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- Douglas R. Hofstadter
I Am a Strange Loop
I Am a Strange Loop Read online
Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
Dedication
A note from the Publisher
WORDS OF THANKS
PREFACE
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 - On Souls and Their Sizes
Soul-Shards
What Is It Like to Be a Tomato?
Guinea Pig
Pig
Revulsion, Revelation, Revolution
Reversion, Re-evolution
The Mystery of Inanimate Flesh
Give Me Some Men Who Are Stouter-souled Men
Small-souled and Large-souled Humans
Hattie the Chocolate Labrador
Ollie the Golden Retriever
Where to Draw that Fateful, Fatal Line?
Interiority — What Has it, and to What Degree?
The Gradual Growth of a Soul
Lights On?
Post Scriptum
CHAPTER 2 - This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream
What Is a “Brain Structure”?
A Simple Analogy between Heart and Brain
Can Toilet Paper Think?
The Terribly Thirsty Beer Can
Levels and Forces in the Brain
Who Shoves Whom Around Inside the Cranium?
Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics
Thinkodynamics and Statistical Mentalics
CHAPTER 3 - The Causal Potency of Patterns
The Prime Mover
The Causal Potency of Collective Phenomena
Neurons and Dominos
Patterns as Causes
The Strange Irrelevance of Lower Levels
A Hat-tip to the Spectrum of Unpredictability
The Careenium
Simmballism
Taking the Reductionistic View of the Careenium
Taking a Higher-level View of the Careenium
Who Shoves Whom Around inside the Careenium?
The Dance of the Simmballs
CHAPTER 4 - Loops, Goals, and Loopholes
The First Flushes of Desire
A Soccer Ball Named Desire
The Slippery Slope of Teleology
Feedback Loops and Exponential Growth
Fallacy the First
Fallacy the Second
Feedback and Its Bad Rap
God, Gödel, Umlauts, and Mystery
Savoring Circularity and Self-application
The Timid Theory of Types
Intellectuals Who Dread Feedback Loops
CHAPTER 5 - On Video Feedback
Two Video Voyages, Three Decades Apart
Diary of a Video Trip
Enigmatic, Emergent Reverberation
Feeding “Content” to the Loop
A Mathematical Analogue
The Phenomenon of “Locking-in”
Emergent New Realities of Video Feedback
CHAPTER 6 - Of Selves and Symbols
Perceptual Looping as the Germ of “I”-ness
Varieties of Looping
Reception versus Perception
Mosquito Symbols
Mosquito Selves
An Interlude on Robot Vehicles
Pondering Dogthink
The Radically Different Conceptual Repertoire of Human Beings
Episodic Memory
CHAPTER 7 - The Epi Phenomenon
As Real as it Gets
Concrete Walls and Abstract Ceilings
The Many-faceted Intellectual Grounding of Reality
No Luck, No Soap, No Dice
An Out-of-the-Blue Ode to My Old Friend Epi
No Sphere, No Radius, No Mass
Where the Buck Seems to Stop
The Prime Mover, Redux
God’s Eye versus the Careenium’s Eye
I Am Not God
CHAPTER 8 - Embarking on a Strange-Loop Safari
Flap Loop, Lap Loop
Seeking Strange Loopiness in Escher
Seeking Strange Loops in Feedback
Seeking Strange Loops in the Russellian Gloom
Mr Berry of the Bodleian
I Can’t Tell You How Indescribably Nondescript It Was!
Blurriness Buries Berry
A Peanut-butter and Barberry Sandwich
An Autobiographical Snippet
Idealistic Dreams about Metamathematics
Post Scriptum
CHAPTER 9 - Pattern and Provability
Principia Mathematica and its Theorems
Mixing Two Unlikely Ideas: Primes and Squares
Pattern-hunting
People who Pursue Patterns with Perseverance
Where There’s Pattern, There’s Reason
Sailing the Ocean of Primes and Falling off the Edge
The Mathematician’s Credo
No Such Thing as an Infinite Coincidence
The Long Search for Proofs, and for their Nature
CHAPTER 10 - Gödel’s Quintessential Strange Loop
Gödel Encounters Fibonacci
The Caspian Gemstones: An Allegory
A Tiny Spark in Gödel’s Brain
Clever Rules Imbue Inert Symbols with Meaning
Mechanizing the Mathematician’s Credo
Miraculous Lockstep Synchrony
Flipping between Formulas and Very Big Integers
Very Big Integers Moving in Lock-step with Formulas
Glimmerings of How PM Can Twist Around and See Itself
Prim Numbers
The Uncanny Power of Prim Numbers
Gödelian Strangeness
How to Stick a Formula’s Gödel Number inside the Formula
Gödel’s Elephant-in-Matchbox Trick via Quine’s Analogy
The Trickiest Step
An Elephant in a Matchbox is Neither Fish Nor Fowl
Sluggo and the Morton Salt Girl
CHAPTER 11 - How Analogy Makes Meaning
The Double Aboutness of Formulas in PM
Extra Meanings Come for Free, Thanks to You, Analogy!
Exploiting the Analogies in Everyday Situations
The Latent Ambiguity of the Village Baker’s Remarks
Chantal and the Piggybacked Levels of Meaning
Pickets at the Posh Shop
Prince Hyppia: Math Dramatica
Analogy, Once Again, Does its Cagey Thing
How Can an “Unpennable” Line be Penned?
“Not” is Not the Source of Strangeness
Numbers as a Representational Medium
CHAPTER 12 - On Downward Causality
Bertrand Russell’s Worst Nightmare
A Strange Land where “Because” Coincides with “Although”
Incompleteness Derives from Strength
Bertrand Russell’s Second-worst Nightmare
An Endless Succession of Monsters
Consistency Condemns a Towering Peak to Unscalability
Downward Causality in Mathematics
Göru and the Futile Quest for a Truth Machine
The Upside-down Perceptions of Evolved Creatures
Stuck, for Better or Worse, with “I”
Proceeding Slowly Towards the Bottom Level
Of Hogs, Dogs, and Bogs
CHAPTER 13 - The Elusive Apple of My “I”
The Patterns that Constitute Experience
Reflected Communist Bachelors with Spin 1/2 are All Wet
Am I a Strange Marble?
A Pearl Necklace I Am Not
I Am My Brain’s Most Complex Symbol
Internalizing Our Weres, Our Wills, and Our Woulds
I Cannot Live without My Self
The Slow Buildup of a Self
Making Tosses, Internalizing Bounces
Smiling Like Hopalong Cassidy
The Lies in our I’s
The Locking-in of the “I” Loop
I Am Not a Video Feedback Loop
I Am Ineradicably Entrenched…
…But Am I Real?
The Size of the Strange Loop that Constitutes a Self
The Supposed Selves of Robot Vehicles
A Counterfactual Stanley
CHAPTER 14 - Strangeness in the “I” of the Beholder
The Inert Sponges inside our Heads
Squirting Chemicals
The Stately Dance of the Symbols
In which the Alfbert Visits Austranius
Brief Debriefing
Soaps in Sanskrit
Winding Up the Debriefing
Trapped at the High Level
First Key Ingredient of Strangeness
Second Key Ingredient of Strangeness
Sperry Redux
CHAPTER 15 - Entwinement
Multiple Strange Loops in One Brain
Content-free Feedback Loops
Baby Feedback Loops and Baby “I” ’s
Entwined Feedback Loops
One Privileged Loop inside our Skull
Shared Perception, Shared Control
A Twirlwind Trip to Twinwirld
Is One or Two Letters of the Alphabet?
Pairsonal Identity in Twinwirld
“Twe”-tweaking by Twinwirld-twiddling
Post Scriptum re Twinwirld
Soulmates and Matesouls
Children as Gluons
CHAPTER 16 - Grappling with the Deepest Mystery
A Random Event Changes Everything
Desperate Lark
Post Scriptum
CHAPTER 17 - How We Live in Each Other
Universal Machines
The Unexpectedness of Universality
Universal Beings
Being Visited
Chemistry and Its Lack
Copycat Planetoids Grow by Absorbing Melting Meteorites
How Much Can One Import of Another’s Interiority?
Double-clicking on the Icon for a Loved One’s Soul
Thinking with Another’s Brain
Mosaics of Different Grain Size
Transplantation of Patterns
CHAPTER 18 - The Blurry Glow of Human Identity
I Host and Am Hosted by Others
Feeling that One is Elsewhere
Telepresence versus “Real” Presence
Which Viewpoint is Really Mine?
Where Am I?
Varying Degrees of Being Another
The Naïve Viewpoint is Usually Good Enough
Where Does a Hammerhead Shark Think it is?
Sympathetic Vibrations
Am I No One Else or Am I Everyone Else?
Interpenetration of National Souls
Halos, Afterglows, Coronas
CHAPTER 19 - Consciousness = Thinking
So Where’s Consciousness in my Loopy Tale?
Enter the Skeptics
Symbols Trigger More Symbols
The Central Loop of Cognition
CHAPTER 20 - A Courteous Crossing of Words
CHAPTER 21 - A Brief Brush with Cartesian Egos
Well-told Stories Pluck Powerful Chords
What Pushovers We Are!
Teleportation of a Thought Experiment across the Atlantic
The Murky Whereabouts of Cartesian Egos
Am I on Venus, or Am I on Mars?
The Radical Nature of Parfit’s Views
Self-confidence, Humility, and Self-doubt
Morphing Parfit into Bonaparte
The Radical Redesign of Douglas R. Hofstadter
On “Who” and on “How”
Double or Nothing
Trains Who Roll
The Glow of the Soular Corona
CHAPTER 22 - A Tango with Zombies and Dualism
Pedantic Semantics?
Two Machines
Two Daves
The Nagging Worry that One Might Be a Zombie
Consciousness Is Not a Power Moonroof
Liphosophy
Consciousness: A Capitalized Essence
A Sliding Scale of Élan Mental
Semantic Quibbling in Universe Z
Quibbling in Universe Q
CHAPTER 23 - Killing a Couple of Sacred Cows
A Cerulean Sardine
Bleu Blanc Rouge = Red, White, and Blue
Inverting the Sonic Spectrum
Glebbing and Knurking
The Inverted Political Spectrum
Violets Are Red, Roses Are Blue
A Scarlet Sardine
Yes, People Want Things
The Hedge Maze of Life
There’s No Such Thing as a Free Will
CHAPTER 24 - On Magnanimity and Friendship
Are There Small and Large Souls?
From the Depths to the Heights
The Magnanimity of Albert Schweitzer
Does Conscience Constitute Consciousness?
Albert Schweitzer and Johann Sebastian Bach
Dig that Profundity!
Alle Grashüpfer Müssen Sterben
Friends
EPILOGUE
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acknowledgements
INDEX
Copyright Page
Praise for I Am A Strange Loop
“[F]ascinating . . . original and thought-provoking . . . [T]here are many pleasures in I Am a Strange Loop.”
— Wall Street Journal
“I Am a Strange Loop scales some lofty conceptual heights, but it remains very personal, and it’s deeply colored by the facts of Hofstadter’s later life. In 1993 Hofstadter’s wife Carol died suddenly of a brain tumor at only 42, leaving him with two young children to care for . . . I Am a Strange Loop is a work of rigorous thinking.”
— Time
“Almost thirty years after the publication of his well-loved Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter revisits some of the same themes. The purpose of the new book is to make inroads into the nexus of self, self-awareness and consciousness by examining self-referential structures in areas as diverse as art and mathematics. Hofstadter is the man for the job. His treatment of issues is approachable and personal, you might even say subj ective. His discussion is never overtechnical and his prose never over-bearing. He stays close to the surface of real life at all times, even as he discusses matters of the highest level of abstraction, and his book is full of fresh and rich real-life examples that give texture and authenticity to the discussion.”
— Times Literary Supplement, London
“[P]leasant and intriguing . . . Hofstadter is a supremely skillful master of an educational alchemy that can, at the turn of the page, transform the most abstract and complex of thoughts into a digestible idea that is both fun and interesting . . . Hofstadter’s good humor and easygoing style make it a real pleasure to read from start to finish.”
— Times Higher Education Supplement, London
“I Am a Strange Loop contains many profound and unique insights on the question of who we are. In addition, it is a delightful read.”
— Physics Today
“I Am a Strange Loop is vintage Hofstadter: earnest, deep, overflowing with ideas, building its argument into the experience of reading it — for if our souls can incorporate those of others, then I Am a Strange Loop can transmit Hofstadter’s into ours. And indeed, it is impossible to come away from this book without having introduced elements of his point of view into our own. It may not make us kinder or more compassionate, but we will never look at the world, inside or out, in the same way again.”
— Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Nearly thirty years after his best-selling book Gödel, Escher, Bach, cognitive scientist and polymath Douglas Hofstadter has returned to his extraordinary theory of self.”
— New Scientist
“I Am a Strange Loop is thoughtful, amusing and infectiously enthusiastic.”
— Bloomberg News
“[P]rovocative and heroi
cally humane . . . 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.”
— Publishers Weekly Starred Review
“[Hofstadter’s] new book, as brilliant and provocative as earlier ones, is a colorful mix of speculations with passages of autobiography.”
— Martin Gardner in Notices of the American Mathematical Society
“Why am I inside this body and not in a different one? This is among the most irresistible and fascinating questions humanity has ever asked, according to Douglas Hofstadter. His latest book I Am a Strange Loop asks many more challenging questions: Are our thoughts made of molecules? Could a machine be confused? Could a machine know it was confused? — until it ties you in loops. If you enjoy such brain-bending questions and are willing to struggle with some deep mathematical ideas along the way, then you’ll certainly enjoy this book . . . (I)f this book works its magic on you, you will no longer want to ask ‘why am I inside this body and not a different one?’ because you’ll know what it means to be just a strange loop.”
— BBC Focus
“Hofstadter introduces new ideas about the self-referential structure of consciousness and offers a multifaceted examination of what an ‘I’ is. He conveys abstract, complicated ideas in a relaxed, conversational manner and uses many first-person stories and personal examples as well as two Platonic dialogs. Though Hofstadter admits he writes for the general educated public, he also hopes to reach professional philosophers interested in the epistemological implications of selfhood.”