I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter (PDF)

Description

One of our greatest philosophers and scientists of the mind asks, where does the self come from — and how our selves can exist in the minds of others. Can thought arise out of matter? Can self, soul, consciousness, “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. The most central and complex symbol in your brain is the one called “I.” The “I” is the nexus in our brain, one of many symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse. How can 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 laws of physics? These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter’s first book-length journey into philosophy since Gödel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is a moving and profound inquiry into the nature of mind.

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⭐I became interested in philosophy of mind about three years ago, and have since read a variety of books written by philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists and computer experts. About a year ago I heard about Douglas Hofstadter and his [then] forthcoming book “I Am A Strange Loop”. I also discovered his 1979 work

⭐, where the strange loop concept was expounded in great detail. While GEB did indeed attempt to apply strange loops to the workings of the mind, IAASL promised to focus this idea with laser intensity upon the mysteries of human consciousness. Given what I had already read about the importance of circular processes within the brain, especially regarding the “binding” of multiple sense and memory data into a “unified impression”, I looked forward to IAASL with great anticipation. I hoped that it would provide cutting insights that would help dispel the fog surrounding the current consciousness debate. In the end, however, Dr. Hofstadter provided little more than a warmed-over version of an old theory, i.e. PHYSICALIST FUNCTIONALISM; albeit with a quasi-mathematical twist to it, i.e., the Godel / strange-loop approach.Although Hofstadter is a computer scientist, his first love appears to be mathematics. He gives a great description of what mathematicians do, i.e. finding and analyzing patterns amidst groups of numbers. He gives examples of how this is done, and then shows how these patterns are analyzed and formally documented via axioms and theorems and strings of logical symbols. He then kicks it up a notch by explaining what number theory is, i.e. the foundation for those theorems and logical constructs. Not content with stopping there, he takes you to the next level by explaining how mathematician Kurt Godel performed a brilliant meta-analysis of number theory in 1931 and found that it breaks down when “indexicals” are considered (i.e., self-referential propositions such as “this quote is untrue”). By now, most of us reasonably-intelligent readers are gasping for mental oxygen, as though we’re way up in the Andes. But Hofstadter then pushes us up to the peak, i.e. the “strange loop”, which is an abstraction and generalization of what Godel did to number theory.Yikes! How many levels up have we gone? Numbers can be called first-order abstractions of reality. Identified number patterns would be a second-order; documentation of these by theorems would represent a third. Number theory is four levels up, and Godel hits the fifth floor elevator button. So a “strange loop” is a sixth-order abstraction from everyday reality. No wonder it seems somewhat “strange” to mere mortals.But strangeness doesn’t mean that an idea is useless. Hofstadter makes it clear (more so in GEB) that mathematicians have come up with all sorts of abstract ideas, which often sit for years in dusty library books until some physicist comes along looking for a way to describe something rather peculiar about the data he or she has gathered from the lab. All of a sudden, an ignored system or obscure concept is found to be exactly what is needed to solve the problem of, say, electrical superconductence at room temperature. The question here is just how useful the strange loop concept would be in solving problems. It is not a logically formal idea, in the way that a math construct such as the proof of Fermat`s Last Theorem is. The strange loop paradigm is really more of a philosopher’s construct, something a bit looser around the edges. Hofstadter tries to do with math what the late, great David Bohm attempted with quantum physics, i.e. to stretch it into a bigger, more holistic thought system that extends to the far corners of the human mind. What Hofstadter and Bohm found once they reached those far corners are quite different however; instead of localized loops, Bohm saw “implicate universal order”. (Bohm’s 1987 book

⭐is to “implicate order” what GEB is to strange loops).This is important to keep in mind if you choose to climb the mountain of thought with Hofstadter. Right up through Godel’s intellectual craftwork, Hofstadter stays on the pathways of formal logic. But that last jump is different, and Hofstadter does not warn you. It’s easy (for those of lesser minds like myself) to be impressed by the strict methods used to get to level number five, and believe that such intellectual acuity carries through right to the top. So keep your eyes open (even though it’s difficult at such intellectual heights); Hofstadter is very impressive as a wanna-be mathematician, but may not be as skilled when he shifts to philosophy, where the “strange loop” proposition actually resides.In GEB, Hofstadter attempts to give real-world examples of strange-loop situations. Not surprisingly, the results are of mixed efficacy. He first refers to the Escher paintings so liberally sprinkled throughout his first book (a few of which show up in IAASL). But he gains little traction – those are just optical illusions. He then refers to what almost happened during the Watergate crisis during Richard Nixon’s presidency; i.e. the Supreme Court interpreting the Constitution for the Executive Branch, and the Executive Branch contrarily interpreting the Constitution regarding the Judiciary. In fact, such political situations don’t loop around very much; they are resolved rather quickly by riots and bullets (luckily Nixon backed off in 1974). Hofstadter’s greatest success with strange loops in GEB came in a wonderful chapter about the workings of DNA in living beings.Hofstadter also took on the problems of the mind in GEB. However, his efforts in that field were overshadowed by the expansive brilliance of the book. And thus, in IAASL Hofstadter conveys his disappointment about not being taken more seriously by the brain-mind-consciousness crowd. He calls GEB a “shout into a chasm” – although Hofstadter did in fact team up with one of the most formidable “mind philosophers”, Daniel Dennett, soon after GEB (e.g., their 1981 book

⭐). I read GEB only recently, but it was rather clear to me that Hofstadter’s strange-loop concept of the mind was really nothing more than physicalist functionalism, a viewpoint that has been around since the mid-1960s. Not surprisingly, Dennett is quite sympathetic to this approach. For a good introduction to functionalism and its materialist interpretation, I’d recommend David Papineau’s

⭐.In applying strange loops to the workings of the brain, Hofstadter establishes that the mind works “recursively”. Sense data flows in from the body and drives the neurons; and yet this “bottom level” activity works its way through a hierarchy to the upper levels of the mind, where sensations are felt and decisions are made. Those decisions are then “passed back down” to the neurons and synapses, completing the strange loop from low-level to high-level and back again.The brain is thus seen as having “mind states” that exist between sensory input and behavioral output. These states are loopy and recursive; their present status is as much a function of what they were like an instant ago, as of what new sense data was just inputted into them. Through devices such as memory, they tend to stabilize human behavior, allowing a longer-term perspective. E.g., if you are chasing a rabbit for food, and the rabbit temporarily disappears behind a tree, you don’t stop running just because you no longer see it – you hold a belief that it will soon reappear. Brain states, as an intermediary between stimulus and response, obviously have a function, one that contributes to survival. And thus the case for functionalism. The physicalist part rejects any dualist notions about the ontological independence of “qualia” and inner experience, and equates our mind states and their functional interactions with consciousness itself. In GEB, Hofstadter used the strange loop abstraction to get to functionalism. In IIASL, he concentrates somewhat more on the physicalist agenda.As such, Hofstadter wears the philosopher’s hat more frequently in IIASL, while in GEB he mostly kept the mathematician’s cap on. But the new hat doesn’t fit as well. First off, he doesn’t seem to be aware that he’s pouring the old wine of functionalism into the new skin of strange loopiness (to reverse the Biblical metaphor). He seems a bit too sure of himself, too ready to summarily ridicule those who have argued against functionalism, most notably philosopher John Searle. (He may be doing the bidding of his partner Daniel Dennett, who has had rather vitriolic debates with Searle over the years; but unlike Hofstadter, Dennett has spelled out in great detail his position relative to Searle’s. Hofstadter, in turn, is mostly yelling insults at the enemy of his friend). He spends many pages setting up and attacking a straw man, i.e. substance dualism, a position that has not been seriously espoused since Sir John Eccles passed away.Professor Hofstadter doesn’t show any appreciation for the subtleties of modern property dualism and its hope that future progress in understanding the nature of “deep reality” may eventually close the “explanatory gap” between physics and consciousness, e.g. the “information substrate to reality” and the hologram paradigms that physicists such as John Wheeler now discuss, and which David Bohm anticipated. Hofstadter admires, yet refuses to adopt the self-doubt that his fellow materialist Derek Parfait expresses after Parfait strictly identifies qualia and self-awareness with brain electrochemistry.Hofstadter as philosopher shows no knowledge of the “mysterian” position of

⭐and Thomas Nagel; this is especially regrettable given Hofstadter’s words in GEB about the human brain ultimately being a Turing algorithmic system subject, one that at some point faces a determinability limit similar to what Godel found in number theory. Is it possible that our questions regarding our own consciousness are the ultimate indexicals? Hofstadter also seeks to kill some “sacred cows” of philosophy that are antithetical to the functionalist viewpoint, such as the “inverted spectrum” thought experiment. (Hofstadter swears in the book to be a vegetarian pacifist, but I suppose that philosophic sacred cows are still fair game.) Interestingly, though, he does not attempt to “kill” the thought-experiment denizen who should trouble him the most: i.e., Frank Jackson’s “Mary”, the formerly color-blind neuroscientist (also explained well by Papineau, cited above).Even when explaining his own paradigms, Hofstadter can be a bit confusing. He spends a lot of time telling us that human consciousness is like a television with a camera pointed at it (he even provides pictures of what the frame-within-frame results looks like). The implied infinite series of frames-within-frames is claimed to be much like the strange loops that power our consciousness. But if so, then how far is this paradigm from the much reviled “Cartesian theater” idea of the homunculus (tiny little person) within the brain watching a screen tied to our sense organs, with a homunculus within him/her watching a screen, with a homunculus . . . . in the end, just another infinity of screens. Nonetheless, after a lot of words about TV cameras pointed at monitors, Hofstadter then tells us that it’s not the infinity of screen frames that is important; infinity would have sunk Godel had he not gotten around the problem with a finite reference to infinity. The given example of a finite reference to the infinite is the girl on the Morton Salt container, holding an identical salt container under her arm so that her image, and an infinite regress, is blocked but still implied. OK, fine, but I didn’t see how the TV/screen system was squared with the salt container. Are they both kinda-sorta like indexical consciousness, but in differing ways?And then there’s Hofstadter’s illusion of the marble in the box of envelopes – proving that our everyday notions regarding self-consciousness are just illusions, anyway. But illusions to who? Don’t ask, just be satisfied that the illusion is had by an illusion which is perceived by another illusion . . . . ad infinitum / ad absurdum.IAASL is an intensely personal book – it could almost be sub-titled

⭐, with apologies to David Keirsey and his work on Myers-Briggs and human temperaments (Hofstadter is clearly an INTP “architect” – an architect of numbers, ideas and systems). You learn a lot about the life and times of Douglas Hofstadter while climbing the intellectual heights with him. He makes a lot of entertaining little jokes and quips along the way, but becomes very serious as he discusses Carol, his beloved late wife. His word are truly moving until he tries to convince you that Carol lives on in his mind, almost as much as Douglas Hofstadter does. She is still conscious within him – certainly not to the same degree that he is, but according to his hyper-functional concept of “consciousness”, just as qualitatively conscious. He goes through a rather convoluted thought experiment (regarding “Twinwirld”) to justify the notion that one consciousness can be shared among more than one brain.To truly grasp what is going on here, you need to be familiar with a certain tenant of physicalist functionalism: i.e., that consciousness is “platform independent”. Platform independence has been used to support the notion that living protoplasm is not a sine qua non for consciousness, and that there is no reason why artificial intelligence researchers (such as Hofstadter) will not eventually reproduce consciousness “in silico”. Hofstadter has put a rather innovative twist on the platform independence theory here: why not a person-to-person transfer of conscious awareness? One could think of all sorts of skeptical questions in response, but I would like to ask something more personal: is this really healthy? At some point, don’t we need to learn to let go after we lose something or someone we love? (Or am I taking Hofstadter too seriously, since he feels that all human consciousness is just a “marble in an envelope box” anyway?)Given all the psychological sharing in IAASL, one can see how much even a brilliant person’s views are shaped by their own personal history and circumstances. It’s not surprising that the wrapping of physicalist functionalism with a strange loop bow comes from a fellow of prodigious intellectual talents who, as a young boy, bought math treatises and who got goose bumps thinking about self-referential propositions, and whose teenage music thrills came from Albert Schweitzer doing Bach’s greatest hits. (I wonder if Hofstadter considered calling this book “Godel, Schweitzer and Bach”?) Professor Hofstadter didn’t know that

⭐also recorded a song using the refrain “it ain’t the meat, it’s the motion”, which Hofstadter uses to mockingly attack Searle’s consideration of the idea that living protoplasm might be essential to consciousness. Hofstadter is being unfair here, as Searle is in fact quite cautious in discussing this. As to Southside and Mr. Popeye, well, they will probably get over the slight eventually . . . .I’d give this book two stars from the perspective of the general reader who might want an overview on the current debate regarding how our brains, minds and consciousness relate. If you are already familiar with philosophy of mind, then perhaps Hofstadter earns a third star – he will at least give YOUR mind a work-out. And if you enjoyed GEB and more-or-less understood it, then IAASL could be a four or even five-star read for you. So I’ve averaged it out to three stars overall. As with Hofstadter’s sense of humor, which is liberally sprinkled throughout the book (aside from the Carol chapters), some will enjoy and benefit from Hofstadter’s approach, but many won’t.A final note about Douglas Hofstadter’s admittedly touching tribute to his late wife. Despite his heartfelt attempts to weave his theories into something of beauty in her honor, recursive mathematical constructs still pale in comparison with Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”:I trust I have not wasted breath:I think we are not wholly brain,Magnetic mockeries; not in vain,Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death;Not only cunning casts in clay;Let Science prove we are, and thenWhat matter Science unto men,At least to me? I would not stay.As Dr. Parfait realized, dualism will not be easily vanquished. Like Professor Hofstadter, I too am a vegetarian romanticist computer geek, albeit a considerably less brilliant one. But as to being a strange loop . . . no way.

⭐I Am a Strangel Loop is a scientific discussion on the immortality of the soul. Or perhaps it’s a poetic discourse on the physiology of the brain. It floats between a diverse array of ideas that readers will either find fascinating or infuriating.This book admittedly starts out slow, as many readers have pointed out, so I recommend to start reading on pg. 147, and referring to Index the as needed. For the mathematically inclined, pgs. 125-142 give an amazingly good explanation of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. But pg. 147 is where the big picture ideas that I cared most about really started to start flowing.Here’s my attempt at a condensed summary of his message:Our ancestors created stories that placed humans in the middle, in between the animals on one side, and the angels on the other. This picture illustrates our dual nature […] our biological needs and impulses and our less fixed, but potentially stronger social nature. Our biological nature is relatively fixed and unchanging, but our social nature, being relatively new on the scene, is currently much more varied and dynamic.What is our social nature? What exactly do we want from society? (Of course, we want the needs of our biological nature to be satisfied, but that tells us nothing about the ultimate goals and desires of the social part of our being.) While we’ve learned much about our biological nature (thanks to Darwin and evolutionary theory), our understanding of our social nature is still largely mystical, based largely on the accumulated wisdom passed on through religion and literature.I Am a Strange Loop takes the first steps toward formulating a well-defined understanding of our social nature.That’s the ultimate purpose of the book. The specific purpose of the book though is to spell out, in grand fashion, Hofstadter’s theory of consciousness: what it is and how it develops.Think of man 10,000 years ago compared to where he is today. It would have taken biological evolution 10,000,000 years to achieve as much progress. Don’t think that I’m talking primarily about technology. Although technological innovation has greatly increased the average individual’s capacity for self-expression, technology is only a means to an end, not an end itself. Near universal literacy, the ease of travel, and political freedoms have greatly increased the life possibilities for the modern individual. Shakespeare, Muhammad Ali, J.K. Rowling and countless other lives are the shining achievements of our civilization. Humanity’s greatest achievement has always been man himself. (`Man’ in the gender-neutral sense of the word, of course.) What is the source of this relatively rapid progress? What forces are behind this social evolution?Hofstadter has built a framework for exploring our ever-still-emerging self-consciousness, ultimately the starting point of our social nature, in well-defined terms.—–Hofstadter’s theory of consciousness—————————–A basic definition of `consciousness’ is `awareness of one’s desires’. Hofstadter believes that our desires ultimately are caused by the interaction of neurons obeying the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics. The catch is that our consciousness, our “I”, by its very nature is required to view things differently. Our “I” automatically sees itself as the cause of desires. “I” decides it wants something (say a peanut butter and jelly sandwich), our bodies move about in certain ways, and often that desire is fulfilled (if we have access to a pantry and a refrigerator at least). The cause and effect relationship couldn’t be more obvious! And yet, in Hofstadter’s view, that first assumption, that “I” decides what it wants, is basically illusory. “I” automatically views things in terms of higher level symbols, in terms of billiard balls and pressure fronts, rather than particles and molecules. But “I” is no more the cause of our desires than a pressure front determines the behavior of individual air molecules (rather than the other way around). “I” automatically turns causality upside down with regards to itself in the world.So we are left with the question: Does causality start on the small level or the large level? Does the interaction of particles–particles, electrons, and molecules–determine the behavior of our billiard balls, computers, and pressure systems, as science claims they do? Or is science wrong about causation–does causation ultimately start on the symbolic, large level, the level of billiard balls, pressure systems, and “I”s?Judging from the fact that I’m trusting the technology of laptops, wireless radio signals, and the internet to communicate this review, it’s hard to claim that science is wrong. And Hofstadter, as one would expect form the son of a Nobel prize winning physicist, sees no choice but to choose the scientific, particle level as the ultimate source of causation, and claim that “I”ness is ultimately illusory–an extremely convincing, extremely necessary hallucination.We are tempted to say: “Well maybe it can be both: maybe for non-conscious objects, like billiard balls and pressure systems, causation starts on the small level, but once consciousness kicks in, it is endowed with a causal ability of its own.” But this goes against Hofstadter’s whole conception of what consciousness is. Consciousness is not made out of some separate, “specially-endowed” material; it is made out of astoundingly complex patterns of the same particles, neurons, and molecules as everything else.The last two paragraphs of the book, he says:Pg. 363 – “In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference… Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems–vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful. “To see ourselves this way is probably not as comforting as believing in ineffable other-worldly wisps endowed with eternal existence, but it has its compensations. What one gives up on is a childlike sense that things are exactly as they appear, and that our solid-seeming, marble-like `I’ is the realest things in the world; what one acquires is an appreciation of how tenuous we are at our cores, and how wildly different we are from what we seem to be. As Kurt Gödel with his unexpected strange loops gave us a deeper and subtler vision of what mathematics is all about, so the strange-loop characterization of our essences gives us a deeper and subtler vision of what it is to be human. And to my mind, the loss is worth the gain.”I won’t try to go any further into Hofstadter’s explanation of consciousness for now. (It involves a brilliant analogy to a mathematical proof written by Kurt Gödel in 1931. If you’re at all mathematically inclined, he gives an excellent, understandable explanation of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which by itself makes the book worth a look.) But here are some of Hofstadter’s more interesting, possibly controversial conclusions:1. He provides reasoning behind claiming that birds, mammals, and possibly some fish or reptiles have a self-consciousness that is qualitatively similar to human consciousness. Although even for these animals, he explains their consciousness is clearly limited compared to ours. (pp. 83-84)2. He claims that human embryos and even probably human infants are not self-conscious as their minds have not taken in enough perceptions in order to construct the mental symbols necessary for a sense of “I”ness. He does however, also point out the potential that lies within a human embryo. (pg. 209) (The obvious conclusions being that abortion is not equivalent to murder, but is nevertheless wiping out a huge amount of potential and is therefore still a tragic occurrence.)3. We are immortal to the extent that we live on within those that love us and to the extent that our life’s achievements continue to impact future generations. As Hofstadter explains in this interview […] “I would also say that I think that music comes much closer to capturing the essence of a composer’s soul than do a writer’s ideas capture the writer’s soul.” A prominent example Hofstadter uses in the book is how the thoughts, and therefore pieces of the soul (which he terms “soul shards”), of long-dead composers are preserved on sheets of music through which they sometimes are kept alive in other minds. And: “autobiographical story-telling is not nearly as effective a means of soul-transmission as is living with someone you love for many years of your lives, and sharing profound life goals with them — that’s for sure!”

⭐It hurts me to give a bad review to the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, which was an inspiration to me when I first read it some 40 years ago. This book rehearses a lot of the territory of GEB, adding new analogies and even a couple of dialogues, but it lacks finesse compared with its predecessor, and adds little.As well as repeating his arguments about Gödel’s theorem, Hofstadter uses this book to discuss his theory of self, “I”, or consciousness, which he treats as synonyms. The title of the book says that consciousness is tied to self-representation, the level-breaking recursion that happens in the proof of Gödel’s theorem. It’s a nice theory, but Hofstadter leaves it as a tantalising possibility, rather than giving any detail.Indeed, when you start to think seriously about Hofstadter’s theory, it falls to pieces. If I were to build a computer that had an internal representation of itself, a “strange loop”, would that make the computer conscious? Even if the computer had no sense of pleasure or pain, in fact no sensations at all, and no knowledge of other computers or people or individuals of any kind? Surely a strange loop is not a sufficient condition for consciousness. Or what about an infant human without the mental ability to represent itself. Is it conscious? Surely it is, unless you have hit it on the head with a blunt instrument. So a strange loop is not a necessary condition for consciousness.If you want to read a far more disciplined analysis of consciousness, I can strongly recommend the works of Hofstadter’s friends, David Chalmers and (especially) Daniel Dennett. Or try Thomas Metzinger.Sorry Hofstadter, you must try harder. But please do, you are a genius, and it is a waste to fritter away your talent writing books like this.

⭐Having enjoyed the author’s ‘Godel, Escher Bach’ some years ago, and spurred on by a deepening interest in human nature, I opened this book with a sense of expectation. I wasn’t disappointed, and found the ideas both deeply thought-provoking and highly satisfying. If you are interested in the enigma of ‘consciousness’, and are open to exploring concepts from multiple viewpoints, this book will intrigue and entertain you. Somewhat like riding an intellectual roller-coaster.

⭐Does not do the job for me. I so enjoyed Gödel, Escher, Bach that this seemed as though it would be a winner. It was not. I found it to be turgid, requiring of more determination to read it than was needed to understand it.

⭐If Douglas Hofstadter was heard and understood, there would be peace in the world. He clarified in this book what the spectrum of feeling is. This is the complete demonstration of empathy. I’d love it if someone could rewrite it to include machine learning edge detection more granularly into his analysis of self perception and representation. Here he sometimes misses the mark ever so slightly. But that is statistic noise: at other times he goes beyond perfection.His pages on the death of his wife. I was brought to tears and to deepen the already deepest bonds I have with my friends.

⭐A loop within a loop within a loop… No matter what you thought you knew about programming and meta programming, this read will blast you away…. Hofstadter along with Lilly will let you take control of the ultimate empire: Your mind

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