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I Am a Strange Loop |  |
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I Am a Strange Loop | |
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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Though elegantly written, it is not surprising that Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop suffers a bit by comparison to his acclaimed Gödel, Escher, Bach: they both cover the same ground, with the more recent book elaborating on the ideas of the first one. However, I Am a Strange Loop is a much more personal effort, an "intellectual autobiography" (Time) of the last 30 years of Hofstadter's life. Critics agreed that Hofstadter is riveting when sharing his grief over the unexpected death of his wife and his conviction that part of her continues to live on in him. Some readers may not agree with his beliefs, and he draws little on findings in neurological science, but they cannot deny that I Am a Strange Loop is a heartfelt exploration of the human mind.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* For more than 25 years, Hofstadter has been explaining the mystery of human consciousness through a bold fusion of mathematical logic and cognitive science. Yet for all of the acclaim his fusion has garnered (including the Pulitzer for his Godel, Escher, Bach, 1979), this pioneer admits that few readers have really grasped its meaning. To dispel the lingering incomprehension, Hofstadter here amplifies his revolutionary conception of the mind. A repudiation of traditional dualism--in which a spirit or soul inhabits the body--this revolutionary conception defines the mind as the emergence of a neural feedback loop within the brain. It is this peculiar loop that allows a stream of cognitive symbols to twist back on itself, so creating the self-awareness and self-integration that constitute an "I." Hofstadter explains the dynamics of this reflective self in refreshingly lucid language, enlivened with personal anecdotes that translate arcane formulas into the wagging tail on a golden retriever or the smile on Hopalong Cassidy. Nonspecialists are thus able to assess the divide between human and animal minds, and even to plumb the mental links binding the living to the dead. Hofstadter's analysis will not convince all skeptics. But even skeptics will appreciate the way he forces us to think deeper thoughts about thought. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
"(I am a Strange Loop) pulls off some remarkable achievements. For example, in a matter of 40 readable and even enjoyable pages, Hofstadter manages to explain Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem in a way I have a never seen attempted before... he whisks us away to tangle with ever more layers of paradox and wonderfully mind-wrenching questions... (A) pacy mix of stories, metaphors, questions and explanations..." Nature "(A) brilliant American prof called Douglas Hofstadter has just written a book (about consciousness) that may point us in the right direction. And if I spend the next 700 words raving incoherently about it, that's because it is the most gripping 400 pages I've read in years..." The Times "In this pleasant and intriguing book, Douglas R Hofstadter returns to the themes of his 1979 bestseller Godel, Escher, Bach, ostensibly focusing on the nature of selfhood and consciousness. Hofstadter is a supremely skilful master of an educational alchemy that can, at the turn of a page, transform the most abstract and complex of thoughts into a digestible idea that is both fun and interesting. Times Higher Education Supplement Almost thirty years after the publication of his well-loved Godel, 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 subjective. His discussion is never over technical 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." TLS 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 Magazine "Nearly thirty years after his best-selling book Godel, Escher, Bach, cognitive scientist and polymath Douglas Hofstadter has returned to his extraordinary theory of self." New Scientist"
