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: "I" is not sure Hofstadter gets that "I am not "I""
Summary: 3 Stars
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.
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