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I Am a Strange Loop | 
 enlarge | Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
List Price: £9.99
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Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 5156
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 436
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 5.9 x 1.2
ISBN: 0465030793
Dewey Decimal Number: 153
EAN: 9780465030798
ASIN: 0465030793
Publication Date: August 7, 2008
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 A sleight of hand to kill off all sleights of hand September 27, 2008
Mr. O. Buxton (Highgate, UK)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Philosophy, to those who are disdainful of it, is a sucker for *a priori* sleights of hand: purely logical arguments which do not rely for grip on empirical reality, but purport to explain it all the same: chestnuts like "cogito ergo sum", from which Descartes concluded a necessary distinction between a non-material soul and the rest of the world.
Douglas Hofstadter is not a philosopher (though he's friends with one), and in "I am a Strange Loop" he is mightily disdainful of the discipline and its weakness for cute logical constructions. All of metaphysics is so much bunk, says Hofstadter, and he sets out to demonstrate this using the power of mathematics and in particular the fashionable power of Goedel's incompleteness theory.
Observers may pause and reflect on an irony at once: Hofstadter's method - derived *a priori* from the pure logical structure of mathematics - looks suspiciously like those tricksy metaphysical musings on which he heaps derision. As his book proceeds this irony only sharpens.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, for I started out enjoying this book immensely. Until about halfway I thought I'd award it five stars - but then found it increasingly unconvincing and glib, notably at the point where Hofstadter leaves his (absolutely fascinating) mathematical theorising behind and begins applying it. He believes that from purely logical contortion one may derive a coherent account of consciousness (a purely physical phenomenon) robust enough to bat away any philosophical objections, dualist or otherwise.
Note, with another irony, his industry here: to express the physical parameters of a material thing - a brain - in terms of purely non-material apparatus (a conceptual language). In the early stages, Professor Hofstadter brushes aside reductionist objections to his scheme which is, by definition, an emergent property of, and therefore unobservable in, the interactions of specific nerves and neurons. Yet late in his book he is at great pains to say that that same material thing *cannot*, by dint of the laws of physics, be pushed around by a non material thing (being a soul), and that configurations of electrons correspond directly to particular conscious states in what seems a rigorously deterministic way (Hofstadter brusquely dismisses conjectures that your red might not be the same as mine). Without warning, in his closing pages, Hofstadter seems to declare himself a behaviourist. Given the excellent and enlightening work of his early chapters, this comes as a surprise and a disappointment to say the least.
Hofstadter's exposition of Goedel's theory is excellent and its application in the idea of the "Strange Loop" is fascinating. He spends much of the opening chapters grounding this odd notion, which he says is the key to understanding consciousness as a non-mystical, non-dualistic, scientifically respectable and physically explicable phenomenon. His insight is to root consciousness not in the physical manifestation of the brain, but in the patterns and symbols represented within it. This, I think, is all he needs to establish to win his primary argument, namely that Artificial Intelligence is a valid proposition. But he is obliged to go on because, like Darwin's Dangerous Idea, the Strange Loop threatens to operate like a universal acid and cut through many cherished and well-established ideas. Alas, some of these ideas seem to be not ones Douglas Hofstadter is quite ready to let go.
The implication of the Strange Loop, which I don't think Hofstadter denies, is that a string of symbols, provided it is sufficiently complex (and "loopy") can be a substrate for a consciousness. That is a Neat Idea (though I'm not persuaded it's correct: Hofstadter's support for it is only conceptual, and involves little more than hand-waving and appeals to open-mindedness.)
But all the same, some strange loops began to occur to me here. Perhaps rather than slamming the door on mysticism, Douglas Hofstadter has unwittingly blown it wide open. After all, why stop at human consciousness as a complex system? Cconceptually, perhaps, one might be able to construct a string of symbols representing God. Would it even need a substrate? Might the fact that it is conceptually possible mean that God therefore exists?
I am being mendacious, I confess. But herein lie the dangers (or irritations) of tricksy *a priori* contortions. However, Professor Hofstadter shouldn't complain: he started it.
Less provocatively, perhaps a community of interacting individuals, like a city - after all, a more complex system than a single one, QED - might also be conscious. Perhaps there are all sorts of consciousnesses which we can't see precisely because they emerge at a more abstract level than the one we occupy.
This might seem far-fetched, but the leap of faith it requires isn't materially bigger than the one Hofstadter explicitly requires us to make. He sees the power of Goedel's insight being that symbolic systems of sufficient complexity ("languages" to you and me) can operate on multiple levels, and if they can be made to reference themselves, the scope for endless fractalising feedback loops is infinite. The same door that opens the way to consciousness seems to let all sorts of less appealing apparitions into the room: God, higher levels of consciousness and sentient pieces of paper bootstrap themselves into existence also.
This seems to be a Strange Loop Too Far, and as a result we find Hofstadter ultimately embracing the reductionism of which he was initially so dismissive, veering violently towards determinism and concluding with a behavioural flourish that there is no consciousness, no free will, and no alternative way of experiencing red. Ultimately he asserts a binary option: unacceptable dualism with all the fairies, spirits, spooks and logical lacunae it implies, or a pretty brutal form of determinist materialism.
There's yet another irony in all this, for he has repeatedly scorned Bertrand Russell's failure to see the implications of his own formal language, while apparently making a comparable failure to understand the implications of his own model. Strange Loops allow - guarantee, in fact - multiple meanings via analogy and metaphors, and provide no means of adjudicating between them. They vitiate the idea of transcendental truth which Hofstadter seems suddenly so keen on. The option isn't binary at all: rather, it's a silly question.
In essence, *all* interpretations are metaphorical; even the "literal" ones. Neuroscience, with all its gluons, neurons and so on, is just one more metaphor which we might use to understand an aspect of our world. It will tell us much about the brain, but very little about consciousness, seeing as the two operate on quite different levels of abstraction.
To the extent, therefore, that Douglas Hofstadter concludes that the self is that is an illusion his is a wholly useless conclusion. As he acknowledges, "we" are doomed to "see" the world in terms of "selves"; an *a priori* sleight-of-hand, no matter how cleverly constructed, which tells us that we're wrong about that (and that we're not actually here at all!) does us no good at all.
Neurons, gluons and strange loops have their place - in many places this is a fascinating book, after all - but they won't give us any purchase on this debate.
Olly Buxton
 A maverick's prospective September 4, 2008
Gintautas Zvirblis
I am still in the process of reading the book, and I am enjoying it immensely. Hofstadter to me is a genius, who's probably come to terms with this fact by and by. He sounds as someone who is well aware of the support of a big constituency on the strength of his masterpiece the GEB, and can afford to be purely himself - warts and all. He has an insight of a naturally born maverick which coupled with his training in mathematics and physics delivers a very potent mixture of ideas indeed. Hofstadter explains very complex ideas of cognition and how brains work in terms so simple that even a bright eleven year old could understand. This book should be considered as an essential read for anyone interested in AI and cognition.
Brilliant analysis of consciousness as structured information July 13, 2007
Rolf Dobelli (Luzern Switzerland)
13 out of 17 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."
 Do you share your conciousness with others? June 13, 2007
C. E. Carter (sheffield UK)
47 out of 64 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.
 Inspiring, funny and capturing May 22, 2007
M. Otte (Netherlands)
20 out of 22 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!
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