I Am a Strange Loop | 
 enlarge | Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $10.13
You Save: $16.82 (62%)
New (3) Used (8) from $4.93
Rating:  78 reviews
Sales Rank: 282386
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 436
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 5.9 x 1.4
Dewey Decimal Number: 153
Publication Date: March 26, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new! Beautiful! May have a small remainder mark (ink mark) along the edge. gift quality, crisp, clean, multiple copies available, prompt shipping, excellent service.
| |
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
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.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 73 more reviews...
 Vintage and Original Hofstadter March 31, 2007
R. Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA)
138 out of 153 found this review helpful
You have certainly enjoyed the sensation of looking into a mirror that itself reflected a mirror, making a tunnel of reflections that went as deep as you could see. The same sort of thing happens when you take a television camera and turn it onto a monitor that is showing what the television camera is taking a picture of. But there is something spooky about such a loop. In fact, when young Doug Hofstadter's family was looking to purchase its first video camera, Hofstadter (showing in youth the sort of interest in self-reference that he would turn into a writing career) wondered what would happen if he showed the camera a monitor that itself showed the camera's own output. He remembers with some shame that he was hesitant to close the loop, as if he were crossing into forbidden territory. So he asked the salesman for permission to do so. "No, no, _no_!" came the reply from the salesman, who obviously shared the same fears, "Don't do _that_ - you'll break the camera." And young Hofstadter, unsure of himself, refrained from the experiment. Afterwards he thought about it on the drive home, and could see no danger to the system, and of course he tried it when they got home. And he tried it again many times; video feedback is one of the themes in Hofstadter's monumental and delightful _Goedel, Escher, Bach_ (known by millions as GEB) from 1979, and it comes back for further discussion (with more advanced hardware) in Hofstadter's new _I Am a Strange Loop_ (Basic Books). As in his other books, Hofstadter has written a deeply personal work, even though he is taking on the eternal philosophical bogey of consciousness, and has written once again with a smoothness and a sense of fun that will entrance even casual readers with no particular interest in philosophy or consciousness or mathematics into deep and rewarding thought.
Hofstadter's theme here is consciousness, or "I" or (and he shuns religious connections to the word) the soul. Humans have consciousness. Dogs seem to have some ability to understand what other dogs (and humans) are feeling, some way of representing themselves and others within their own brains. Goldfish, well that's pretty iffy. Mosquitoes have no capacity for self-knowledge. And go further down that scale. How about the neuron itself? Is there any consciousness there? After all, mosquito neurons aren't really much different from human ones, they are just more numerous and tangled in humans. Further down: DNA molecules - conscious or not? Further: carbon atoms - wait a minute, there's not even the possibility that an inanimate atom could have consciousness. Thus the great paradox, looked at repeatedly from different viewpoints here: inanimate matter, properly organized, yields consciousness. We take it all for granted, but it is all profoundly puzzling. Every human brain working at the symbol level (but very much dependent on neural and chemical foundations) "perceives its very own 'I' as a pusher and a mover, never entertaining for a moment the idea that its star player might merely be a useful shorthand standing for a myriad infinitesimal entities and the invisible chemical transactions taking place among them." The "I" is an illusion, an effective one that has great survival value for its possessors. This could be dense stuff, but Hofstadter's analogies are brilliant, as are many of his puns; he reminds us, "Just as we need our eyes in order to _see_, we need our "I"'s in order to _be_!" Hofstadter is fun to read.
Hofstadter's last book, _Le Ton beau de Marot_, was a long meditation on language and translation, and contained many reflections about his wife Carol, who sadly and suddenly died of a brain tumor in 1993 before she was 43. Carol reappears many times in the current work; it is clear that she and Hofstadter had an unusually deep and affectionate marriage, "one individual with two bodies". He is able to write movingly of what he has learned from the loss, how Carol's mind, her "Carolness" or "Carol-consciousness" has been incorporated into his own "I". He isn't Carol, and carries only an imperfect copy of Carol's soul within his own soul, but he shows how her strange loop has been incorporated into his, and just how strong and loving such an incorporation must be. It is a deeply humanistic vision of empathy, the sort of generous personal insight that shows that though souls might be merely the product of atoms and neurons interacting, might be merely illusory, they can still be grand and fully empathetic. Hofstadter has written another book to increase our wonder over the workings of our wonderworking brains.
The illusion of the I May 17, 2007
Jaume Puigbo Vila (Barcelona, Spain)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
What is a strange loop? First of all, what is a loop? Hofstadter gives some examples. One is the infinite regression of yourself looking at a mirror in a room where there is another mirror on your back. Or a video camera filming the TV screen to which is connected.
What about a "strange" loop? One of the author's examples is Goedel's theorem. Russell and Whitehead designed their theory of types in Principia Mathematica (PM)to avoid the self-referring paradoxes of mathematics such as the set of sets that do not contain themselves or in a more digestible version the barber who in a village shaves those and only those that do not shave themselves. Who shaves the barber?
What Goedel discovered through an ingenious code system is that the (in principle meaningless formal) formulas of PM could be mirrored in statements of arithmetic and in this way he managed that PM talked about itself and proved that in PM there are true propositions which are not provable. This means that any axiomatic system rich enough so that it contains the elementary arithmetic (positive integers with addition and multiplication) is not complete.
In a similar fashion, when an animal brain grows in complexity such as an adult human brain, the system is capable of self-referral.
Hofstadter tells us that this is what self-awareness is about. When you apply reductionist methods in your analysis of the brain and you go down to brain zones, neurons, DNA, atoms, protons and quarks, you don't find any inmaterial essence, no "elan mental". Consciousness is an emergent property that appears in a sufficiently complex system, the way that if you touch the envelopes in a box it feels that in ht middle there is a marble. So, the "I" according to the author, is our more precious hallucination.
The book is also a memoir of his personal suffering due to the unexpected death of his wife and his reflections about souls of dead people living, albeit in fragmentary and coarse form, in the brains of other people. "A la Turing", Hofstadter tells us that the human brain is a universal brain, capable of modelling other brains.
I must say that I was delighted to read a book about this difficult subject that I could finish and understand. However, there are parts in the book that perhaps need more discussion, as when the author makes a rough ranking of human souls. Apparently he is most interested in two dimensions: the love of music and the generosity (magnanimity means great soul). I do not know how Picasso ranked in music and he certainly was not a very generous person, rather, as many top people in their fields, he was an egocentric. However, for me he ranked high in the soul classification.
Another interesting aspect of the book is the references to AI. The self-driving automobiles that crossed the Mojave dessert should have some symbols inside. Hofstadter tells us that intelligence is about patterns. We have symbols, we categorize them and our brain activity is a constant dance of these symbols.
You can envision a day, perhaps in the XXI century, when machines will be capable of self-representation and when the patterns in a human brain can be transported to either machines (like the novel "2001, a Space Odyssey" predicted) or other brains. Our century will be the century of the brain like the first half XXth century was the century of physics and the second part the (half) century of biology and computer science.
We are, with regard to the brain, as we were regarding quantum mechanics in the 1920's. So expect fascinating years.
I'm one too! April 10, 2007
Norman Bearrentine (Oakland, CA)
20 out of 27 found this review helpful
I am a strange loop, too, and Douglas Hofstadter has written my book! Actually, he has written a much more thorough and comprehensible book than I could, and in such a friendly and personal way that I feel I could call him Doug.
Not everyone will feel the same about it as I do. I once worked with a guy who said, "Your brain is like the telephone: you don't have to understand how it works to use it." There are many people like that who have no interest in how this amazing organ gives us our experience of our selves and the world, and they will find nothing of interest here. If scientific explanations of human behavior give you apoplexy, you will probably be unhappy with this book, but maybe it would be good for you anyway. If you believe in "free will," you may find yourself very upset by this book, for as Doug says, "I don't see any room in this complex world for my will to be 'free.'" (p. 340) I don't, either.
If you're at all curious about what makes us tick, this book has the answers to some of the most significant questions--not about "wet-ware;" I don't think it mentions "amygdala" even once--but about how it is possible to think, and to think about our thinking.
Doug did make me a little nervous in Chapter 3, "The Causal Potency of Patterns." At first I had visions of recipes causing cakes to be made, but in the end he made the point perfectly clear that, "Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time intervals."(p. 41) That was a relief, and from there on it was clear sailing. Even as mathematically challenged as I am, I was able to follow the two chapters on Bertrand Russell and Godel and get the gist of them.
I have some niggling little issues here and there, arising, I think, from our cultural differences. While little Dougie's mom was playing Chopin for him in California, little Normie's mom was playing Eddie Arnold for him in Florida, at the opposite end of the intellectual spectrum. While he was practicing piano, my brother and I were making bows and arrows out of sticks and playing Indians. Aside from our similarities in having good brains and sisters whose brains were broken, our lives were vastly different, and I had the feeling while reading the book that he had little appreciation for the impact of his personal history on his values and preferences--he seemed to have little compassion for those whose history might have been less musically and intellectually stimulating.
So it's not exactly my book, but it makes ideas that I have struggled with wonderfully clear, and in the process manages to be personable and even entertaining--I laughed out loud more than once. I hope that millions of readers find it equally gratifying and enjoyable.
Strange Loops Rule!! May 27, 2007
John L. Dolan (Ashland, OR)
8 out of 11 found this review helpful
I read this book after a friend of mine, who shares my interest in neurophilosophy, recommended it, and I am glad that I did. Hofstadter does a nice job of showing how the complex interactions of neurons at the basic level of the brain can lead to large scale structures which are the cause of consciousness. He terms the former "mentalics" and the latter "thinkodynamics". He then proceeds in the monistic manner of his friend Daniel Dennett to show how the material brain can produce an immaterial consciousness by the incredibly complex interactions of 100 billion neurons, which are capable of forming intricate patterns of feedback loops, and from these loops consciousness emerges. Unfortunately, he starts out by making unfair criticisms of John Searle, who has doubts that a computational system can think. In his famous (or infamous in some circles) Chinese room experiment, he merely points out that syntax, which the machine is very good at, is not the same as semantics. In other words, the poor guy in the Chinese room can translate perfectly following the set of rules, but he does not understand a word of what he translates. Searle's point is valid, and nobody, not even Searle himself, has solved this neurophilosophical dilemma.
What I find most interesting about Hofstadter's argument is that he uses Goedel's incompleteness theorem as a basis for his solution. On page 110 he says: "...what was really being explored by Goedel, as well as by many people he had inspired, was the mystery of the human mind and the mechanisms of human thinking." Goedel, in a manner which defies my mathematically impoverished mind, takes Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, which is a set of rigid rules governing logic and arithmetizes it, or, in other words, adds a higher level of meaning and then is able to manipulate this higher level so that self-referential feedback loops can emerge which have the ability to cause further feedback loops. On page 206 Hofstadter summarizes this: "Kurt Goedel .... demonstrated how high-level, emergent, self-referential meanings in a formal mathematical system can have a causal potency just as real as that of the system's rigid, frozen, low-level rules of inference."
Even more interesting, at least to me, is that Roger Penrose (The Emperor's New Mind; The Shadows of the Mind; and The Large, the Small and the Human Mind) uses Goedel's theorem to prove the opposite - that no computational system could ever possibly be the basis of thinking. Penrose says that the incompleteness theorem showed that no computational system is complete, and, therefore, cannot be the basis of human thought, which must necessarily be independent and complete in its own world. He stated it this way in The Shadows of the Mind, page vi: "Central to the arguments of Part I, is the famous theorem of Goedel ...... The conclusions are that conscious thinking must indeed involve ingredients that cannot be even simulated adequately by mere computation; still less could computation, of itself alone, evoke any conscious feelings or intentions. Accordingly, the mind must indeed be something that cannot be described in any kind of computational terms."
Let me explain the basic problem of consciousness as I see it. While playing a game of kickball I focus on a ball which is "red" and `round". If you stop and think about it, the round, red ball does not exist. In the "real" world that object consists of a gazillion elementary particles, complexly organized, which give off light waves/particles of a specific frequency, which travel into my eye, are focused on the retina, and then excite special neurons that, by way of a complex pathway, travel to our cerebral cortex and set up the complex feedback loops that Hofstadter talked of. Nowhere in this material world does a round, red ball exist. It is an illusion in our mind, but an important one if I want to be able to dodge the ball. Our brain consists of 100 billion neurons, which are connected to each other via multiple synapses (around 3000 synapses per neuron). These neurons can fire in very intricate ways, thereby setting up incredibly complicated patterns, which exist in space and time, both synchronically and diachronically. From these patterns "emerge" consciousness, much as the wetness of water emerges from the combination of hydrogen and oxygen.
I cannot fault this explanation, mainly because I can see no other way to explain consciousness without getting mystical. Nevertheless, it seems impossible for our minds to exhibit free will in a closed material system. Hofstadter solves this neatly by denying free will (see pages 339-341). Penrose tries to solve it by getting into the quantum world, which is weird (mystical?) in many ways. For example, I pity poor Schroedinger's cat, whose fate is dependent upon human consciousness somehow interacting with the quantum world. Furthermore, Bell's interconnectedness theorem (refer to Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert, page 211) indicates that we are all connected in some magical way at the micro-level of our existence. There is no doubt that we get away from the strict mechanistic causality of our macro-world when we delve into quantum mechanics. Courtesy of Sir John Eccles, the Nobel prize winning neurophysiologist (see How the Self Controls Its Brain by Eccles). Penrose says that the microtubules of each neuron, which secrete the neurotransmitters essential for synaptic transmission, are so small that they are actually part of the micro-world that operates according to quantum mechanics. Perhaps here lies the spiritual aspect of mind, which completely eludes any explanation based upon the physical laws of our macro-world.
In conclusion, I would like to bring up Cartesian dualism, which is the other way we can salvage free will. Ever since Gilbert Ryle in his 1949 book, Concept of Mind, showed how the "ghost in the machine" contradicted Descartes' mind/matter dualism, sophisticated neurophilosophers have ridiculed the spiritual concept of mind. An immaterial mind could not effect changes in material neurons anymore than Caspar, the friendly ghost, could float through a wall and then play catch with the kids. If this is true, then free will goes out the window, or through the wall, if it is an immaterial idea. It seems like a stretch to use microtubules as the means the quantum world, which has immaterial aspects to it, can effect material changes in our brain. Let me end by pointing out that Descartes, in his criticism of Newtonian gravity, was proven right by 20th physics. Descartes ridiculed the idea that gravity, a mysterious force that acted at a distance, could be the cause of planetary motion. He stated that there were "vortices" in space that controlled how celestial objects moved. Einstein showed that material bodies act to transform and curve the space around them, and that the planets move in the channels that such curved space provides.
Perhaps Descartes was also right about mind/matter dualism.
Nice complement to GEB September 20, 2007
Kelly Collins (Lewisville, TX)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you have already read and enjoyed Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, then you should read this. Just don't expect GEB 2.
If you have not, then go read that first, then read this.
|
|
|
