Douglas Hofstadter I Am A Strange Loop Pdf

What do we mean when we say 'I'? Can thought arise out of matter?

• Douglas Hofstadter I Am A Strange Loop Pdf Converter

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. From reader reviews: Kim Duncan:The book I Am a Strange Loop can give more knowledge and also the precise product information about everything you want. So why must we leave the great thing like a book I Am a Strange Loop? A few of you have a different opinion about guide.

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Douglas Hofstadter I Am A Strange Loop Pdf Converter

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Hofstadter speculates that Russell never saw the second level of meaning (the effect of mapping numbers onto theorems) in his great work, like a dog that sees a television screen as a mass of changing pixels, or a child who sees the people on the screen but fails to grasp the romantic plot. And then he whisks us away to tangle with ever more layers of paradox and wonderfully mind-wrenching questions. What is the nature of mathematical truth? What is the nature of meaning? Could a machine be confused? Could it know it was confused?

Could it believe that its unquestioned belief in the reality of its own 'I' is a necessary illusion? Along the way, Hofstadter talks about himself, but his pacy mix of stories, metaphors, questions and explanations is sometimes spoiled by what seems like a lack of confidence. Instead of just blasting us with his rush of original ideas, Hofstadter apologizes for a “corny pun”, a “hopefully amusing example” or just for telling personal stories at all. Yet these stories are delightful. My favourite is his first encounter with something that, he says, “runs in our human grain”: the irrational fear of loops.

When little Douggie went with his parents to buy a video camera, one of the cameras in the store was plugged into a television screen. So he pointed the camera at his father, then at himself and then. About to point it at the screen itself, he stopped. He remembers with shame that he was hesitant to close the loop. So he timidly asked the salesperson whether he might and was told: “No, no — you'll break the camera!”. A sadder event, the discovery of his baby sister's brain damage, began his fascination with the physical basis of consciousness. At the age of 12 or so, it dawned on him that consciousness is a peculiar kind of mirage that perceives itself and yet doesn't believe it's perceiving a mirage.

This insight leads directly to the stated aim of this book: to try to pinpoint that “special kind of subtle pattern” that underlies, or gives rise to the 'soul', the 'I', 'having a light on inside' or 'being conscious'. Herein lies the source of my dissatisfaction. The idea of the self as a strange loop makes sense of moments of self-awareness and of baffled self-inquiry — but what about the rest of the time?

The theory seems to imply that mostly we are not conscious at all, which may well be right, but Hofstadter does not discuss this. Then there are those profound moments of utter stillness or absorbed flow when the self is in abeyance. People describe these as being clearer than ordinary consciousness, but this cannot be explained if self and consciousness are as closely linked as Hofstadter claims. He also argues that the self loop is indispensable; this might be challenged by those who have attempted, or even managed, to let go of the illusion of self. He quotes a Zen koan that seems beautifully to point the way out of strange loops and into awareness beyond self, but he dismisses it as “just a bunch of non-sequiturs”.