I Am a Strange Loop

After trying to get the people in my life to read GEB for two years, I finally just got them this book so we could have the same conversations about consciousness, existence, individuality, and immortality. The ideas put forward here are not always the easiest to grapple with, but the overall argument and especially the final chapter are life-changing in terms of how I define the self and identity. I am a Strange Loop makes for wonderful discussion too!

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.

I read this book after a friend of mine, who shares my interest in neurophilosophy, recommended it, and I am glad that I did. Hofstadter does a nice job of showing how the complex interactions of neurons at the basic level of the brain can lead to large scale structures which are the cause of consciousness. He terms the former "mentalics" and the latter "thinkodynamics". He then proceeds in the monistic manner of his friend Daniel Dennett to show how the material brain can produce an immaterial consciousness by the incredibly complex interactions of 100 billion neurons, which are capable of forming intricate patterns of feedback loops, and from these loops consciousness emerges. Unfortunately, he starts out by making unfair criticisms of John Searle, who has doubts that a computational system can think. In his famous (or infamous in some circles) Chinese room experiment, he merely points out that syntax, which the machine is very good at, is not the same as semantics. In other words, the poor guy in the Chinese room can translate perfectly following the set of rules, but he does not understand a word of what he translates. Searle's point is valid, and nobody, not even Searle himself, has solved this neurophilosophical dilemma. What I find most interesting about Hofstadter's argument is that he uses Gödel's incompleteness theorem as a basis for his solution. On page 110 he says: "...what was really being explored by Gödel, as well as by many people he had inspired, was the mystery of the human mind and the mechanisms of human thinking." Gödel, in a manner which defies my mathematically impoverished mind, takes Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, which is a set of rigid rules governing logic and arithmetizes it, or, in other words, adds a higher level of meaning and then is able to manipulate this higher level so that self-referential feedback loops can emerge which have the ability to cause further feedback loops. On page 206 Hofstadter summarizes this: "Kurt Gödel .... demonstrated how high-level, emergent, self-referential meanings in a formal mathematical system can have a causal potency just as real as that of the system's rigid, frozen, low-level rules of inference." Even more interesting, at least to me, is that Roger Penrose (The Emperor's New Mind; The Shadows of the Mind; and The Large, the Small and the Human Mind) uses Gödel's theorem to prove the opposite - that no computational system could ever possibly be the basis of thinking. Penrose says that the incompleteness theorem showed that no computational system is complete, and, therefore, cannot be the basis of human thought, which must necessarily be independent and complete in its own world. He stated it this way in The Shadows of the Mind, page vi: "Central to the arguments of Part I, is the famous theorem of Gödel ...... The conclusions are that conscious thinking must indeed involve ingredients that cannot be even simulated adequately by mere computation; s

What is a strange loop? First of all, what is a loop? Hofstadter gives some examples. One is the infinite regression of yourself looking at a mirror in a room where there is another mirror on your back. Or a video camera filming the TV screen to which is connected. What about a "strange" loop? One of the author's examples is Gödel's theorem. Russell and Whitehead designed their theory of types in Principia Mathematica (PM)to avoid the self-referring paradoxes of mathematics such as the set of sets that do not contain themselves or in a more digestible version the barber who in a village shaves those and only those that do not shave themselves. Who shaves the barber? What Gödel discovered through an ingenious code system is that the (in principle meaningless formal) formulas of PM could be mirrored in statements of arithmetic and in this way he managed that PM talked about itself and proved that in PM there are true propositions which are not provable. This means that any axiomatic system rich enough so that it contains the elementary arithmetic (positive integers with addition and multiplication) is not complete. In a similar fashion, when an animal brain grows in complexity such as an adult human brain, the system is capable of self-referral. Hofstadter tells us that this is what self-awareness is about. When you apply reductionist methods in your analysis of the brain and you go down to brain zones, neurons, DNA, atoms, protons and quarks, you don't find any inmaterial essence, no "élan mental". Consciousness is an emergent property that appears in a sufficiently complex system, the way that if you touch the envelopes in a box it feels that in ht middle there is a marble. So, the "I" according to the author, is our more precious hallucination. The book is also a memoir of his personal suffering due to the unexpected death of his wife and his reflections about souls of dead people living, albeit in fragmentary and coarse form, in the brains of other people. "A la Turing", Hofstadter tells us that the human brain is a universal brain, capable of modelling other brains. I must say that I was delighted to read a book about this difficult subject that I could finish and understand. However, there are parts in the book that perhaps need more discussion, as when the author makes a rough ranking of human souls. Apparently he is most interested in two dimensions: the love of music and the generosity (magnanimity means great soul). I do not know how Picasso ranked in music and he certainly was not a very generous person, rather, as many top people in their fields, he was an egocentric. However, for me he ranked high in the soul classification. Another interesting aspect of the book is the references to AI. The self-driving automobiles that crossed the Mojave dessert should have some symbols inside. Hofstadter tells us that intelligence is about patterns. We have symbols, we categorize them and our brain activity is a constant dance of these symb

I am a strange loop, too, and Douglas Hofstadter has written my book! Actually, he has written a much more thorough and comprehensible book than I could, and in such a friendly and personal way that I feel I could call him Doug. Not everyone will feel the same about it as I do. I once worked with a guy who said, "Your brain is like the telephone: you don't have to understand how it works to use it." There are many people like that who have no interest in how this amazing organ gives us our experience of our selves and the world, and they will find nothing of interest here. If scientific explanations of human behavior give you apoplexy, you will probably be unhappy with this book, but maybe it would be good for you anyway. If you believe in "free will," you may find yourself very upset by this book, for as Doug says, "I don't see any room in this complex world for my will to be 'free.'" (p. 340) I don't, either. If you're at all curious about what makes us tick, this book has the answers to some of the most significant questions--not about "wet-ware;" I don't think it mentions "amygdala" even once--but about how it is possible to think, and to think about our thinking. Doug did make me a little nervous in Chapter 3, "The Causal Potency of Patterns." At first I had visions of recipes causing cakes to be made, but in the end he made the point perfectly clear that, "Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time intervals."(p. 41) That was a relief, and from there on it was clear sailing. Even as mathematically challenged as I am, I was able to follow the two chapters on Bertrand Russell and Godel and get the gist of them. I have some niggling little issues here and there, arising, I think, from our cultural differences. While little Dougie's mom was playing Chopin for him in California, little Normie's mom was playing Eddie Arnold for him in Florida, at the opposite end of the intellectual spectrum. While he was practicing piano, my brother and I were making bows and arrows out of sticks and playing Indians. Aside from our similarities in having good brains and sisters whose brains were broken, our lives were vastly different, and I had the feeling while reading the book that he had little appreciation for the impact of his personal history on his values and preferences--he seemed to have little compassion for those whose history might have been less musically and intellectually stimulating. So it's not exactly my book, but it makes ideas that I have struggled with wonderfully clear, and in the process manages to be personable and even entertaining--I laughed out loud more than once. I hope that millions of readers find it equally gratifying and enjoyable.

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, n