I Am a Strange Loop (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Hofstadter—who won a Pulitzer for his 1979 book, Gödel, Escher, Bach—blends a surprising array of disciplines and styles in his continuing rumination on the nature of consciousness. Eschewing the study of biological processes as inadequate to the task, he argues that the phenomenon of self-awareness is best explained by an abstract model based on symbols and self-referential "loops," which, as they accumulate experiences, create high-level consciousness. Theories aside, it's impossible not to experience this book as a tender, remarkably personal and poignant effort to understand the death of his wife from cancer in 1993—and to grasp how consciousness mediates our otherwise ineffable relationships. In the end, Hofstadter's view is deeply philosophical rather than scientific. It's hopeful and romantic as well, as his model allows one consciousness to create and maintain within itself true representations of the essence of another. The book is all Hofstadter—part theory, some of it difficult; part affecting memoir; part inventive thought experiment—presented for the most part with an incorrigible playfulness. And whatever readers' reaction to the underlying arguments for this unique view of consciousness, they will find the model provocative and heroically humane. (Mar.)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Peter D. Kramer

Okay, I think, therefore I am. But who gets to play that game? A newborn? A mosquito? A computer? If my thoughts are elsewhere, am I here or there? When I no longer think as I once did, am I the same person? What composes this "I," molecules or memories?

Questions about the boundaries, location, continuity and constituents of the self stand at the heart of philosophy, but a mathematician and physicist, René Descartes, set the terms of the discussion. Who better to bring us up to date than Douglas Hofstadter? Trained in math and physics, Hofstadter won a 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Gödel, Escher, Bach, a bravura performance linking logic, art and music. He returns now to apply a concept from that book, the strange loop, to the definition of self.

Like consciousness, the strange loop is elusive. When a brilliant author uses one slippery concept to clarify another, the result for the reader can be anxiety. Page after page, we may wonder whether we will reach the limit of our understanding and whether the journey will be worth the effort.

Fortunately, Hofstadter is a gifted raconteur and a master of metaphor. He conjures up a car with a 16-cylinder motor and what the salesman calls Racecar Power®. It's not as if you can get a model that has the engine without the trademark feature. Similarly, Hofstadter writes, "consciousness is not an [added] option" for beings evolved to engage in symbolic thought, recognize patterns, create categories, reason via analogies and wonder about the self. Consciousness is "the upper end of a continuous spectrum of self-perception levels that brains automatically possess as a result of their design."

Hofstadter's strange loop is the feedback loop. Point a video camera at a TV displaying the camera's output, and you will produce a receding corridor of screens. Pixels make up the picture, but our interest is in the image, the tunnel of rectangles. Identity resembles that phenomenon. Never mind the neurons that make up our brain. Our emotions, others' responses and our repeated looks outward to the world and inward to ourselves shape what we call our self. Nor is ours the only loop we contain. We know how our friends see things; our mind houses their perspectives -- it has the formulae for producing their thoughts.

However mechanistic, Hofstadter's account of the self emerges from deep emotion. In 1993, when she was 43, Hofstadter's wife and soul mate, Carol, died suddenly of a brain tumor. Three months into his mourning, Hofstadter initiated a heartfelt correspondence with the philosopher Daniel Dennett. What emerged was Hofstadter's understanding of self as distributed over many minds, a concept that explained how Carol's "personal sense of 'I' " lived on (in "low-resolution fashion") as a "loop" in Hofstadter's consciousness.

I have so far given a superficial account of Hofstadter's position. As his book title indicates, for Hofstadter the self is a strange loop. Strange loops are reflexive and paradoxical, like M.C. Escher's impossible image of right and left hands drawing each other into existence. Hofstadter's example of a real-world strange loop is a key construct in Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem, published in 1931, a proof that any seemingly comprehensive mathematical system will contain true statements that cannot be proven. The theorem is notoriously indigestible.

How elusive is this strange loop? I was a young math buff. Last year, when Discover magazine surveyed authors about science writing that had influenced them, atop my list was a popularization of Gödel's proof by Ernest Nagel and James Newman -- the same book that inspired Hofstadter in his teens. If I am, for that reason, an ideal audience for the strange loop theory, there's good news and bad. I found Hofstadter's explication of Gödel revelatory. There were implications of the proof that I had never appreciated. But then (here's evidence for discontinuity), I no longer quite understand the proof. Nor, given what I do grasp, am I convinced that the entities Gödel conceived are apt analogues of the self.

This difficulty does surprisingly little to diminish Hofstadter's achievement. Philosophers of mind are divided between those who see consciousness as a special quality (like Racecar Power®) and those who see it as irredeemably physical (like neural networks). Hofstadter points to another level at which self might exist, up among the symbols and patterns -- or rather, to various levels on which self exists simultaneously. His conclusions mesh well with those of psychotherapy. We are not selves first and social creatures later. It's through empathy that we develop a rich sense of self. Nor is the self neatly demarcated. We contain multitudes.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 436 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; illustrated edition edition (March 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465030785
• ISBN-13: 978-0465030781
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (91 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #228,307 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

116 of 123 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Another visit to the metaphors of GEB, April 20, 2007

By	Michael J Edelman (Huntington Woods, MI USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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, 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.

145 of 161 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vintage and Original Hofstadter, March 31, 2007

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

148 of 173 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The title says it all..., April 7, 2007

By	The Dilettante "Dilly!" - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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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.