jhn 2008-12-21

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

There are a number of reasons I found this book lacking, even though I agree with its major premises.

(1) It brings no new arguments to the table. He simply restates arguments he and others have made before.

(2) Bad puns, dumb analogies, unfunny jokes. Sorry.

(3) More seriously, he fails to treat opposing arguments with the seriousness they deserve. Instead, he dismisses them by begging the question. In his world, non-functionalist-materialist accounts of the mind are false. Why? Because, silly, materialist-functionalist accounts are correct! The zombie problem that he and Dennett enjoy dismissing as nonsense deserves more credit than he gives it, and their continually having to face it points to their failure to provide a convincing account for interiority. Dismissing it on the basis that it is not compatible with your theory of the mind does not suffice.

He simply fails to understand Searle. Searle is a materialist who argues that the brain might not be a computer or an information processing device. So his examples of turing machines running on unlikely physical substrates are in fact highly relevant and not merely dishonest rhetoric. If Searle is in fact correct, current thinkers who see the brain as a computer of sorts (and thus capable of being "run" on any turing machine) may one day be looked at the way we look at 19th century thinkers who saw the brain as a kind of steam engine. It may be that computers are just our latest neat toy, and not a profound explanation of consciousness and life.

Many, many brilliant thinkers hold views other than those put forward by Dennett and Hofstader. Not all of them are blinkered philosophers: I'd look to Roger Penrose as one example.

I loved GEB and the Metamagical Themas columns. However brilliant Hofstader is, though, here he comes close to trying to do pure philosophy. He fails.

Bryan K. Long 2008-11-25

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Fans of Hofstadter's style of writing may be pleased to have another tome to wander through, but fans of his ideas, such as I am, may be disappointed. In this book, DH attempts to focus on the question of identity: who or what am "I". DH firmly rejects both religious dualism and the pseudo-scientific dualism of Chalmers and others. Instead, DH calls upon the recursive loops he explored with us in GEB to expose identity for what it is: an emergent property of perceptual cognition turned in on itself.

Yet DH seems uncomfortable with his own conclusion, as if he still has one foot in the old dualist world where each of us has, if not an eternal, unchanging soul, then at least an animate "spiritual being" distinct from the "mere stuff" we are made of. He almost interchangeably uses the words "soul", "self", and "consciousness", and he spends a lot of time worrying about what living systems possess what amount of "soulness" (he seems to be certain, however, that mosquitos have no soul worth worrying about). He argues that people, too, must have "souls" which vary in "size" with their degree of self-consciousness. He ties this as well to empathy, arguing that people who are more exquisitely sensitive to the identities and feelings of others (e.g., Albert Schweitzer) have larger souls. Although he doesn't make it explicit, he seems to use the word "soul" when discussing judgments made about someone's identity by others, while using "self" or "I" when describing an entity's own awareness of itself.

One idea I found intriguing in this book was the concept of extended identity. There is the identity "I" continually construct for "myself" (the recursive act of self-identification), but there is also my identity held in the minds of others as a product of co-creation. DH explores the idea that my identity mirrored in the minds of others can be legitimately considered to be me in the same way that my many (often conflicting) self-images are me. I would have liked him to explore this idea further, particularly the hall-of-mirrors idea that I am very susceptible to adopting the images of myself constructed by others!

As with DH, the question of identity is a central obsession within my own identity, so of course I had to read this book. But I was frustrated by its rambling diversions and failure to attempt a concise, no-diversion summary of his thesis. I would rather have seen him start with, and end with, a very concise set of ideas. If I were DH [play on identity intended], I would have said it this way:

(1) The symbol for the self, "I", is not the individual. Rather "I" represents the individual, or whatever portion of that complex individual it is useful to represent in a particular context. The symbol "I" is thus linked to the current physical, emotional, and cognitive states of the individual, as well as to whatever memory structures are currently active. As states change and active memories cycle, the "I" changes with them. We do not notice this because, but just as we "fill in" our field of vision with what we "know" to be out there surrounding our focal point, we "fill in" the concept of "I" with a base-covering "and all the other aspects of myself that I am not thinking about at the moment".

(2) Each healthy human individual maintains a set of interlinked symbols to refer to people it knows well. If I think of my wife it might be her voice or her face that starts a cascade of memory impressions that I label with her name. I have a complex set of memories and expectations about her that define her for me. When she doesn't "live up" to those expectations, I either change them or attempt to change her (not a good idea, BTW).

(3) Each healthy human, as a social animal, is continually shaped and reinforced by the expectations of members of its social group. A social loop helps establish my identity not only as "friend of", "son of", "supporter of", but as "a father", "responsible", "creative", "reserved": I take my identity in large part from how others see me.

(4) So who am "I"? All the substance is in the system, not in the symbol. I am all that I am at any moment, or I am a remembered participant in a remembered event. I am not "I". "I" is a convenient symbol for a very real, but very complex and very changeable human.

MartinP 2008-11-23

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

"I am a strange loop" is a book that showers the reader with metaphors, some amusing, some challenging, some facetious, some rather vague. What they all have in common is that they constantly reiterate the theory of self that is succinctly stated in the title, and even the most elaborate one, concerning Gödel's analysis of Russell's Principia Mathematica, eventually leaves you just where you started. At the outset you may feel that Hofstadter will elaborate on his theory through his analogies, or deepen it, but no such thing really happens. Basically, after reading the first few chapters you know all there is to it without ever quite getting to know how it actually works.

Meanwhile I found the mathematical mind games in the first half of the book highly engrossing, and was rather disappointed when halfway through Hofstadter suddenly shifts gear. Out of the blue comes the tragic story of his wife's demise, that in this context, with all due respect, felt to me like a rather cheap coup de théâtre. From this point onward Hofstadter develops the idea that an I can exist in several brains simultaneously, but while his personal motivations for wanting such a theory are obvious, he rather fails to offer convincing underpinnings for it. This in turn leads to the non sequitur and surprisingly moralistic conclusion that only once we feel compassion for fellow human beings do we truly develop an I.

All this left me rather puzzled at the end; I don't quite know what the point is of this book, and I get a feeling that neither did the author. That said, many parts of it do make for reasonably entertaining reading.

Paul M. Murphy 2008-11-17

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

How real is X to you...the moment you start taking X for granted, then it would seem you would consider X's reality highly dubious.

This, a book of analogies and metaphors, presents a plethora of academic notions in a down to earth way, spinning science subjects such as physics, mathematics at the logical level, chemistry, psychology, humanities, and a touch of theology, to describe the human experience, which Hofstadter calls a Strange loop. He brings in a lot of his humble personality and subtle sense of humor to help the reader feel like his best friend is telling you about a crazy dream he had the night before. In keeping with the spirit of the book I recognize that every reaction or review would carry the bias of the reviewer's life experience, whether that be one of science, business, art, sports, spiritual, or just a plain ordinary person...most of us. I am going with the human experience henceforth. With regard to the human experience Hofstadter suggests that in order to perceive our universe, you must have a soul, described in the book as that with the capability to interpret the symbols of the universe.

From small to large, while there is a DNA make up that begins things, Hofstadter puts forward the notion, backed with enough thought to be the foundation of a thesis, but not enough to make a boring academic read, that DNA must be capable eventually through development in chemical communication of powering enough energy to a.) Interpret symbols, b.) Share these symbols with other beings, and c.) Care about the other being. Please understand not I did not state the possibility of a soul to be strictly the domain human beings. Hofstadter, in no way suggests the human being as the center of thought but in many ways implies that souls are not dependent on the human form. This is clearly in sync with Emerson, and Jesus to name a couple souls, but is scientifically based in the 21st century.

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T. Burket 2008-11-09

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Once again, Hofstadter brings his unusual and very personal style to a serious subject. As with the title, "I" is a major player here, with stories, ruminations and specifics on what he thinks as a conscious human and a researcher. In many cases, I felt like we were almost in a dialog together.

The book is too long and repetitious, with its essence only a few key points. There is a complex thread on KG, incompleteness, Russell and how all that applies to looks and being inside and outside the system. It's a tough subject and the author makes a solid shot.

The other main topic is the degree of consciousness from humans to insects, with the lowly mosquito making many appearances. Hofstadter believes that consciousness gradually appears as you go up the chain, with no concrete dividing line. Fair enough.

Given that premise, he doesn't get into how that applies to different abilities and perceptions within humans, either as fully grown adults or as developing humans in the womb. A serious assessment of when humans become conscious and how consciousness evolves as we age (to be fair, he does use Ronald Reagan as a proxy for late-state decline) would have been welcome. Perhaps his highly-visible liberal views would have made that too dangerous, with a simple example being his brief mention of "The Bell Curve" that could have been more seriously assessed.

The riff on consciousness at a distance and replication was one of the highlights. A segue into science fiction concepts could have been a treat in his hands, such as Star Trek's "Borg" and so many other ideas of collective intelligence. How much technology could I insert into the brain and still be a conscious human, especially one who is still "me"?

Finally, computer science and artificial intelligence, one of Hofstadter's own fields, has quite the history of debate on what is intelligence. He is quite clear that many systems are far from conscious, such as chess players and feedback systems, without pushing the envelope for future possibilities. Do some pushing.

The book has its moments, and what a fertile mind he has. On this subject, I prefer Steven Pinker and more traditional writers.