I Am A Strange Loop Deals on Douglas Hofstadter

I Am a Strange Loop

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Editorial Reviews

Can thought arise out of matter? Can self, soul, consciousness, “I” arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here?

I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the “strange loop”—a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. The most central and complex symbol in your brain is the one called “I.” The “I” is the nexus in our brain, one of many symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.

How can a mysterious abstraction be real—or is our “I” merely a convenient fiction? Does an “I” exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the laws of physics?

These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter’s first book-length journey into philosophy since Gödel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is a moving and profound inquiry into the nature of mind.

Customer Reviews

Oh Please

Reviewed by Richard Attanasio, 2010-02-28

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."

The Risible State of Consciousness Studies

Reviewed by Michael E. Murray MD, 2009-09-26

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?

In the Labyrinth of the Mind with Hofstadter and Searle

Reviewed by Meade Fischer, 2009-09-25

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.

Infinity, ho!

Reviewed by G. D. Grubbs, 2009-08-31

This book is good in the sense that his major premise has much to commend it. In another sense, his major premise could have been explained in a rather lengthy article in only 36 pages, rather than the 363 pages it takes to explain. Plus, there were a few things I did not particularly care for.

For instance, making a demeaning remark about Bertrand Russell's work because of Kurt Gödel's later work is like talking about how stupid Newton was, because, well, Einstein updated Newton's contribution, except one could not compare Gödel to Einstein by any stretch of the imagination.

Also, the math that Gödel worked on has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness, so he wasted several chapters associating consciousness to mathematical concepts, probably because he really wanted to be a mathematician, and so takes the opportunity to trot out mathematics as if he's the math professor. In the end, it was only a metaphor for the consciousness (as epiphenomenon), so I can hardly see why it merited several chapters of graduate level math. The math of Russell and Gödel has no direct implication for consciousness.

It is perhaps easy to understand how a person could think he had several "selves" inside his head, if that person were one that could actually could think he went on a vacation his friend only told him about, and could actually have an argument with his friend about who went, like Hofstadter. Dementia, anyone?

He seems intent on trying to redefine what consciousness is in the most unusual ways he can come up with, so that he can seem like the most original thinker...so everyone can laud him as being the genius that defined consciousness. Though what he expounds in this loopy book makes sense, I've read much more fruitful eight page articles on consciousness out of Scientific American.

Hofstadter does have some good points about symbols bumping around against each other in the brain, and I do think he is really onto something, but I kept waiting for him to explain what his research team has found. He says he has a research team, and I assume they must do research, but he never explains his research or his findings.

One of the best chapters in the book is chapter 20, which has a sort of Socratic dialogue, expounding the ideas of the book in the clearest language up to that point. I just feel he has shied away from scientific language (other than the Gödelian math escapade) in favor of endless parables.

Life, circle, ellipse and a spring - connected stochastically

Reviewed by Monishv158, 2009-08-31

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.