I Am a Strangel Loop is a scientific discussion on the immortality of the soul. Or perhaps it's a poetic discourse on the physiology of the brain. It floats between a diverse array of ideas that readers will either find fascinating or infuriating.
This book admittedly starts out slow, as many readers have pointed out, so I recommend to start reading on pg. 147, and referring to Index the as needed. For the mathematically inclined, pgs. 125-142 give an amazingly good explanation of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. But pg. 147 is where the big picture ideas that I cared most about really started to start flowing.
Here's my attempt at a condensed summary of his message:
Our ancestors created stories that placed humans in the middle, in between the animals on one side, and the angels on the other. This picture illustrates our dual nature [...] our biological needs and impulses and our less fixed, but potentially stronger social nature. Our biological nature is relatively fixed and unchanging, but our social nature, being relatively new on the scene, is currently much more varied and dynamic.
What is our social nature? What exactly do we want from society? (Of course, we want the needs of our biological nature to be satisfied, but that tells us nothing about the ultimate goals and desires of the social part of our being.) While we've learned much about our biological nature (thanks to Darwin and evolutionary theory), our understanding of our social nature is still largely mystical, based largely on the accumulated wisdom passed on through religion and literature.
I Am a Strange Loop takes the first steps toward formulating a well-defined understanding of our social nature.
That's the ultimate purpose of the book. The specific purpose of the book though is to spell out, in grand fashion, Hofstadter's theory of consciousness: what it is and how it develops.
Think of man 10,000 years ago compared to where he is today. It would have taken biological evolution 10,000,000 years to achieve as much progress. Don't think that I'm talking primarily about technology. Although technological innovation has greatly increased the average individual's capacity for self-expression, technology is only a means to an end, not an end itself. Near universal literacy, the ease of travel, and political freedoms have greatly increased the life possibilities for the modern individual. Shakespeare, Muhammad Ali, J.K. Rowling and countless other lives are the shining achievements of our civilization. Humanity's greatest achievement has always been man himself. (`Man' in the gender-neutral sense of the word, of course.)
What is the source of this relatively rapid progress? What forces are behind this social evolution?
Hofstadter has built a framework for exploring our ever-still-emerging self-consciousness, ultimately the starting point of our social nature, in well-defined terms.
-----Hofstadter's theory of consciousness-----------------------------
A basic definition of `consciousness' is `awareness of one's desires'. Hofstadter believes that our desires ultimately are caused by the interaction of neurons obeying the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics. The catch is that our consciousness, our "I", by its very nature is required to view things differently. Our "I" automatically sees itself as the cause of desires. "I" decides it wants something (say a peanut butter and jelly sandwich), our bodies move about in certain ways, and often that desire is fulfilled (if we have access to a pantry and a refrigerator at least). The cause and effect relationship couldn't be more obvious! And yet, in Hofstadter's view, that first assumption, that "I" decides what it wants, is basically illusory. "I" automatically views things in terms of higher level symbols, in terms of billiard balls and pressure fronts, rather than particles and molecules. But "I" is no more the cause of our desires than a pressure front determines the behavior of individual air molecules (rather than the other way around). "I" automatically turns causality upside down with regards to itself in the world.
So we are left with the question: Does causality start on the small level or the large level? Does the interaction of particles--particles, electrons, and molecules--determine the behavior of our billiard balls, computers, and pressure systems, as science claims they do? Or is science wrong about causation--does causation ultimately start on the symbolic, large level, the level of billiard balls, pressure systems, and "I"s?
Judging from the fact that I'm trusting the technology of laptops, wireless radio signals, and the internet to communicate this review, it's hard to claim that science is wrong. And Hofstadter, as one would expect form the son of a Nobel prize winning physicist, sees no choice but to choose the scientific, particle level as the ultimate source of causation, and claim that "I"ness is ultimately illusory--an extremely convincing, extremely necessary hallucination.
We are tempted to say: "Well maybe it can be both: maybe for non-conscious objects, like billiard balls and pressure systems, causation starts on the small level, but once consciousness kicks in, it is endowed with a causal ability of its own." But this goes against Hofstadter's whole conception of what consciousness is. Consciousness is not made out of some separate, "specially-endowed" material; it is made out of astoundingly complex patterns of the same particles, neurons, and molecules as everything else.
The last two paragraphs of the book, he says:
Pg. 363 - "In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference... Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems--vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.
"To see ourselves this way is probably not as comforting as believing in ineffable other-worldly wisps endowed with eternal existence, but it has its compensations. What one gives up on is a childlike sense that things are exactly as they appear, and that our solid-seeming, marble-like `I' is the realest things in the world; what one acquires is an appreciation of how tenuous we are at our cores, and how wildly different we are from what we seem to be. As Kurt Gödel with his unexpected strange loops gave us a deeper and subtler vision of what mathematics is all about, so the strange-loop characterization of our essences gives us a deeper and subtler vision of what it is to be human. And to my mind, the loss is worth the gain."
I won't try to go any further into Hofstadter's explanation of consciousness for now. (It involves a brilliant analogy to a mathematical proof written by Kurt Gödel in 1931. If you're at all mathematically inclined, he gives an excellent, understandable explanation of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, which by itself makes the book worth a look.) But here are some of Hofstadter's more interesting, possibly controversial conclusions:
1. He provides reasoning behind claiming that birds, mammals, and possibly some fish or reptiles have a self-consciousness that is qualitatively similar to human consciousness. Although even for these animals, he explains their consciousness is clearly limited compared to ours. (pp. 83-84)
2. He claims that human embryos and even probably human infants are not self-conscious as their minds have not taken in enough perceptions in order to construct the mental symbols necessary for a sense of "I"ness. He does however, also point out the potential that lies within a human embryo. (pg. 209) (The obvious conclusions being that abortion is not equivalent to murder, but is nevertheless wiping out a huge amount of potential and is therefore still a tragic occurrence.)
3. We are immortal to the extent that we live on within those that love us and to the extent that our life's achievements continue to impact future generations. As Hofstadter explains in this interview [...] "I would also say that I think that music comes much closer to capturing the essence of a composer's soul than do a writer's ideas capture the writer's soul." A prominent example Hofstadter uses in the book is how the thoughts, and therefore pieces of the soul (which he terms "soul shards"), of long-dead composers are preserved on sheets of music through which they sometimes are kept alive in other minds. And: "autobiographical story-telling is not nearly as effective a means of soul-transmission as is living with someone you love for many years of your lives, and sharing profound life goals with them -- that's for sure!"
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From the Publisher
Godel, Escher, Bach
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Le Ton Beau De Marot
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Metamagical Themas
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The Mind's I
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Surfaces and Essences
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| Explore the Works of Douglas R. Hofstadter | A wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more. | An autobiographical essay, a love letter to the French language, a series of musings on life, loss, and death, a sweet bouquet of stirring poetry—but most of all, it celebrates the limitless creativity fired by a passion for the music of words. | Hofstadter's collection of quirky essays is unified by its primary concern: to examine the way people perceive and think. | This book explores the meaning of self and consciousness through the perspectives of literature, artificial intelligence, psychology, and other disciplines. | Now, with his wit and special talent for making complex ideas vivid, Hofstadter has partnered with Sander to put forth a highly novel perspective on cognition. This book will profoundly enrich our understanding of our own minds. |
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First copy was sliced through the cover, second copy was printed incorrectly
I guess the first problem is in the Amazon warehouse. Amazon was fine about replacing the product and paying for the return. The replacement came printed at 70%, which makes it nearly impossible to read without a magnifying glass. Should I send it back AGAIN?
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on January 24, 2009
- Reviewed in the United States on October 2, 2013
Top reviews from other countries
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Amazon カスタマーReviewed in Japan on March 29, 2024
再帰（recursion）の再帰的理解のためのインスピレーション集
Touretzky, D.S. "COMMOM LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation." で演習的学習を進めていたところ，Chapter 8: Recursionの8.15の項で，再帰的プログラミングの理解を促進するための参考資料として，Hofstadter, D. R.の "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid." が紹介されており，Amazonで検索したところ，近作である本書もあることを知り，両方を購入して，Lisp の再帰的プログラミングの学習を進める際の参考資料として，面白そうなところをチラチラと眺めるような形で利用している。そんな皮層を撫で回すような利用法ではあるのだが，再帰（recursion）とは，Lisp のみならず，音楽，絵画・美術，数学，さらにはさまざまな日常場面において，それらの根底に，類似のあるいは相似の構造性を秘めている「精神活動枠組み」なのだ，という著者の主張に触れ，その「間口」と「奥行き」の深さに，改めて気付かされたように感じる。ただし，著者の記述展開は，筆者の読み取りの不十分さに起因するものかもしれないが，「間口」の広さの強調の方にかなり偏しているような印象を持った。それでも，あまり哲学的に深いことを考えないで，紹介されているトピックスや，さまざまなジャンルの図や画像を眺めるだけでも，Lispにおける再帰的プログラミングの理解の深化には有用であるように感じている。ただし，以上は，門外漢による斜め読みの途中報告であるということをお断りしておく。念の為。Amazon カスタマー再帰（recursion）の再帰的理解のためのインスピレーション集
Reviewed in Japan on March 29, 2024
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Cliente AmazonReviewed in Brazil on February 19, 2019
Boas discussões sobre o conceito de eu.
- T. J. Cooke-DaviesReviewed in the United Kingdom on February 9, 2021
As mind-bending as the title suggests
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Jean-loup SabatierReviewed in France on January 22, 2013
I'm a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hoffstadter
