I Am a Strange Loop | Douglas R. Hofstadter | Why I do not exist, you can too!

I Am a Strange Loop | Douglas R. Hofstadter | Brilliant explanation of the mind

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I Am a Strange Loop

	I Am a Strange Loop Douglas R. Hofstadter Basic Books, 2007 - 436 pages average customer review:based on 78 reviews view larger image
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Why I do not exist, you can too!

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.

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Brilliant explanation of the mind

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.

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A sleight of hand to kill off all sleights of hand

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

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Not his best

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.

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Hofstadter reaches out

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.

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