambasts Bertrand Russell for his attempts to formalize knowledge, yet he comes across himself as some purveyor of truth about the self. This makes for a rather strange loop, indeed.

Here's a true statement that isn't self-referential: Cognitive science is not science. The latter makes well founded strides, however small, in the direction of increasing our understanding of nature and its phenomena, most difficult among those being intelligence and consciousness. Whereas, cognitive science is the practice of constructing arguments sufficiently florid or persuasive, exuberant or mysteriously hinting at truth behind the loquacious fog, so as to persuade the reader of a personal viewpoint. When such arguments reach a level of bloviation sufficient to secure a tenured professorship, that accomplishment clears the path toward endlessly continuing the same.

Readers should expect more. Or at least, we expect that blather should not masquerade behind waves of scientific terminology designed to fool the unwary reader into believing that they're reading a scientific text. Or, that the writer bears scientific credentials.

Hofstadter is famous for GEB, which I read as a student. GEB was a precocious and masterful piece of writing that hinted, from the mind of one unfocused student to another, at great truths. In my unstructured mind, it hinted and stimulated, but left me unsatisfied. Hofstadter himself writes in the preface to "Strange Loop" that while GEB was widely read, its central thesis seems not to have been apprehended. That's because it has no central thesis, and it relies upon the reader to take away a set of impressions that are as variable as the readers themselves. To remedy this, Hofstadter wrote "Strange Loop" in part to restate his central thesis more concisely and clearly. In this he has succeeded! It is even more clear than before that he has nothing to contribute to our understanding of mind, consciousness, intelligence, or the processes behind them.

Each individual chapter takes a small piece of a disjointed tale, and at face value each chapter seems to be an interesting tidbit of writing. Try weaving them together, and you will find that the fabric simply disintegrates. It's the kind of writing that can make one say "Cool man, that's awesome" provided the reader is sufficiently stoned, but that's about all it has.

The book made a generous impact on me and I recommend its reading to anyone. The book is about consciousness and aims to explain what is the human "I". Or, what is a soul. Before I opened Hofstadter's book I often said "What is meant by a soul?", "What is that soul everybody are talking about?". After I closed Hofstadter's book, I understood indeed, at least partially, what this vague concept can mean. Best of all, Hofstadter's notion of soul is in harmony with both the scientific world view and most soul-discussions out there. Other important mind-boggling questions that I had and that have been given a great chance to be answered (and some of them answered indeed) include those that are listed here.

The author of the book carefully builds analogies after analogies, examples after examples of a concept that he names "a strange loop". The claim is that "I" is a strange loop, as the title of the book suggests. The loop originates in self-reference and self-representation. That is, a human being's symbol and representation repertoire is so rich that it can form a symbol, a representation of itself. Accurate that representation need not be, but almost in every thought it is present. "I remember", "I remember remembering", "I am here", "I remember I was here" and so on. The book is not about "I" as word referring to the physical system of our body, it is about the word "I" which refers to our consciousness, our mental activity, our "inner light", our soul. The author explains via analogies and real and artificial examples, where does this "I" come from, why it feels like being "somewhere" and being us. One delightful (artificial) example is a world in which pairs of persons (which Hofstadter calls pairsons) develope common identities. I hesitated first whether this is a fair analogy, unless... I realized that our brains are formed from two halves which are quite isolated, distinct "brains" with many different functions even.

The language of the book is marvellous, it is pleasant to read. Sometimes (only) Hofstadter is a bit too down-to-Earth with his endless lists of concrete special cases of abstract concepts. They do make the book easier to read for many people, I suppose, but my mathematically adjusted brain would be happy with shorter lists as well.

The book includes a popular exposition of the Gödel's incompleteness theorem which is one of the best popular expositions of a mathematical theorem I know. It is endowed in the context of the book however, so those who are interested in reading only that part of the book (hopefully not many) will experience some deviations from the main subject. As I already knew a big deal about Gödel's theorem, I might be a bad judge, but I believe that if the reader is careful and thoughtful, she (or he) will get a good picture of what is going on in Gödel's ideas.

It is fascinating how deeply Hofstadter is able to analyse entities which are so meagerly explored (human cognition and human brain) and partly the cost that has to be paid is the lack of scientific evidence or a clear-cut scientific framework which could suggest meaningful experiments... so far!

So... if you want to know more... go and read the book

Hofstadter hooked me in the beginning by reviewing the ways that humans are superior to other forms of life and suggesting there may be a secular parallel to the concept of the soul. Having studied the mind from psychology at some depth, I agree that the human mind is wonderous indeed and deserves a special place in the universe. I knew that already but it was nice to be reminded. "Thanks for the compliment, Dougie". So I've taken a page of notes on this book, not so much for what he is claiming but because of the implications of his ideas.

First to address the ideas I found interesting or enlightening.

"Abstraction Ceiling" meaning one can only comprehend concepts up to a certain degree of abstraction. This reminded me of my struggles with calculus and also with music. It also explains why guys like Hofstadter like to play in fields of abstraction.

"Pattern Recognition", a term I've used often in psychology to describe a basic perceptual skill, particularly developed in humans but present in all life, and in CS as well.

"Recursion", a subject central to your profession, rarely mentioned in psychology. I think this idea, going back to GEB, has great merit in explaining evolution, how we learn, how our culture evolves, how DNA drives life. It may not be the only requirement for life but it is one of the fundamental ones. I think this also explains how political/religious beliefs are built on a scaffold of elemental premises and emotions and why it is so hard for someone to change those beliefs without challenging the whole house of cards.

"Identity Merging", the idea that thru communication, humans can perceive some of what another does and can in extreme examples assume another's identity, becoming that person. I'm reminded of actors like Merril Streep who make you believe she is anyone she wants to play. It also includes such phenomena as mass hysteria. But more important, our language and communication allow us to live beyond our means, beyond the here and now, beyond our time in history. Our biology is our hardware; our culture is the software. As we share more and more of our software, a change is taking place in human life. A change being resisted by every parochial interest, including myself. It's hard to imagine a future where everything is accessible, but the opportunity appears unavoidable. I guess the scariest part is that we are tinkering with the hardware. I hope we keep enough of the prototypes around in case we screw up the genome.

AI and evolution. He doesn't address this exactly but it's hiding between the lines. In fact I think Hoftadter has missed a big piece of his story. Perhaps he's taking it for granted. I can't help thinking that he is laying a foundation for the next quantum leap of evolution to the next species of supra-human. If the soul is not a spiritual entity but a phenomenon (or illusion) born of mental processes, then the artificial intelligence can become a he or she (not an it). In fact male/female components of our species have been so successful; so why not expand that in the next species to he, she, be, che, etc. Reproduction will no longer be biological but cultural for the AI. But how to motivate? Is the search for higher abstract knowledge sufficient to drive a species? Is survival the only true motive? If the next species rubs us out, will that be so bad? Or will they need us for something like we need cows.

Life itself and mathematics. Again, Hofstadter is missing a big story here. He has spent a lot of time extolling the mysteries of number theory (quite beyond my abstract ceiling, I'm afraid). But I'm able to understand that there are certain regularities that show up in math that one might call laws and which point to predestined outcomes. This is sounding a lot like god. If you believe that number theory is not just frivolous speculations, then there are laws like gravity which may direct the flow of evolution, past and subsequent life. This recursive process that began with nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, etc and ended up with human consciousness is the definition of life itself.

So now for my critique. Except for all I've said above, I find his book frivolous. His points are highly speculative, based on "thought experiments". Putting number theory, cybernetics, human mental processes and the soul in the same bag may be mixing apples and oranges. They may have nothing to do with each other; unless they do. I'm very disappointed in his research. He seems to do all his research in his own brain, with reference to a couple of his friends. There is a huge body of research in psychology on consciousness and self-consciousness and he hasn't read any of it. He has very little to say about "the I" or "the self" in spite of it being the subject of the book. Thankfully he has so much to say about everything else. Evolution teaches that the individual is irrelevant. It's the survival of the species. But then the species doesn't have consciousness, or does it? I'm not sold on the importance of self-awareness. Certainly we spend some time thinking about ourselves, perceiving ourselves, thinking about thinking. But I don't think that how we perceive ourselves is so important. How we think about anything is supremely important; thinking about oneself being only a subset of that. And thinking about oneself is going to result in a outcome limited by individual hardware and software. Just like the TV camera pointed at the monitor, there are only predictable outcomes.

"I am a Strange Loop" is like a work of abstract art. It doesn't tell you anything practical but throws up some ideas and allows you to paint your own meaning on the canvas.

This is a book about our brains and mind that is quite thought provoking. However, the book is a frustrating read because it is a combination of philosophy, biography, and some science - the author rambles on about a variety of sublects that are tied to the main theme but he overworks many of them, eg. Godel, video feedback. Basically the author is making the point that our selves, our "I", our consciousness, is a physical phenomenon that takes place in our brain and is a property of the vast complexity of our brain, the way it is constructed, the way it accepts and processes inputs, with an incredible number of feedback loops that keep symbols, ideas, thoughts in continuous motion in our head. I relate to this view.

There are a number of areas where I question his views. He seems to conclude that any machine that is complex enough would also be conscious. I don't think we understand the physical components of consciousness - it would seem to me that we could have an incredibly complex machine that was still not conscious. Secondly, he seems to say that our self, or "I", is distributed across a number of brains - not only do other people have deep thoughts about us in there brains, but a peice of our self is actually in there - I can't buy it. All-in-all I found the book tedious, but it was enlightening and thought provoking enough that I am glad thatI read it. In my desire to better understand the human brain/mind, I believe that I need more science and less philosophy.

Hofstadter seeks to escape from the Cartesian dualism but in the process creates his own. He is first of all a scientist, one who sees in the particles of physics the foundation for everything else. He is of course right about that; nothing escapes from having physical particles in its foundation. But that is not the full story. For from these particles come living entities, reproduction, and information. The methods of thought, the concepts, needed to understand these is a step above that needed to understand physical particles. Biology as a life science concerns a complexity unknown to and unknowable by the concepts and methods of physics.
In a similalr form of transcendence the concepts and methods needed to comprehend the social world and its capacity to create identities concern a complexity beyond that of the life sciences and the physical sciences.
Not seeing this the thoughts Hofstadter uses to comprehend the interaction and even inter-invasion of minds, which he fully describes, even go beyond that of the physical sciences, the life sciences, and even social studies. In fact, one value of "strange loop" is that Hofstadter enters the realm of the humanities, of music and poetry; he becomes a more than adequate artist. He actually enters the minds of his readers and transforms them as he has, by his writing, transformed himself. He hss rediscovered and reconstituted himself and his readers, which is what fine artists do.
Thus he is both a scientific thinker and a creative artist; in this he is more than a dualist. He thinks and writes at four different levels, physical sciences, life sciences, social studies, and the humanities, each of which hasdifferent non-overlapping materials to work with. So he uses different sets of concepts, has different objectives, and writes at different levels of thoughtUpheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions.
Without knowing exactly what he is doing--he is not a philosopher--he establishes these four levels of thought in "strange loop."

In "I Am A Strange Loop," Hofstadter offers some interesting ideas (such as the comparison between Godel's self-referencing formula and the sense of self arising from neurological symbols). I found the discussion of the Incompleteness theorem interesting and enlightening, and the analogies of video feedback and Escher's art illuminating.

However, his expertise does not extend into philosophy of mind, into which he attempts to delve later in the book. His criticisms of qualia were completely off the mark. He attacks a straw-man version of the idea in which qualia are equated to souls, and then on the very same page refers to "perceptual filtering," as though the meaning of the term were a given. "Perceptual filtering," (i.e. distinction of sensory stimuli) is, I think, exactly what many people mean when they discuss qualia!

His section on personal identity also fails abjectly. He refers to Daniel Kolak's book "I Am You," (a much, much more thorough, enjoyable, and convincing read, discussing the possibility that there is only one numerically identical subject) and says that, to him, it makes about as much sense as panpsychism. He then goes on to refer to people as "relatively localized blobs," without giving any criteria for defining personal identity. A 5th grader who had read the back cover of "I Am You" could write a better response.

If you're looking for a good discussion of some mathematical formulas and their application to the study of symbols in the brain, I would recommend this book -- but if you're interested in philosophy of mind and personal identity, you should definitely look elsewhere.

I was excited when this book was published, as I read GEB a few years ago and enjoyed it immensely. Sadly, "Strange Loop" has none of the charm of Hofstadter's first work, and has virtually nothing new to offer. Most of this book is a simple re-hash of ideas and concepts from earlier works. Hofstadter tries to spice up the text with frequent analogies and thought experiments, but these offerings are strained and lack the wit that he has demonstrated in the past. Skip this (lengthy) book and read GEB again.

I have read Hofstadter's classic on Godel, Escher and Bach, but was disappointed by his latest work. Possibly because it is just too difficult to know who "I"really is without a much deeper understanding of our minds which may well be unreachable because we cannot go outside to take a look. However the chapters on Russell's Principia Mathematica and Godel's refutation are very clear and well worth reading.

In the Labyrinth of the mind with Hofstadter and Searle: a review of Douglas Hofstadter's, I am a Strange Loop

Meade Fischer

Those of you who suspect that cognitive science isn't particularly cognitive or scientific; Hofstadter's 2007 book will confirm your suspicions. This rambling and often incoherent work is located on the "science" shelves, but would be better placed in "memoirs."

The title made me think I'd be getting current insights into consciousness, but after he started the book with a dialog he wrote as a teen and followed it up with an account of his conversion to vegetarianism, I began to think he wasn't going to address the subject.
Then when he blasts John Searle for a review of Hofstadter's earlier work, The Mind's I,
the warning lights really went off. The review was concise and clear and didn't warrant offhand dismissal. Perhaps Hofstadter's admitted friendship with artificial intelligence guru Marvin Minsky had something to do with the hostile attitude.

Oddly enough, there are areas of agreement between Searle and Hofstadter, such as a rejection of Cartesian dualism and thinking machines: on page 190 he agrees that Deep Blue, when beating Kasparov at chess, wasn't really thinking.

I found his premise that the "I," that self-consciousness we all experience, is a loop running in the brain. However, he doesn't really dig deeply into what that means in terms of mental states and brain activity. He does go on about symbols in the brain, but that is totally unclear. It sounded to me like little name tags stuck to synapses.

He also failed to address a major issue surrounding the "I," the obvious evolutionary forces that made self-consciousness necessary. We are social animals, and to be such we must read the goals, moods and actions of our group, and then make inferences about projected group behavior. Doing this would, naturally, be pointless if we couldn't also read the same things in ourselves in order to decide if we were with the group, following them, deciding to lead them in another direction or deciding we were in the wrong group.
It is impossible to be a social animal without self reference.

Another puzzling part of the book is the amount of space he spends praising mathematician Kurt Gödel. He devotes one full chapter and a big part of at least two others in what appears to be blatant hero worship. He even dwells on the fact that Gödel's name includes the letters "god." As part of this hero worship, he reduces the work of Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead to nothing more than a springboard for Gödel's 1931 work. The most confusing part of these Gödel pages is that Hofstadter takes a convoluted route to make a connection between Gödel and the premise of his book. I finally had to skip over sections where Gödel's name appeared. That Hofstadter is an admitted failed mathematician might have something to do with this apparent obsession.

Hofstadter's notion that an imperfect copy of one person's mind can be incorporated into another, say a loved one, ignores the fact that the physical experiences, not just mental ones, shape the content of the mind, thus forever leaving each mind virtually isolated. He seems to verge on the "New Age" with these notions.

At times Hofstadter attempts to be literary, but he seems to try too hard, overdoing the extended metaphors to the point where the reader thinks, "just get on with it."

Finally, in this 360 page book, any valuable points he makes about consciousness and self-consciousness can be found in John Searle's 161 page, Mind, Language and Society.
However, Searle is perfectly clear, while Hofstadter leaves the reader confused.

If you're interested in buying this book, you've probably already read it. The first half of it was called Godel, Escher, Bach, and the second half was called The Mind's I. But the amusing dialogues of GEB and the influential essays of The Mind's I are missing, leaving nothing but a dry exposition of Hofstadter's worldview that you probably already know.

I suppose the book would go over better with someone who was new to Hofstadter, but then such a person would still be better off reading Godel, Escher, Bach and making most of this book redundant in the process.

Loved Goedel Escher Bach; utterly disappointed by this new work. Again, Hofstadter uses Goedel's theorem as an (overly abstract) analogy for how tangled mappings "just might" lead to a sense of autobiographical self. Details are missing.

DH gives a poignant and worthwhile story of how we make a coarse-grained internal model for the autobiographical self of those close to us, and that after their death, that rough model can continue to run as software in our brain, giving a kind of fleeting immortality.

That is as close as he gets to making a direct analogy between the mind-body problem and software running on hardware. Software interacts with hardware via A/D converters, serial ports, USB-II, etc. Despite DH's own software expertise, he misses the chance to make explicit how software running on hardware is itself a strange loop, in that the software is a (rather Goedelian) model for the state of the hardware.

Instead we get a vague and irritating "Careenium", with symbols as a high level description of colliding ball bearings. Aunt Hillary was far better.

Since GEB, Hofstadter seems to have read only Dennett and Hofstadter.

No mention of Antonio Damasio's utterly brilliant "The Feeling of What Happens". Summarizing AD barbarically: we map how a change in our external sensory maps is followed by a change in our internal mileau maps; this secondary map constitutes "the feeling of what happens" and is then laid down breath by breath as our (terabyte-huge) autobiographical self. (Much more to it than that.)

No mention of J LeDoux's "Synaptic Self" or "The Emotional Brain", or M Gazzagnia or S Pinker or J McCrone or many others.

No mention of even S Wolfram on software, cellular automata, emergent phenomena, and computational irreducibility, and its tight relevance to free will. No mention of the related fields of self-organizing systems at the edge of chaos.

Summary: the Mind-Body problem, the free will problem, and "the feeling of what happens" have been pushed forward since GEB, but DH seems to have read only himself.

You have certainly enjoyed the sensation of looking into a mirror that itself reflected a mirror, making a tunnel of reflections that went as deep as you could see. The same sort of thing happens when you take a television camera and turn it onto a monitor that is showing what the television camera is taking a picture of. But there is something spooky about such a loop. In fact, when young Doug Hofstadter's family was looking to purchase its first video camera, Hofstadter (showing in youth the sort of interest in self-reference that he would turn into a writing career) wondered what would happen if he showed the camera a monitor that itself showed the camera's own output. He remembers with some shame that he was hesitant to close the loop, as if he were crossing into forbidden territory. So he asked the salesman for permission to do so. "No, no, _no_!" came the reply from the salesman, who obviously shared the same fears, "Don't do _that_ - you'll break the camera." And young Hofstadter, unsure of himself, refrained from the experiment. Afterwards he thought about it on the drive home, and could see no danger to the system, and of course he tried it when they got home. And he tried it again many times; video feedback is one of the themes in Hofstadter's monumental and delightful _Gödel, Escher, Bach_ (known by millions as GEB) from 1979, and it comes back for further discussion (with more advanced hardware) in Hofstadter's new _I Am a Strange Loop_ (Basic Books). As in his other books, Hofstadter has written a deeply personal work, even though he is taking on the eternal philosophical bogey of consciousness, and has written once again with a smoothness and a sense of fun that will entrance even casual readers with no particular interest in philosophy or consciousness or mathematics into deep and rewarding thought.

Hofstadter's theme here is consciousness, or "I" or (and he shuns religious connections to the word) the soul. Humans have consciousness. Dogs seem to have some ability to understand what other dogs (and humans) are feeling, some way of representing themselves and others within their own brains. Goldfish, well that's pretty iffy. Mosquitoes have no capacity for self-knowledge. And go further down that scale. How about the neuron itself? Is there any consciousness there? After all, mosquito neurons aren't really much different from human ones, they are just more numerous and tangled in humans. Further down: DNA molecules - conscious or not? Further: carbon atoms - wait a minute, there's not even the possibility that an inanimate atom could have consciousness. Thus the great paradox, looked at repeatedly from different viewpoints here: inanimate matter, properly organized, yields consciousness. We take it all for granted, but it is all profoundly puzzling. Every human brain working at the symbol level (but very much dependent on neural and chemical foundations) "perceives its very own 'I' as a pusher and a mover, never entertaining for a moment the idea that its star player might merely be a useful shorthand standing for a myriad infinitesimal entities and the invisible chemical transactions taking place among them." The "I" is an illusion, an effective one that has great survival value for its possessors. This could be dense stuff, but Hofstadter's analogies are brilliant, as are many of his puns; he reminds us, "Just as we need our eyes in order to _see_, we need our "I"'s in order to _be_!" Hofstadter is fun to read.

Hofstadter's last book, _Le Ton beau de Marot_, was a long meditation on language and translation, and contained many reflections about his wife Carol, who sadly and suddenly died of a brain tumor in 1993 before she was 43. Carol reappears many times in the current work; it is clear that she and Hofstadter had an unusually deep and affectionate marriage, "one individual with two bodies". He is able to write movingly of what he has learned from the loss, how Carol's mind, her "Carolness" or "Carol-consciousness" has been incorporated into his own "I". He isn't Carol, and carries only an imperfect copy of Carol's soul within his own soul, but he shows how her strange loop has been incorporated into his, and just how strong and loving such an incorporation must be. It is a deeply humanistic vision of empathy, the sort of generous personal insight that shows that though souls might be merely the product of atoms and neurons interacting, might be merely illusory, they can still be grand and fully empathetic. Hofstadter has written another book to increase our wonder over the workings of our wonderworking brains.

You have certainly enjoyed the sensation of looking into a mirror that itself reflected a mirror, making a tunnel of reflections that went as deep as you could see. The same sort of thing happens when you take a television camera and turn it onto a monitor that is showing what the television camera is taking a picture of. But there is something spooky about such a loop. In fact, when young Doug Hofstadter's family was looking to purchase its first video camera, Hofstadter (showing in youth the sort of interest in self-reference that he would turn into a writing career) wondered what would happen if he showed the camera a monitor that itself showed the camera's own output. He remembers with some shame that he was hesitant to close the loop, as if he were crossing into forbidden territory. So he asked the salesman for permission to do so. "No, no, _no_!" came the reply from the salesman, who obviously shared the same fears, "Don't do _that_ - you'll break the camera." And young Hofstadter, unsure of himself, refrained from the experiment. Afterwards he thought about it on the drive home, and could see no danger to the system, and of course he tried it when they got home. And he tried it again many times; video feedback is one of the themes in Hofstadter's monumental and delightful _Gödel, Escher, Bach_ (known by millions as GEB) from 1979, and it comes back for further discussion (with more advanced hardware) in Hofstadter's new _I Am a Strange Loop_ (Basic Books). As in his other books, Hofstadter has written a deeply personal work, even though he is taking on the eternal philosophical bogey of consciousness, and has written once again with a smoothness and a sense of fun that will entrance even casual readers with no particular interest in philosophy or consciousness or mathematics into deep and rewarding thought.

Hofstadter's theme here is consciousness, or "I" or (and he shuns religious connections to the word) the soul. Humans have consciousness. Dogs seem to have some ability to understand what other dogs (and humans) are feeling, some way of representing themselves and others within their own brains. Goldfish, well that's pretty iffy. Mosquitoes have no capacity for self-knowledge. And go further down that scale. How about the neuron itself? Is there any consciousness there? After all, mosquito neurons aren't really much different from human ones, they are just more numerous and tangled in humans. Further down: DNA molecules - conscious or not? Further: carbon atoms - wait a minute, there's not even the possibility that an inanimate atom could have consciousness. Thus the great paradox, looked at repeatedly from different viewpoints here: inanimate matter, properly organized, yields consciousness. We take it all for granted, but it is all profoundly puzzling. Every human brain working at the symbol level (but very much dependent on neural and chemical foundations) "perceives its very own 'I' as a pusher and a mover, never entertaining for a moment the idea that its star player might merely be a useful shorthand standing for a myriad infinitesimal entities and the invisible chemical transactions taking place among them." The "I" is an illusion, an effective one that has great survival value for its possessors. This could be dense stuff, but Hofstadter's analogies are brilliant, as are many of his puns; he reminds us, "Just as we need our eyes in order to _see_, we need our "I"'s in order to _be_!" Hofstadter is fun to read.

Hofstadter's last book, _Le Ton beau de Marot_, was a long meditation on language and translation, and contained many reflections about his wife Carol, who sadly and suddenly died of a brain tumor in 1993 before she was 43. Carol reappears many times in the current work; it is clear that she and Hofstadter had an unusually deep and affectionate marriage, "one individual with two bodies". He is able to write movingly of what he has learned from the loss, how Carol's mind, her "Carolness" or "Carol-consciousness" has been incorporated into his own "I". He isn't Carol, and carries only an imperfect copy of Carol's soul within his own soul, but he shows how her strange loop has been incorporated into his, and just how strong and loving such an incorporation must be. It is a deeply humanistic vision of empathy, the sort of generous personal insight that shows that though souls might be merely the product of atoms and neurons interacting, might be merely illusory, they can still be grand and fully empathetic. Hofstadter has written another book to increase our wonder over the workings of our wonderworking brains.

This book did not turn out to be what I was expecting/wanted, which would have been more about the physical brain than just symbols created by it. There are some pretty interesting ideas expressed in this book, but it could easily be 100 pages and not 400. Very repetitive.

I agree with the most "useful" negative review. I guess I am going to finish this book (at page 260), but more out of annoyance of owning half-read books than any sense of thrill at reading it.

Not horrible.

Year ago, I quite enjoyed Godel, Escher, Bach, so I thought I might like this book. It would have been much better as a 10 or 20 page essay than this long rambling book, as Hofstadter really doesn't have that much to say -- he just has lots of metaphors for the same thing.

One part that bothered me was one of the final chapters where he attempts to dismiss some other philosophical arguments by calling them sacred cows and then claiming he can dispose of them quickly. He argues that the "problem of the inverted spectrum" is especially ludicrous -- that is, how can I know what I perceive as red and call by that name is the same thing that you perceive as red and call by that name. Yet, earlier in the work he went on about how he is moved by Prokofiev's music and his friend was moved moved by Bartok, yet he wasn't moved by Bartok. It strikes me that this is the real and more significant "inverted spectrum" -- clearly some stimulus in the form of music moves him that doesn't move others and vice-versa. It would have been better to explain why we have different responses like this.

Another part I found bothersome was his early claim that his vegetarianism was caused by some sort of sympathetic feelings toward animals because they have some self awareness. After this he has long rambling chapters about how when a person dies, that some of them lives on in their representations within other people's thoughts, and that this is a sort of continued existence. Given this, why not eat animals, but think of them -- they would continue on with existence more than if you hadn't spent the time to think about them while eating them. It strikes me as a silly conflict to extoll sympathies for animals and also feel a continuation of human existence through memories.

I can't recommend this book unless you love long-winded philosophical arguments.

Doug did it again: that's a good thing, because mr. Hofstadter has written some very interesting books in the past. And this one is funny, ssurprising and interesting like his others (Ton beau de Marot, G.E.B).

And sometimes, it's not such a good thing: the repetition, especially in the beginning of the book, the re-introduced stuff about Godel, the somewhat inconsistent left wing-vegeterian-pro-choice pondering he does, abeit with a smile, didn't do much for me. But it sure is a book to help you make "think again". And it gets better, and rather personal, as the pagenumbers go up.

me:-}

Doug Hofstadter is a pleasant fellow, a warm human being, and I think I would enjoy his company a whole lot, while disagreeing with his thinking almost all the time. To start, I'm with Bertrand Russell: once you start playing games with reasonable hypotheses, for example, talking about "sets which are members of themselves" or language that talks about itself, you're abandoning rational systems and entering the world of games, which can be called "making things hard for the fun of it." That's what tennis, team sports, and chess are all about. Philosophy, which claims to be interested in absolute truth, should be more careful.

So I'm with Bertrand Russell, and against Kurt Goedel, and against DH in this. I think this book demonstrates the box canyons you end up in when you play Hofstadter's and Goedel's game. In particular, in this book Doug proves my point; when he tries to explain consciousness he can't do better than "somehow" and "mirabile dictu." He spends time with the conundrum we all encountered in sophomore year of college and finally matured enough to ignore, the epistemological problem: how do I know the world isn't a figment of my imagination? This is another flavor of how does the real world interact with my mind, or what is my mind by which I know the world. Building analogies doesn't help: my favorite reaction to analogies was delivered by a poetry professor. In response to something like "the horizon is a blue tractor," he responded, "no it isn't." In my opinion, when someone uses an analogy to support an argument, he doesn't have a good argument.

This book is a collection of fragments of several books. As philosophy it fails; as memoir it is often interesting, unsatisfyingly incredible (literally) in his discussion of his interaction with his dear friend David Chalmers, warm and human when he talks about his family life and children, and terribly sad when he reports the loss of his wife. But as others have commented, it does not belong in the science section of a book store; perhaps in philosophy, more likely in memoirs or "new age."

I was disappointed upon reading I Am a Strange Loop (IAASL), especially because I enjoyed Gödel Escher Bach (GEB) so immensely. Whereas, with GEB Hofstadter was a Young Turk of sorts, excited about a new idea and approaching it straightforwardly, IAASL is the product of years spent in academia.

Hofstadter begins as an academic would, reviewing the past reception (and misperception, apparently) of GEB, and differing opinions from other academics. These disputes are of almost zero interest to a reader not specifically engaged in this academic field.

Second, Hofstadter aims at rehashing, clarifying, expanding, and enriching his thesis from GEB. This book fails both at providing a clear recounting of his previous ideas and at expanding upon or building upon them in any profound way. His writing this time around is far more academic (as if he were lecturing his graduate students with clever turns of phrase) rather than providing the clear insights of GEB. Of course, he indulges liberally in analogies and metaphors throughout IAASL, much like he did in GEB, but this time around their delivery is far more muddled and their purpose is less apparent, leading to an overall feeling of dissatisfaction.

Third, we are taken on a pseudo-relevant excursion in which Hofstadter ponders the application of his theory to his late wife. His dedication to her is profound. The chapters and musings centering around her are not, however, engaging to someone uninterested in a story of personal or private exploration. They add little to one's understanding of Hofstadter's thesis.

In sum, IAASL is a disappointment. It is not successful as a condensation or abridgment of the GEB thesis. It is not successful as a sequel or expansion to GEB.

If you are tempted to buy this volume, but have not yet read GEB, do not purchase this book. You will not gain an understanding of the GEB thesis from this book, you will merely be lead around circuitously and end up confused. Purchase GEB and ignore this volume. If you have read GEB and are itching to read more of the profound insights and witty dialogs, you will find it short on any new insights and bored by uninspired and frankly unnecessary metaphors.

Why did he write this book? What was his goal? What was I to get from it?

Having read GED more than once, I was looking for some new insights, or at least questions. I finished the book angry at myself for having wasted the time, at the publisher and the writer for wasting trees, but glad it was from the library so my own money wasn't wasted.

I don't recall ever experiencing such growing frustration and disappointment, reading page after page, searching for but finding no substance.

Dougie, you didn't have another book in you after all. The typeface and page layout were great though.

Lhadro

I Am a Strange Loop

It is difficult to believe that this book was not a vanity pressing or that an editor of any kind had offered input. There are so many things wrong with "I Am a Strange Loop" that one hardly knows where to begin criticizing it. To start with, after 363 pages the book ultimately comes up empty. But to reach that vacuum, the reader must trudge through page upon page of cloying and twee descriptions of what Hofstadter claims to be analogies and metaphors. To quote neurologist V. S. Ramachandran, "A metaphor juxtaposes two seemingly unrelated things to highlight certain important aspects of only one of them." What Hofstadter highlights as an important aspect, however, is entirely unsupported by (nor does he refer to) any scientific evidence. Thus, what he asserts to be metaphor is simply fiction. Or to be generous, he has merely offered silly neologisms for concepts that everyone is already familiar with; that other people's expressed thoughts and behaviors can affect the thoughts and behaviors of others, a simple notion that has been taught in social psychology courses for 50 years. When a so-called metaphor is more convoluted and takes much longer to explain than the concept in question, one can be sure that the metaphor is deeply flawed. I challenge any intelligent person to read page 218 without wincing at the cutesy, drawn-out prose. Oh, we get it alright. It is just that the writing is nauseatingly precious.

Having noted the central flaw of the book, what follows are some additional Hofstadterisms that a learned reader will find annoying.

1. The author's vicious attack on philosopher John Searle is unwarranted, misguided, and appears to be motivated by a bad review that Searle might have delivered regarding one of Hofstadter's works. If this is the case, Hofstadter might have had the courage to acknowledge that fact.

2. The author freely uses the term "soul" as if incognizant of the fact that the word has no place in scientific writing. He could have just as easily employed a less confusing and less religiously loaded term such as "consciousness." But one gets the feeling that he is attempting to broaden his reader base by appealing to "new age" fanatics.

3. His casual dismissal of the importance of underlying neural mechanisms that support consciousness is naive in the extreme, especially given the illuminative power that studies in cognitive neuroscience has given us regarding the nature of memory, sensation, emotions, etc. over the last 40 years. As if to pull a fast one on us, Hofstadter voices his contempt of reductionism at the level of subatomic particles (he demonstrates a particular fondness for the term "gluons") instead of considering the appropriate level of reductionism; that of neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, neuronal circuitry, synaptic plasticity involving AMPA and NMDA receptors, etc.

4. Although the author claims to reject dualism, on more that one occasion he reveals his strong support for a mind/body distinction by speaking of consciousness as if it lurks around the brain like a disembodied ghost.

5. His use of the phrase, "my dear reader" at least once per chapter is so anachronistic and patronizing as to induce a gag reflex.

6. The author's protracted allusion to the important findings of Godel proves to be a lengthy non sequitur as it offers absolutely no insight into the nature of consciousness, not even as an analogy. This reviewer wonders why so many self-proclaimed postmodernist philosophers latch on to Godel as a source of inspiration.

7. Why does Hofstadter bore us with the history of his dietary practices over several pages? On what possible grounds does he claim to have insight that allows him to dole out a consciousness quotient on things from atoms to "normal adult humans" along what he calls "the Huneker soul-scale?" This is childish prattle beyond belief.

8. The entire section of the book devoted to the tragic loss of Hofstadter's wife is fraught with potential traps that undermine his own fuzzy hypothesis. He claims, in essence, that his wife's mind/soul/brain is almost identical to his own because he is dead certain that they were "on the same wavelength" for so many years. What if, in fact, she did not express to her husband many of the things she found obnoxious in him, or if she had privately fallen out of love with him, or if she had multiple extramarital affairs, but did not reveal any of this so as to keep the family together. If any this were true (and let's face it, these things happen frequently enough such that no imagination is being stretched here), then his whole (non)theory is blown out of the water.

9. This reviewer has read many books by Daniel C. Dennett. But perhaps the general public has not. Wouldn't it have been appropriate for Hofstadter to have offered a short introduction to Dennett's ideas as a brilliant philosopher instead of referring to him as "Dan" (as in my good buddy Dan)? I would be willing to wager that Dennett would like to distance himself from the mawkish, sentimental unidirectional dialogue that Hofstadter spilled out unto the pages of this most amateurish of books.

This reviewer could continue, but unlike Hofstadter, has the sense to know when to stop. It is regrettable that "I Am a Strange Loop" inhabits the science section at Barnes & Noble Booksellers.

I found that this book is so powerful that I had to stop reading it after the first chapter. It presents a way of being that is most admirable but I am not at the present time in a position to take on yet another way of being. Those readers who are able to look upon these messages in an objective way would be able to handle them as another world view of great interest. I found myself captivated by Hofstadter's world view so could not view them objectively. I found that I had to endorse them and take them on board.

Right now I am taking on a new way of being by studying A Course in Miracles. That clashes with Hofstadter's world view in many ways. Even though each is valid it is not possible to reorganise oneself in two different manners at the same time so one had to be put aside.

Obviously I think that this book is a significant contribution to human existence. For those who are looking for a new way of being so that they can make a significant contribution to human welfare I would recommend this as a basic text.

I was not able to provide a valid star rating because I have not read the whole book.

Every book written by Hofstadter or co-authored by him is sitting on my "bible" shelf -- next to my bed. I've read them all several times over. Being able to get one from the store is so good. I am now homebound and I love the reviews, suggestions, etc. that I get here. Sometimes I feel I'm having my soul cookied. After I bought one book, the next time I checked in there were three suggestions for other books to buy --I already owned them all!

If you have already read and enjoyed Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, then you should read this. Just don't expect GEB 2.

If you have not, then go read that first, then read this.

Sorry, but reading the book I got the feeling that the author is using the word-toolkit to describe the Universe, and is limited then by that toolkit. He seems to exist in a world defined by words. The Universe seems to be a bit more simultaneously and dynamically complex than that, across a scale of entangled detail density that is very hard to even begin to hold in a mind. The best authors and explorers seem to start with the Universe and try to expand the toolkit to express their visions. This is a difficult and untidy process with very different results. What is a symbol? It is never the thing being symbolized, and it is never static. So what is it? I enjoyed the book, but did not agree in many places because of the narrowed and selective causality used. I also tend to consider metaphors to be inherently incorrect attempts to describe.

I picked up this book because I had been reading a lot of Daniel Dennett's work and wanted to broaden my reading.

I felt that the majority of this book was filled with musings, or half finished thoughts. "Oh, this is a new way I thought of to think about our right and left brain. Take it and do with it what you will. Next chapter..."

Except for the lengthy piece about numbers that some mathematician may have thoroughly enjoyed, I found most of his musings unrelated and spacey. If you've read much of this type of philosophy before you may not find much new material here.

Interesting fellow this author.

He has done a good job illuminating the inner clouds of thought rolling around in the brain.

Takes you on an interesting trip. Still a little tough to grasp.

I thoroughly enjoyed Hofstadter's book, Godel, Escher, Bach and was hoping for more of the same type of insight in this book. The author comes across as a very likeable person, but alas I did not find anything deep or profound in this book.

I also disagree with the author's assertion that negation is not an essential part of consciousness. It is true that there can be self-reference without negation, but self-reference is only a part of consciousness. To be conscious is to choose and to choose is to deny one set of possibilites while opting for another. Thus the power of negation must be at the very heart of the "I."

Is there anything more risible than the current state of consciousness studies? Over the past two decades one respected commentator after another has come to grief in trying to explain it. In 'I Am a Strange Loop' Professor Douglas Hofstadter offers a model which is astonishingly devoid of any significant reference to advances in brain science. Instead he offers a notion rooted in philosophical idealism which leads straight to solipsism. What will come next? Strange Attractors?

The horrible fact - Douglas Hofstader's wife died at the sadly young age of 43. All agree that is a rotten tragedy.

The professional result, pretty much, is this book. I think the most kindly way to describe it is: Hofstader is such a genius, that we can happily, cheerfully, let him get away with writing something like "Strange Loop" now and again.

The exact analogy from rock music is those "incredibly indulgent" albums from bands like Pink Floyd (what was it .. "Ummadawn" or something??!)

So, that's it. IF DH is reading this, we all love you deeply, and hope you get back to thinking straight ASAP!!

Dear Doug,

I have been reading your book "I Am A Strange Loop".

I bought the book on the store, it arrived well-packaged, as is usual with the store books.

Sorry, I got interrupted here. My wife has just handed me a framed version of

[Interrupted again here

___[Interrupted yet again here

______[I have to stop completely]

___]

]

I will start again later. I don't think I can carry on now. Perhaps I can.

I have just got up to the bit in Chapter 3, where you mention the number 641. I love [6 lines deleted] Gauss.

My wife went out of the room a few minutes ago.

Anyway, the book had a dust jacket when it arrived. I detest dust jackets, they make the book more difficult to hold. I took the dust jacket off and ripped it in half. Possibly ripping that picture of you in half. I felt a pang of guilt as I did that. But, what is one more pang in a world of pangs?

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that I have been reading the book laying on my back, on a bed.

The corners of the cover are very sharp. You could consider making the corners of your next book rounded. And, perhaps, the corners of the pages, too.

[Added much later] I have now guillotined off the offending corners.

[Added a little earlier] I have now realised that it is impossible for me to write an the store review of this book.

I have read the first two chapters of this amazingly profound book and am sure to re-read it again and again. The metaphors, especially ~synonyms that Douglas talks so eloquently about are the mystery. The miracle is that we can decipher it!

I think a poemi-ita that came to me sometime ago is something akin...

Spheres caged in a Sphere: An allegory for research

Research always seeks to excavate the roots of a problem to expose the hidden and the unknown by the light of rational thought and construct. Invariably, this is a deep process in which we seek to expand the limitations of human frailties, both physical and mental.

We have achieved phenomenal progress in understanding the world. Not only can we now explain and model fundamental processes of the physical world; we can also predict the behavior of moderately complex systems.

Our method of unraveling the secrets of the space-time and even nature has been wonderfully reductionist. The success of the method has been beyond one's imagination and has resulted in many small new worlds of knowledge.

In these small new worlds (Spheres) immediate and local knowledge and understanding can explain everything or nearly everything. In each of these worlds a perceptible boundary exists which needs to be transcended so that the Spheres can add up to a universe (Sphere).

The allegorical tale of Spheres caged in a Sphere begins from this dilemma: Can the understanding of parts make the whole fathomable?

Spheres, those little universes have no spark that is not known.
We have known them all, in their splendor and in their static indolence.
We have fret over the end of knowledge and the end of the world.

But, now the whole beckons:

My friends, the Sphere, the One (or the many ones) has caged these
spheres (universes) in its belly and once again there is a pale color of
darkness around our cups of wisdom.

Our spheres don't unmask the Sphere - they don't add, multiply upto the Sphere.
We have the void of the interstices to deal with and an undefined boundary of
the new world to contend with.

The Sphere is elusive. Despite our efforts that have been successful in some
dimension, we are still poor and cannot see the light at the end of the
tunnel of its never-ending knowledge.

We must try to chart out the path of the Sphere as it moves
in the new (and last) heavens as only then can we discover if there
is any hope in this murderous little world of ours.

Will we be able to persevere and try to grasp the ineffable? One hopes not.

As a gift for my son,who's studies were interrupted by health problems, this book is encouraging his curiosity to become active and excited. Just what he needed. What a well written examination of possibilities. Thank You.

"It might justly be asked what importance Gödel's proof has for our work. For a piece of mathematics cannot solve problems of the sort that trouble us.--The answer is that the situation, into which such a proof brings us, is of interest to us. 'What are we to say now?'--That is our theme. However queer it sounds, my task as far as concerns Gödel's proof seems merely to consist in making clear what such a proposition as: `Suppose this could be proved' means in mathematics."
Wittgenstein "Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics"
p337(1956) (written in 1937).

"My theorems only show that the MECHANIZATION of mathematics, ie., the elimination of the mind and of ABSTRACT entities, is impossible, if one wants to have a satisfactory foundation and system of mathematics. I have not proved that there are mathematical questions that are undecidable for the human mind, but only that there is no MACHINE (or BLIND FORMALISM) that can decide all number-theoretic questions, (even of a very special kind)....It is not the structure itself of the deductive systems which is being threatened with a brakedown, but only a certain INTERPRETATION of it, namely its interpretation as a blind formalism."
Gödel "Collected Works" Vol 5, p 176-177.(2003)

"Superstition is nothing but belief in the causal nexus." Wittgenstein TLP 5.1361

"Now if it is not the causal connections which we are concerned with, then the activities of the mind lie open before us." Wittgenstein "The Blue Book" p6 (1933)

"We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course, there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer." Wittgenstein TLP 6.52 (1922)

I have read some 50 reviews of ISL and none of them provide a satisfying framework, so I will try to give novel comments that will be useful, not only for this book but for any book in the behavioral sciences (which can include ANY book, if one grasps the ramifications).

Like his classic Godel, Escher, Bach: the Eternal Golden Braid, and many of his other writings, this book by Hofstadter (H) tries to find correlations or connections or analogies that shed light on consciousness and all of human experience. As in GEB, he spends a great deal of time explaining and drawing analogies with the famous "incompleteness" theorems of Godel, the "recursive" art of Escher and the "paradoxes" of language (though, as with most people, he does not see the need for quotes, and this is the core of the problem). The idea is that their seemingly bizarre consequences are due to "strange loops" and that such loops are in some way operative in our brain. In particular, they may "give rise" to our self, which he seems roughly to equate with consciousness and thinking. As with everyone, when he starts to talk about how his mind works, he goes seriously astray. I suggest that it is in finding the reasons for this that the interest in this book, and most commentary on behavior, lies.

I will contrast the ideas of ISL with those of the philosopher (armchair psychologist) Ludwig Wittgenstein (W), whose commentaries from 1912 to 1951, have never been surpassed for their depth and clarity. He is an unacknowledged pioneer in evolutionary psychology (EP) and developer of the modern concept of intentionality.
W clearly and repeatedly noted the underdetermination of all our concepts. Nowadays this is commonly called the problem of combinatorial explosion and often pointed to by evolutionary psychologists as compelling evidence for innateness, unaware that W anticipated them by over 50 years.

W noted that the fundamental problem in philosophy is that we do not see our automatic innate mental processes. He gave many illustrations (one can regard the entire 20,000 pages of his nachlass as an illustration), some of them for words like "is" and "this", and noted that all the really basic issues usually slip by without comment. A major point which he developed was that nearly all of our intentionality ( roughly, our evolutionary psychology (EP), rationality or personality) is invisible to us and such parts as enter our consciousness are largely epiphenomenal (ie, irrelevant to our behavior). The fact that nobody can describe their mental processes in any satisfying way, that this is universal , that these processes are rapid and automatic and very complex, tells us that they are part of the "hidden" cognitive modules (templates or inference engines) that have been gradually fixed in animal DNA over more than 500 million years.

It never crosses Hofstadter's mind that both "strange" and "loop" are out of context and lack any clear sense (likewise for "I", "consciousness", "reality", "paradox", "recursive", "self referential", etc). H does not see the "strangest loop" of all--that we use our consciousness, self and will to deny themselves!

Though H does not tell you, Godel's theorems are logically equivalent to Turing's "incompleteness" solution of the famous halting problem for computers performing some arbitrary calculation. He spends a lot of time explaining Godel's original proof, but fails to mention that others subsequently found vastly shorter and simpler proofs of "incompleteness" in math and related concepts. The one he does briefly mention is that of contemporary mathematician Gregory Chaitin--an originator with Kolmogorov and others of Algorithmic Information Theory-- who has shown that such "incompleteness" or "randomness" (Chaitin's term-- though this is another game), is much more extensive than long thought, but does not tell you that both Godel's and Turing's results are corollaries to Chaitin's theorems and an instance of "algorithmic randomness". You should refer to Chaitin's recent writings such as "The Omega Number(2005)."

It was shown quite convincingly by Wittgenstein in the 1930's (ie, shortly after Godel's proof) that the best way to look at this situation is as a typical language game. "Gödel's proposition, which asserts something about itself, does not mention itself" and "Could it be said: Gödel says that one must also be able to trust a mathematical proof when one wants to conceive it practically, as the proof that the propositional pattern can be constructed according to the rules of proof? Or: a mathematical proposition must be capable of being conceived as a proposition of a geometry which is actually applicable to itself. And if one does this it comes out that in certain cases it is not possible to rely on a proof." (RFM p336). These remarks barely give a hint at the depth of W's insights into mathematical intentionality, which began with his first writings in 1912, but was most evident in his writings in the 30's and 40's.

W lectured on these issues in the 1930's and this has been documented in several of his books. There are further comments in German in his nachlass (some of it formerly available only on a $1000 cdrom but now, like nearly all his works, on p2p). Canadian philosopher Victor Rodych has recently written two articles on W and Godel in the journal Erkenntnis and 4 others on W and math, which I believe constitute a definitive summary of W and the foundations of math. It lays to rest the previously popular notion that W did not understand incompleteness (and much else concerning the psychology of math). In fact, so far as I can see W is one of very few to this day (and NOT including Godel!) who does.

In any case, it would seem that the fact that Godel's result has had zero impact on math (except to stop people from trying to prove completeness!) should have alerted H to its triviality and the "strangeness" of trying to make it a basis for anything. I suggest that it be regarded as another conceptual game that shows us the boundaries of our psychology. Of course, all of math, physics, and human behavior can usefully be taken this way.

The Eternal Golden Braid is not realized by H to be our innate Evolutionary Psychology, now, 150 years late (ie, since Darwin), becoming a burgeoning field that is fusing psychology, cognitive science, economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, religion and parts, at least, of math, physics and literature. The vast majority of the insights from philosophy, as well as those from quantum physics, probability, meditation, EP , cognitive psychology and psychedelics do not rate even a passing reference here (nor in most philosophical writings of scientists). W made extensive commentaries on Godel and the foundations of mathematics and the mind; is a pioneer in EP (though nobody seems to realize this); the discoverer of the basic outline and functioning of higher order thought and much else, and it is amazing that D&H, after half a century of study, are completely oblivious to the thoughts of the greatest natural psychologist of all time (though they have 6 billion for company).

Neither H nor anyone else has provided a convincing reason to reject Searle's Chinese Room Argument (the most famous article in this field) that computers don't think. And Searle has organized and extended W's work in books such as "Rationality in Action." H, Dennett and countless others in cognitive science and AI are annoyed with Searle because he has destroyed their core philosophy -the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) almost 30 years ago and continues to point this out. The recent article by Shani (Minds and Machines V15, p207-228(2005)) is a nice summary of the situation with references to the excellent work of Bickhard on this issue. Bickhard has also developed a seemingly more realistic theory of mind that uses nonequilibrium thermodynamics, in place of Hofstadter's concepts of intentional psychology used outside the contexts necessary to give them sense. '

Few realize that W again anticipated everyone on these issues with numerous comments on what we now call CTM or AI, and even did thought experiments with persons doing "translations" into Chinese. I had noticed this (and countless other close parallels with Searle's work) when I came upon Diane Proudfoot's paper on W and the Chinese Room in the book "Views into the Chinese Room" (2005). One can also find many gems related to these issues in "Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge 1934(1976). One of the very few who has surveyed W's views on this is Christopher Gefwert, whose excellent book "Wittgenstein on Minds, Machines and Mathematics" (1995), is universally ignored. W realized that the basic issue is very simple---computers lack a psychology. " But a machine surely cannot think!--Is that an empirical statement? No. We only say of a human being and what is like one that it thinks. We also say it of dolls and no doubt of spirits too. Look at the word "to think" as a tool." (PI p113).

Hofstadter follows the common trend and makes much of "paradoxes", which he regards as self references, recursions or loops, but there are many "inconsistencies" in intentional psychology (math, language, perception, art etc) and they have no effect, as our psychology evolved to ignore them.

H, in line with nearly universal practice, refers often to our "beliefs" for "explanations" of behavior, but our innate psychology does not rest on "beliefs" at it is clearly not subject to test or doubt or revision (eg, try to give a sense to "I believe I am reading this review" and mean (ie, find a real use in our normal life for) something different from "I am reading this review"). Before any "explanations"(really just clear descriptions, as W noted) are possible, it has to be clear that the origins of our behavior lie in the axioms of our innate psychology, which are the basis for all understanding, and that philosophy, math, literature, science, and society are their cultural extensions.

There is a vast literature on causes and explanations, so I will only refer to Jeffrey Hershfield's excellent article "Cognitivism and Explanatory Relativity" in Canadian J. of Philosophy V28 p505-26(1998) and to Garfinkel's book "Forms of Explanation" (1981). Or, one can just follow the links between rationality, causality, probability, information, laws of nature, quantum mechanics, determinism, etc. in Wikipedia, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for decades (or, with W's comments in mind, maybe only days) before one realizes he got it right and that we do not get clearer about our psychological "reality" by studying nature. This literature is rapidly fusing with those on epistemology, probability, logic, game theory, behavioral economics, and the philosophy of science, which seem almost completely unknown to H. Perhaps the bottom line with ISL is that scientific laws and explanations are frail and ambiguous extensions of our innate psychology and not, as he would have it, the reverse.

Dennett comically tries to eliminate psychology by including our innate evolved intentionality with the derived intentionality of our cultural creations (ie, thermometers, pc's and airplanes) by noting that it's our genes, and so ultimately nature (ie, the universe), and not we that "really" have intentionality, and so it's all "derived".

Certainly it's dripping with irony that D's most recent book is on the EP of religion, but he cannot see his own materialism as a religion (ie, it's likewise due to innate conceptual biases). Timothy O'Connor has written (Metaphilosophy V36,p436-448(2005)) a superb article on D's Fundamentalist Naturalism, noting that simply accepting the emergence of intentionality is the most reasonable view to take. But pastors D and H read from the Churchland's books and the other bibles of CTM and exhort one and all to recognize their pc's and toaster ovens as sentient beings (or at least they will soon be). Pastor Kurzweil does likewise, but few attend his sermons as he has filled the pews with pc's having voice recognition and speech systems and their chorus of identical synthetic voices shout "Blessed be Turing" after every sentence.

For the grandest reductionist comedy in recent years see Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" which shows us how the universe and all its processes and objects are really just "computers" and "computation". Like nearly everyone who likes to apply this term, he has NO TEST to distinguish a computation from a noncomputation and thus trivially redefines all phenomena as computational (ie, he eliminates psychology by definition).

This brings us again to W who saw that reductionist attempts to base understanding on logic or math or physics were incoherent(they presuppose our psychology). We can only see from the standpoint of our innate psychology, of which they are all extensions. Our psychology is arbitrary only in the sense that one can imagine ways in which it might be different, and this is the point of W inventing odd examples of language games (ie, alternative concepts (grammars) or forms of life). In doing so, we see the boundaries of our psychology. The best discussion I have seen on W's imaginary scenarios is that of Andrew Peach in PI 24:p299-327(2004).

We think that if we just think hard enough or acquire enough facts we can get a view of "reality" that others do not have. W said many times in many ways that we must overcome this craving for "clarity" , the idea of thought underlaid by "crystalline logic", the discovery of which will "explain" our behavior and our world and change our view of what it is to be human.

"The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement.)"PI 107

On his return to philosophy in 1930 he said:

"The wrong conception which I want to object to in this connexion is the following, that we can discover something wholly new. That is a mistake. The truth of the matter is that we have already got everything, and that we have got it actually present; we need not wait for anything. We make our moves in the realm of the grammar of our ordinary language, and this grammar is already there. Thus, we have already got everything and need not wait for the future." (Waismann "Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (1979) p183

and in his Zettel P 312-314

"Here we come up against a remarkable and characteristic phenomenon in philosophical investigation: the difficulty---I might say---is not that of finding the solution but rather that of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it. `We have already said everything.---Not anything that follows from this, no this itself is the solution!"

"This is connected, I believe, with our wrongly expecting an explanation, whereas the solution of the difficulty is a description, if we give it the right place in our considerations. If we dwell upon it, and do not try to get beyond it."

Some might also find it useful to read "Why there is no deductive logic of practical reason" in Searle's "Rationality in Action"(2001). Just substitute his infelicitous phrases "impose conditions of satisfaction on conditions of satisfaction" by "relate mental states to the world by moving muscles--ie talking, writing and doing" and his "mind to world" and "world to mind directions of fit" by "cause originates in the world" and "cause originates in the mind".

This gets us back to my comment on WHY people go astray when they try to "explain" things. Again, this connects intimately with judgements, decision theory, subjective probability, logic, quantum mechanics, uncertainty, information theory, Bayesian reasoning, the Wason test, the Anthropic principle (Bostrum "The Anthropic Principle"(2002)) and behavioral economics, to name a few. Even in his pre-Tractatus writings, Wittgenstein commented that "The idea of causal necessity is not A superstition but the SOURCE of superstition". What is the "cause" of the Big Bang or an electron being at a particular "place" or of "randomness" or chaos or the "law" of gravitation? But there are descriptions which can serve as answers.

Thus, H feels all actions must be caused and "material" and so, with his pal D and the merry band of reductionist materialists, denies will, self and consciousness. D denies that he denies them, but the facts speak for themselves. His book "Consciousness Explained" is commonly referred to as "Consciousness Denied" and was famously reviewed by Searle as "Consciousness Explained Away".

This is especially odd in H's case as he started out a physicist and his father won the Nobel prize in physics so one might think he would be aware of the famous papers of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen and of von Neumann and others in the 20's and 30's, in which they explained how quantum mechanics did not make sense without human consciousness (and a digital abstraction won't do at all). In this same period others including Jeffreys and de Finetti showed that probability only made sense as a subjective (ie, psychological) method. Those interested might start with Ton Sales article in the Handbook of Philosophical Logic 2nd Ed. Vol 9 (2002) since it will also introduce them to this excellent source, now extending to 14 Volumes (the first 9 on p2p).

It is a curious and rarely noticed fact that the severe reductionists first deny psychology, but, in order to account for it (since there is clearly SOMETHING that generates our mental and social life), they are forced into camp with the blank slaters (all of us before we get educated), who ascribe psychology to culture or to very general aspects of our intelligence (ie, our intentionality is learned) as opposed to an innate set of functions. H and D say that self, consciousness, will, etc are illusions--merely "abstract patterns" (the "spirit" or "soul" of the Church of Fundamentalist Naturalism). They believe that our "program" can be digitized and put into computers, which thereby acquire psychology, and that "believing" in "mental phenomena" is just like believing in magic (but our psychology is not composed of beliefs--which are only its extensions-- and nature is magical). I suggest it is critical to see why they never consider that "patterns" (another lovely language game!) in computers are magical or illusory. And, even if we allow that the reductionist program is really coherent and not circular (eg, we are too polite to point out -as do W and Searle and many others--that it has NO TEST for it's most critical assertions and requires the NORMAL functioning of will, self, reality, consciousness etc, to be understood), can we not reasonably say "well Doug and Dan, a rose by any other name smells as sweet!" I don't think reductionists see that even were it true that we could put our mental life in algorithms running in silicon (or-- in Searle's famous example--in a stack of beer cans), we still have the same "hard problem of consciousness": how do mental phenomena emerge from brute matter? If we can make sense out of the idea that the mind or the universe is a computer (ie, can say clearly what counts for and against the idea), what will follow if it is or it isn't?

Emergence of "higher order properties" from "inert matter" (more language games!) is indeed baffling, but it applies to everything in the universe, and not just to psychology. Let us end with the famous first and last sentences of the Tractatus, seen as summarizing his view that the limits of our innate psychology are the limits of our understanding. "The world is everything that is the case." "Concerning that of which we cannot speak, we must remain silent."

For the full review and comprehensive comments on related matters, my collected writings are now available on the store as paperbacks and Kindles
https://www.the store.com/dp/B071P1RP1B
https://www.the store.com/dp/B0711R5LGX
https://www.the store.com/dp/B071HVC7YP

Its absolutely hieroglyphics to me ! I read parts of GEB, but this book lacks both the clarity and the charm that was the virtue in GEB. I fail to see whats the book is aiming for. If you want to buy it, please read it from a library before you decide whether to buy it in first place.