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47 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
Modified rapture, 27 April 2007
Let's start by stating a simple fact: nothing by Hofstadter can ever be anything but fascinating (even his terrible translation of Eugene Onegin had a very interesting introduction). Now we've got that out of the way, let's admit that this book isn't quite up to par with his others (of which my favourite, for the record, is Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies).
There's not really anything here that we haven't seen before: we have Godel's theorem, self-engulfing camera systems and other paradoxes from GEB; science-fiction thought experiments from The Mind's I; the Careenium from Metamagical Themas; blurred souls and personalities from Le Ton Beau. We get the sense that Hofstadter is frustrated that people still don't quite 'get it', which is fair enough except that I and most of his core readership probably *do* get it.
Now, naturally this doesn't detract from the fact that it's a lovely read as ever (although I miss Hofstadter's playfulness, which seems to have diminished over the years). The chapters on Godel, particularly, are well-explained and do clarify the relationship Hofstadter sees between Godel and the brain. Also, he spends some time expanding on the themes introduced in Le Ton Beau, that a person's spirit is not just held in a single brain but spreads through those they influence. He gives this more rigour than before, likening it to a virtual machine on a computer, creating a (slightly imperfect) version of another program. And his discussions of levels of soulhood (framed in musings about his own vegetarianism) are thought-provoking, particularly the idea that the cut-off point for having a soul could be the ability to have a concept of 'friend'.
What I'd have liked to see was more speculation from Hofstadter's actual area of expertise. He gives the impression that representational power simply appears within a system as soon as it has enough stuff going on on the lower level (this particularly strikes you when reading about his Careenium metaphor), whereas in his actual research he knows perfectly well that it takes a lot of work to make real representation (and indeed he often berates other AI researchers who miss this point). He discusses theories of Dennett, Searle and other philosophers, but we've seen this before and it would be nice to see some mention of the things we have learned in neurology, psychology and evolutionary biology since GEB.
A Hofstadter book is an all-too rare event. Here's hoping we get another and it has more meat to it.
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
Inspiring, funny and capturing, 22 May 2007
I wont go into the details of the book, as other reviewers have already done that. I would also like to note that I am no psychologist, but just a scientifically minded person who enjoys reading all sort of scientific works.
I Am A Strange Loop is a great book to get started to think about consciousness, the mind, the "I". Hofstadter has a knack of clearly explaining all sorts of lines of reasoning that subtly come together as one progresses through the book.
Although not all the sections will be easy reading (take the Gödel section), with a little extra thought (and perhaps a little re-reading) Hofstadter gets his message across and takes you on this marvelous journey into ... nothingness!
Unless you're into the subject already it's sure to conjure up some new thoughts in your Strange Loop, whether you accept his point of view or not.
Definitely worth reading!
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45 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
A bit disappointing, 23 April 2007
Hofstadter revisits a number of topics from his earlier books, centered around his concept of a "strange loop." All rests on a few basic observations about multi-scale systems: (i) the higher (aggregate) levels can often be described more succinctly and profitably with their "own" sets of laws; (ii) information flows both up and down between the various levels (essentially through boundary conditions, although Hofstadter can be trusted to come up with more flowery terms like "downward causality"); (iii) whereas the lower levels involve a modest set of different entities with relatively simple rules, the higher levels tend to allow for a huge variety of entities behaving in complicated ways; (iv) hence the higher levels are endowed with representational power and can accomodate a representation of the system itself; (v) such a self-image would have to be abstracted relative to the real thing, meaning that the lower level is in some sense inaccessible at the level where representations interact.
Hofstadter makes these points using a very neat pedagogical example, called the "Careenium" (which I believe was first introduced in an Achilles-Tortoise dialogue in "Metamagical Themas"). Especially observations (i) and (ii) are brought out very nicely by the Careenium. Hofstadter spends a lot of time discussing observation (iii), which is really not such a hard idea to come to terms with. This is a pity since general popular science books often make the reader feel clever in a cheap way by banging on endlessly about a simple notion; such tactics are generally beneath him. I would have welcomed a Hofstadterian analysis of the technicalities surrounding (ii), which, after all, are his research speciality. Instead, we get a discussion of Goedel's construction, which is fine, even if it is just an abridged reprise of GEB. The most tenuous (and tedious) part of the book is where Hofstadter connects the Goedel construction with multi-scale systems by insisting that observation (iii) holds in both cases. I am not so convinced of the strength of this analogy. Recall that Goedel showed that one may construct certain well-formed strings in the Principia Mathematica (or similarly strong) notational system which by construction are known to be provable or unprovable (as well as expressing a number-theoretical truth, on pain of inconsistency). Does this really mean that at the level of fantastically long PM strings, PM is thinking about itself? What is lacking is perhaps that we can construct meta-mathematical statements as number-theoretical statements, allowing them to "talk" about themselves or other statements, but they just "sit there" (not exactly in plain view, but I concede that that is beside the point). They do not interact much. I make rather a lot of this point since it seems to me that the general usefulness of the concept of "strange loop" is riding on this. My impression is that, after discarding throwaway examples like Escher prints and the like, the human mind (with its self) is the only instantiation of a strange loop that Hofstadter is really serious about.
At any rate, Hofstadter seems to be aware of the weakness, since this is where he resorts to italics and talk of the system "engulfing itself": signs that words are failing him and he hopes that we will "get it". I am reluctant to go along, irked as I am by the assertion, repeated several times over, that Russell himself never "got it" while I am not given detailed pointers to the literature in support of this unkind appraisal, true as it may be (the only reference to work by Russell is to the Principia itself; annoying in a reference list more obsessed with cute references to fictional works).
Perhaps so as not to stress the multi-scale vs Goedel analogy to the breaking point, another earlier example of Strange Loops is not or barely discussed. This is the soi-disant "isomorphism" between the Goedel construction and molecular biology, which received a lot of emphasis in GEB. Good riddance, since this analogy is not all that great either. On the other ha | |
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