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From the Publisher
Douglas R. Hofstadter's long-awaited return to the themes of Gödel, Escher, Bach -- an original and controversial view of the nature of consciousness and identity.
What do we mean when we say "I"? Can thought arise out of matter? Can a self, a soul, a consciousness, an "I" arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here?
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. Deep down, a human brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles, on a higher level it is a jungle of neurons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call "symbols." The most central and complex symbol in your brain or mine is the one we both call "I." The "I" is the nexus in our brain where the levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down, with symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.
For each human being, this "I" seems to be the realest thing in the world. But how can such 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 all-powerful laws of physics?
These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since Gödel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is the book Hofstadter's many readers have long been waiting for.
About the Author
Douglas R. Hofstadter is College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. His previous books are the Pulitzer Prize winning Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Metamagical Themas, The Mind's I, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, Le Ton Beau de Marot, and Eugene Onegin.
Excerpts
...although what happens on the lower level is responsible for what happens on the higher level, it is nonetheless irrelevant to the higher level. The higher level can blithely ignore the processes on the lower level.
The macroscopic world as experienced by humans is, in short, an intimate mixture ranging from the most predictable events all the way to widly unpredictable ones.
...even the simplest imaginable feedback loop has levels of subtlety and complexity that are seldom given any thought, but that turn out to be rich and full of surprise.
I have been struck by the fact that it is the circularity - the loopiness - of the system that brings these patterns into existence and make them persist.
Suppose we begin with a humble mosquito (...) What kind of representation of the outside world does such a primitive creature have? In other words, what kind of symbol repertoire is housed inside the brain, available for tapping into by perceptual processes?
A spectacular evolutionary gulf opened up at some point as human beings were gradually separating from other primates: their category systems became arbitrarily extensible. Into our mental lives there entered a dramatic quality of open-endedness, an essentially unlimited extensibility, as compared with a very palpable limitedness in other species.
The depth and complexity of human memory is staggeringly rich. Little wonder, then, that when a human being, possessed of such a rich armamentarium of concepts and memories with which to work, turns its attention to itself, as it inevitably must, it produces a self-model that is extraordinarily deep and tangled. That deep and tangled self-model is what "I"-ness is all about.
Trough many types of abstraction and analogy-making and inductive reasoning, and trough many long and tortuous chains of citations of all sorts of authorities (...), we build up an intricate, interlocked set of beliefs as to what exists "out there" - and then, once again, that set of beliefs folds back, inevtiably and seamlessly, to apply to our own selves.
Inevitably, what seems realest to us is what gets activated most often. Our hangnails are incredibly real to us.
We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself.
Is there, then, any geniune strange loop - a paradoxical structure that nonetheless undeniably belongs to the world we live in - or are so-called strange loops always just illusions that merely graze paradox, always just fantasies that merely flirt with paradox, always just bewitching bubbles that inevitably pop when approached too closely?
..is all strange loops were illusions, then we would all be illusions, and that would be a great shame.
Strange loops are shy creatures, and they tend to avoid the ligh of the day.
...there was something in the extremely rich and flexible nature of numbers that had a propensity to let paradoy bloom even in the most arid-seeming of deserts or the most sterilized of granite palaces.
On Gödel: ...his discovery that, thanks to a mapping, full-fledged meaning can suddenly appear in a spot where it was entirely unsuspected...
...analogy has force in proportion to its precision and visibility.
...all meanings come from analogies.
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