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I Am a Strange Loop Hardcover – March 26, 2007
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length436 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBasic Books
- Publication dateMarch 26, 2007
- Dimensions7 x 1.25 x 10 inches
- ISBN-100465030785
- ISBN-13978-0465030781
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About the Author
From The Washington Post
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.
Product details
- Publisher : Basic Books (March 26, 2007)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 436 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0465030785
- ISBN-13 : 978-0465030781
- Item Weight : 1.6 pounds
- Dimensions : 7 x 1.25 x 10 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #102,306 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #162 in Consciousness & Thought Philosophy
- #521 in Behavioral Sciences (Books)
- #12,702 in Health, Fitness & Dieting (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American professor of cognitive science whose research focuses on the sense of "I", consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979. It won both the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and a National Book Award (at that time called The American Book Award) for Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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To some, this conclusion might sound outrageous (or at least unpalatable). But take my word for it... Hofstadter ends up giving the reader an even greater appreciation for consciousness, while letting us in on what feels like a secret that no conscious being could understand. He manages to give an alternative, more practical meaning to the word "soul" in a beautiful memorial to his wife whom he lost to cancer.
For me, some of the greatest takeaways from this book were his forays into peripheral topics, like Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem. The Gödel chapter alone makes this book worth the purchase. Hofstadter's explanation is incredibly intuitive.
In the last few chapters, he addresses many of the usual questions about the philosophy of mind and body, but from the new perspective he has established.
Most people have asked the question "Do I see red the same way you do?" By the time Hofstadter gets to this question he has the reader primed for his answer, which is to suggest that it's a nonsensical question. Our inclination to ask it is an artifact of our subjective, illusory understanding of consciousness.
Fans of Star Trek and philosophy have likely encountered troubling questions about the teleporter. Does it destroy one's continuity of consciousness? If you step into the teleporter, do *you* die and a mere copy of you survives at your destination? What happens when the teleporter malfunctions and sends your pattern to two different locations? Most of us would feel most comfortable if these questions were unanswerable... surely the teleporter must be a purely fantastical, impossible device, simply *because* we can't answer these questions. Hofstadter flips that view on its head and draws roughly the opposite conclusion... that in fact, we as human beings want consciousness to be something more fantastical than it really is.
Most of the book comprises delightful analogies and hypothetical scenarios, with small bits of conclusion scattered throughout. The pace accelerates near the end, where he makes more concrete statements, drawing from his many analogies. I recommend this book to everyone. Though it was my first Hofstadter book, I'm certain his fans will love it. Anyone who has asked these questions before will likely find a fresh perspective--and perhaps even some closure.
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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