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Title: I Am a Strange Loop
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Manufacturer: Basic Books
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| I Am a Strange Loop by Basic Books I am a Strange Loop | Do you know what consciousness is? It is a mirage. Just a giant symbol in your brain, like one big complicated word that points to itself. Douglas Hofstadter first had this insight when he was 16 years old and has been trying ever since to get into words that hang together. As other reviewers have pointed out, he probably hasn't succeeded. There are several problems I see with this ideas in the book, which is otherwise a sensitive autobiographical work. The first is how the central topic of Godel's theorem connects to consciousness. The theorem, which shows how self-reference can reveal an interesting fact about arithmetic from the "top down," doesn't by any number of analogies explain how consciousness has arisen from matter. Hofstadter very briefly says that DNA uses the same "Godel Trick" in its self-replication process, but then he stops short and returns to the nether world of metaphors and life experiences. I do feel that I gained a better conceptual understanding of the notion of "I," but here Godel's theorem was of no help.
The second problem I had with this book is the writing. He simply leaves out too much scientific information for the reader to feel confident in the many analogies he offers. By knowing a bit of evolution, formal logic, and Daniel Dennett's related positions, I could make much more sense of the book than what Hofstadter was giving me. Hofstadter may not be a "greedy reductionist" in fact, but he sure is in his writing.
The final problem I had with this books is the scope. At the end of the book, the author rushes to tidy up several problems of interest to the field of philosophy, from the old problem of free will to the recent fad of zombies. This seems stretched and out of place. He then extends himself to political topics such as capital punishment, war, and his grand finale, compassion, which I found completely gratuitous. He seems to think that once one adopts his view of consciousness, ethical values and political stances should fall out almost trivially. They don't. Unfortunately, these are probably the issues closest to Hofstadter's heart, and it pains me to see him gamble on such high chances of disagreement before the book is set down. I much rather see these in different books, say a popular science book and an autobiography. A popular science book needs to relate and convince, while an autobiography need only relate. By reaching so far as to claim, for example, that musical taste (e.g. Bach or Tupac) may be a measure of how conscious someone is, Hofstadter truly boxes himself into his own world. | | I Am a Strange Loop by Basic Books Minding the Mind | I Am a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter turned out to be just what the doctor ordered.
Hofstadter is perhaps most famous for Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (GEB), a book that guides the reader through the study of music and art and logic problems to an understanding of Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which states that any system of logic, at least as complicated as integer arithmetic will either be self-contradictory or be incomplete (containing some theorems that cannot be proven either true or false, some of which will be true and others false). It as a wonderful read, Hofstadter is a master of pun, analogy, and parable.
Strange Loop picks up where GEB left off. Hofstadter was disappointed that people missed some of the implications of GEB, namely for understanding human consciousness. Strange Loop is an attempt to redress that.
Strange Loop slices and dices John Searle (the fellow who wrote the book that caused me to awaken with a panic attack because humans cannot have free will according to him). It builds strongly in the direction that I thought one could look for understanding how we can have physical minds that are equal to our brains (as opposed to some non-physical mind that interfaces with the world through our brains) and not be simple automatons.
Along the way, he tells deep and touching stories about his own life and the loss of his wife to cancer. An (unintended) outcome of his reasoning is a "Proof for the Existence of god" that is just as strong as his reasoning about the existence of human consciousness.
This is an incredibly rich book. As I kept reading it, new ideas and points of view kept spinning off from the text. I don't always agree with Hofstadter. For example, I find his reasoning about the "Inverted Spectrum Theory" of the experience of colors overly simplistic. If he stuck by his guns, he'd see the analogy between knurking and glebbing and his different reactions to Prokovief and Bartok. It takes no special mathematic or philosophical training to follow or enjoy the work. Although I enjoyed it more than GEB, part of me sees GEB as the greater work, but it encompasses less than Strange Loop.
Any educated person should attempt GEB and force themselves through Strange Loop.
| | I Am a Strange Loop by Basic Books The human mind is the greatest mistery. | | The autor leads us into the mistery about what the man really thinks and which are the mental processes those allow that. It no very simple follows the several argument, but the auctor is able to interesting always . The fundamental concept is that, when a theory is related with itself, it borns something as the life. | | I Am a Strange Loop by Basic Books Brilliant ideas but.... | The mixed reviews here for Hofstadter's latest work reflect my mixed feelings about it. I am a HUGE fan of GEB - I read it as an impressionable 15 year old and it kick-started my profound interest in the nature of consciousness. So, as you would expect, I was giddy with excitement when I read the enticing blurb of "I am a Strange Loop" in my local bookstore. I bought it immediately. I was expecting something like a sequel to GEB, but it wasn't quite what I expected.
First of all, IAASL is not another GEB. IAASL is much less technical and much less challenging. A good portion of the book is devoted to Godel's theorem, but it is all discussed in very friendly plain English. Of course, this may be seen as a positive to those who do not have a strong mathematical/computer science background.
Second of all, IAASL is very rich in detailed analogies which serve as "intuition pumps". That is, the analogies lay the foundations (in your brain) for an intuitive understanding of some of the more difficult ideas that Hofstadter tries to articulate. Sometimes entire chapters are devoted to these intuition pumps. You may find all these analogies useful, but if you already have strong intuitions that consciousness has a mechanistic explanation, you may feel that the book is very bloated and verbose.
Third, IAASL is part thesis-on-consciousness, part autobiography. If you'd like to know more about Hofstadter and his life, then you may cherish this feature of the book. If you just want a direct discussion on the nature of consciousness, you may find the digressions into personal details a little bit annoying.
So why have I given this book 4 stars? It's because, despite the flaws (which you may not even see as flaws), I believe this is an important book that should be read by anyone who is seriously interested in understanding what consciousness is, and why it exists. In my opinion, Hofstadter's take on these thorny issues is pure genius and deeply enlightening. However, you must read IAASL (possibly multiple times) with an open mind. If you are a dogmatic dualist, then I doubt you will find the book anything but infuriating and insulting.
| | I Am a Strange Loop by Basic Books Maudlin Autobiography Pretends to be Science | I Am a Strange Loop
It is difficult to believe that this book was not a vanity pressing or that an editor of any kind had offered input. There are so many things wrong with "I Am a Strange Loop" that one hardly knows where to begin criticizing it. To start with, after 363 pages the book ultimately comes up empty. But to reach that vacuum, the reader must trudge through page upon page of cloying and twee descriptions of what Hofstadter claims to be analogies and metaphors. To quote neurologist V. S. Ramachandran, "A metaphor juxtaposes two seemingly unrelated things to highlight certain important aspects of only one of them." What Hofstadter highlights as an important aspect, however, is entirely unsupported by (nor does he refer to) any scientific evidence. Thus, what he asserts to be metaphor is simply fiction. Or to be generous, he has merely offered silly neologisms for concepts that everyone is already familiar with; that other people's expressed thoughts and behaviors can affect the thoughts and behaviors of others, a simple notion that has been taught in social psychology courses for 50 years. When a so-called metaphor is more convoluted and takes much longer to explain than the concept in question, one can be sure that the metaphor is deeply flawed. I challenge any intelligent person to read page 218 without wincing at the cutesy, drawn-out prose. Oh, we get it alright. It is just that the writing is nauseatingly precious.
Having noted the central flaw of the book, what follows are some additional Hofstadterisms that a learned reader will find annoying.
1. The author's vicious attack on philosopher John Searle is unwarranted, misguided, and appears to be motivated by a bad review that Searle might have delivered regarding one of Hofstadter's works. If this is the case, Hofstadter might have had the courage to acknowledge that fact.
2. The author freely uses the term "soul" as if incognizant of the fact that the word has no place in scientific writing. He could have just as easily employed a less confusing and less religiously loaded term such as "consciousness." But one gets the feeling that he is attempting to broaden his reader base by appealing to "new age" fanatics.
3. His casual dismissal of the importance of underlying neural mechanisms that support consciousness is naive in the extreme, especially given the illuminative power that studies in cognitive neuroscience has given us regarding the nature of memory, sensation, emotions, etc. over the last 40 years. As if to pull a fast one on us, Hofstadter voices his contempt of reductionism at the level of subatomic particles (he demonstrates a particular fondness for the term "gluons") instead of considering the appropriate level of reductionism; that of neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, neuronal circuitry, synaptic plasticity involving AMPA and NMDA receptors, etc.
4. Although the author claims to reject dualism, on more that one occasion he reveals his strong support for a mind/body distinction by speaking of consciousness as if it lurks around the brain like a disembodied ghost.
5. His use of the phrase, "my dear reader" at least once per chapter is so anachronistic and patronizing as to induce a gag reflex.
6. The author's protracted allusion to the important findings of Godel proves to be a lengthy non sequitur as it offers absolutely no insight into the nature of consciousness, not even as an analogy. This reviewer wonders why so many self-proclaimed postmodernist philosophers latch on to Godel as a source of inspiration.
7. Why does Hofstadter bore us with the history of his dietary practices over several pages? On what possible grounds does he claim to have insight that allows him to dole out a consciousness quotient on things from atoms to "normal adult humans" along what he calls "the Huneker soul-scale?" This is childish prattle beyond belief.
8. The entire section of the book devoted to the tragic loss of Hofstadter's wife is fraught with potential traps that undermine his own fuzzy hypothesis. He claims, in essence, that his wife's mind/soul/brain is almost identical to his own because he is dead certain that they were "on the same wavelength" for so many years. What if, in fact, she did not express to her husband many of the things she found obnoxious in him, or if she had privately fallen out of love with him, or if she had multiple extramarital affairs, but did not reveal any of this so as to keep the family together. If any this were true (and let's face it, these things happen frequently enough such that no imagination is being stretched here), then his whole (non)theory is blown out of the water.
9. This reviewer has read many books by Daniel C. Dennett. But perhaps the general public has not. Wouldn't it have been appropriate for Hofstadter to have offered a short introduction to Dennett's ideas as a brilliant philosopher instead of referring to him as "Dan" (as in my good buddy Dan)? I would be willing to wager that Dennett would like to distance himself from the mawkish, sentimental unidirectional dialogue that Hofstadter spilled out unto the pages of this most amateurish of books.
This reviewer could continue, but unlike Hofstadter, has the sense to know when to stop. It is regrettable that "I Am a Strange Loop" inhabits the science section at Barnes & Noble Booksellers. | | I Am a Strange Loop by Basic Books Product Description | What do we mean when we say "I"? Can thought arise out of matter? Can a self, a soul, a consciousness, an "I" arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here? I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the "strange loop"--a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. Deep down, a human brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles, on a higher level it is a jungle of neurons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call "symbols." The most central and complex symbol in your brain or mine is the one we both call "I." The "I" is the nexus in our brain where the levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down, with symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse. For each human being, this "I" seems to be the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real--or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics? These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since Godel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is the book Hofstadter's many readers have long been waiting for. |
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