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I Am a Strange Loop: 0

Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book

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Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

5 reviews
Sales Rank: 9796

Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 436
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 5.9 x 1.2

ISBN: 0465030793
Dewey Decimal Number: 149
EAN: 9780465030798
ASIN: 0465030793

Publication Date: August 7, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
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•	Hardcover - I Am a Strange Loop

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Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars

Brilliant analysis of consciousness as structured information July 13, 2007
12 out of 16 found this review helpful

When he was 27, Douglas Hofstadter wrote Goedel, Escher, Bach, a bestselling book loved by precocious teenagers and computer hackers. Its mixture of logic, music and visual art blended the richness of the humanities and the rigor of the sciences in an altogether unforgettable confection that won a Pulitzer Prize. But GEB, as it is affectionately known, was widely misunderstood. Now, at age 62, Hofstadter tries to get his message across more forcefully. Using invented dialogues, fanciful metaphors, mathematical analogies and light-hearted stories, he limns again and again his central point: The self is an illusion or, as he says, "a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination." While this may seem a depressing or, at least, odd conclusion (If the self is unreal, then who is reading this?), it's not. In fact, Hofstadter's conclusion has some surprisingly moving consequences about how human beings should regard themselves, other people and animals. This book is a punning, playful meditation on the logical, rather than neuro-biological, structure of the self. We highly recommend this gorgeous, rich, magical work to anyone who wants to see eye to eye with his or her "I."

1 out of 5 stars

Do you share your conciousness with others? June 13, 2007
38 out of 52 found this review helpful

The author had the misfortune to lose his young wife. Whilst I would agree that traumatic life events can give new insights, they can also distort your view of the world. The author claims that part of his actual consciousness is shared by his late wife. Although an atheist himself, he does this by trying to re-define the religious and dualistic concept of a soul. To me this is just not on. Why not invent a new word, as he has done for other things elsewhere in the book? The reason, I suspect, is to smear his science with religious overtones. He suggests that because all creatures and even things that contain `strange feedback loops' have `souls' we should all therefore become vegetarians. The strange feedback idea comes from mathematics and he assumes that it must be how human brains work, although no evidence for this is given. He fails to address the fact that the animals we eat would not even exist if we did not eat them or that, unlike humans, they would not have the insight to worry about their inevitable death in the slaughter house. I can understand that his wife lives on through the love and empathy that they shared, but the idea that she and every one else that he knows can some how share a little bit of his consciousness is, to me, a leap of faith too far. If he were blind from birth, could sharing `a little bit' of her consciousness enable him to see `a little bit', I wonder? The author does not acknowledge the work of Roger Penrose who in his book `Shadows of the Mind', has shown mathematically that computers or universal machines will never be able to do what humans can do. He does however first distort and then ridicule the ideas of other scientists who have a different view to himself. There is a bibliography but no references. He supports his ideas not with scientific evidence but by endless tedious analogies and lots of irrelevant personal stuff, like his taste in music. When he banged on endlessly about sharing his wife's consciousness I found myself wondering who he was trying to convince us or himself? Frankly I felt obliged to finish reading this book, but could not wait to get to the end of it. I found the book pompous and patronizing. For example it is peppered with `dear reader'. The author acknowledges that he has been given an easy ride by his university in terms of not being expected to publish many papers and I have to say that, to me, it shows.
I find it very strange that my experience is so obviously not shared by other readers so whilst I hated it you may well like it.

4 out of 5 stars

Inspiring, funny and capturing May 22, 2007
19 out of 21 found this review helpful

I wont go into the details of the book, as other reviewers have already done that. I would also like to note that I am no psychologist, but just a scientifically minded person who enjoys reading all sort of scientific works.

I Am A Strange Loop is a great book to get started to think about consciousness, the mind, the "I". Hofstadter has a knack of clearly explaining all sorts of lines of reasoning that subtly come together as one progresses through the book.
Although not all the sections will be easy reading (take the Goedel section), with a little extra thought (and perhaps a little re-reading) Hofstadter gets his message across and takes you on this marvelous journey into ... nothingness!

Unless you're into the subject already it's sure to conjure up some new thoughts in your Strange Loop, whether you accept his point of view or not.

Definitely worth reading!

4 out of 5 stars

Modified rapture April 27, 2007
50 out of 51 found this review helpful

Let's start by stating a simple fact: nothing by Hofstadter can ever be anything but fascinating (even his terrible translation of Eugene Onegin had a very interesting introduction). Now we've got that out of the way, let's admit that this book isn't quite up to par with his others (of which my favourite, for the record, is Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies).

There's not really anything here that we haven't seen before: we have Godel's theorem, self-engulfing camera systems and other paradoxes from GEB; science-fiction thought experiments from The Mind's I; the Careenium from Metamagical Themas; blurred souls and personalities from Le Ton Beau. We get the sense that Hofstadter is frustrated that people still don't quite 'get it', which is fair enough except that I and most of his core readership probably *do* get it.

Now, naturally this doesn't detract from the fact that it's a lovely read as ever (although I miss Hofstadter's playfulness, which seems to have diminished over the years). The chapters on Godel, particularly, are well-explained and do clarify the relationship Hofstadter sees between Godel and the brain. Also, he spends some time expanding on the themes introduced in Le Ton Beau, that a person's spirit is not just held in a single brain but spreads through those they influence. He gives this more rigour than before, likening it to a virtual machine on a computer, creating a (slightly imperfect) version of another program. And his discussions of levels of soulhood (framed in musings about his own vegetarianism) are thought-provoking, particularly the idea that the cut-off point for having a soul could be the ability to have a concept of 'friend'.

What I'd have liked to see was more speculation from Hofstadter's actual area of expertise. He gives the impression that representational power simply appears within a system as soon as it has enough stuff going on on the lower level (this particularly strikes you when reading about his Careenium metaphor), whereas in his actual research he knows perfectly well that it takes a lot of work to make real representation (and indeed he often berates other AI researchers who miss this point). He discusses theories of Dennett, Searle and other philosophers, but we've seen this before and it would be nice to see some mention of the things we have learned in neurology, psychology and evolutionary biology since GEB.

A Hofstadter book is an all-too rare event. Here's hoping we get another and it has more meat to it.

4 out of 5 stars

A bit disappointing April 23, 2007
51 out of 63 found this review helpful

Hofstadter revisits a number of topics from his earlier books, centered around his concept of a "strange loop." All rests on a few basic observations about multi-scale systems: (i) the higher (aggregate) levels can often be described more succinctly and profitably with their "own" sets of laws; (ii) information flows both up and down between the various levels (essentially through boundary conditions, although Hofstadter can be trusted to come up with more flowery terms like "downward causality"); (iii) whereas the lower levels involve a modest set of different entities with relatively simple rules, the higher levels tend to allow for a huge variety of entities behaving in complicated ways; (iv) hence the higher levels are endowed with representational power and can accomodate a representation of the system itself; (v) such a self-image would have to be abstracted relative to the real thing, meaning that the lower level is in some sense inaccessible at the level where representations interact.

Hofstadter makes these points using a very neat pedagogical example, called the "Careenium" (which I believe was first introduced in an Achilles-Tortoise dialogue in "Metamagical Themas"). Especially observations (i) and (ii) are brought out very nicely by the Careenium. Hofstadter spends a lot of time discussing observation (iii), which is really not such a hard idea to come to terms with. This is a pity since general popular science books often make the reader feel clever in a cheap way by banging on endlessly about a simple notion; such tactics are generally beneath him. I would have welcomed a Hofstadterian analysis of the technicalities surrounding (ii), which, after all, are his research speciality. Instead, we get a discussion of Goedel's construction, which is fine, even if it is just an abridged reprise of GEB. The most tenuous (and tedious) part of the book is where Hofstadter connects the Goedel construction with multi-scale systems by insisting that observation (iii) holds in both cases. I am not so convinced of the strength of this analogy. Does Goedel's construction really mean that at the level of fantastically long PM strings, PM is thinking about itself? What is lacking is perhaps that we can construct meta-mathematical statements as number-theoretical statements, allowing them to "talk" about themselves or other statements, but they just "sit there" (not exactly in plain view, but that is beside the point). They do not interact much. I make rather a lot of this point since it seems to me that the general usefulness of the concept of "strange loop" is riding on this. My impression is that, after discarding throwaway examples like Escher prints and the like, the human mind (with its self) is the only instantiation of a strange loop that Hofstadter is really serious about.

At any rate, Hofstadter seems to be aware of the weakness, since this is where he resorts to italics and talk of the system "engulfing itself": signs that words are failing him and he hopes that we will "get it". I am reluctant to go along, irked as I am by the assertion, repeated several times over, that Russell himself never "got it" while I am not given detailed pointers to the literature in support of this unkind appraisal, true as it may be (the only reference to work by Russell is to the Principia itself; annoying in a reference list more obsessed with cute references to fictional works).

Perhaps so as not to stress the multi-scale vs Goedel analogy to the breaking point, another earlier example of Strange Loops is not or barely discussed. This is the soi-disant "isomorphism" between the Goedel construction and molecular biology, which received a lot of emphasis in GEB. Good riddance, since this analogy is not all that great either. On the other hand, it is a pity that relatively little attention is paid to biological systems besides the brain which actually are genuine examples of multi-scale systems, like social insect societies or the immune system. I would be very interested on Hofstadter's take on the immune system.

Hofstadter's resolution of the mind/body problem is based on observation (v): his claim is that thinking about our minds in terms of the neurological processes that form its physical correlate naturally comes very unnatural to us. This is basically the "there is no real problem" argument advanced by, among others, Hofstadter's friend Dan Dennet.

The book offers the usual entertainments of a Hofstadter book: parables making technical points, clever neologisms (for one's memory-analogue of things that never happened, or might yet happen). There is also a dollop of self-indulgence (do we need footnotes explaining the jokes?), which is more annoying here because it is not tempered with intellectual rigour as it was in earlier books, which always distinguished clearly between fact and opinion and opinions were usually closely reasoned. This book feels sloppy and rushed by comparison, and could have done with proof-reading by friends who know their biology.