I Am a Strange Loop
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
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Book Summary Information
Author: Douglas R. HofstadterEdition: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2007-03-26
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 436
Publisher: Basic Books
Book Reviews of I Am a Strange Loop
Book Review: Utterly superfluous
Summary: 2 Stars
Thirty years ago I was blown away by the cleverness of GEB. Twenty-nine years ago I started pondering, "ok, but what's his point" and I had a hard time pinpointing that. Now, 30 years after GEB I pick up Strange Loop and wonder what Hofstadter has learned in the meantime, and I'm disappointed to say that I can't find anything new in this book.
Again, here we have a very smart man thinking aloud, and clearly having thought about matters of "self" and entangledness much longer than the rest of us. And what does it get him?
I read the first couple of chapters, started skipping sections when I was a quarter of the way through this book, and by the halfway point I was just leafing through it, when I got to this. On page 188 there is the crucial question "But Am I Real", and in answer he can not do better than "I think we need some good old-fashioned analogies here to help out". I think this is a cop-out.
Neurology is increasingly showing us that our sense of self is not at all what we think (pretend? hope?) it is. We think our perception of the world is continuous, but it's not: we take pictures and extrapolate between them. Hofstadter is still of the old school, with a sense of the "self" that is almost 19th century. And not only is he stuck where he was 30 years ago, experimental psychology and neurology is about to pass him by, making his observations irrelevant.
His approach to all things meta might be vindicated if he had been able to formalize it somehow, for instance in an AI program that somehow is convincingly "like us". No achievements of this kind are in the book either.
I was really hoping to find some new insights in this book, and I've been disappointed.
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