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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Minding the Mind |
| I Am a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter turned out to be just what the doctor ordered.
Hofstadter is perhaps most famous for [[ASIN:0465026567 Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid]] (GEB), a book that guides the reader through the study of music and art and logic problems to an understanding of Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which states that any system of logic, at least as complicated as integer arithmetic will either be self-contradictory or be incomplete (containing some theorems that cannot be proven either true or false, some of which will be true and others false). It as a wonderful read, Hofstadter is a master of pun, analogy, and parable. Strange Loop picks up where GEB left off. Hofstadter was disappointed that people missed some of the implications of GEB, namely for understanding human consciousness. Strange Loop is an attempt to redress that. Strange Loop slices and dices John Searle (the fellow who wrote the book that caused me to awaken with a panic attack because humans cannot have free will according to him). It builds strongly in the direction that I thought one could look for understanding how we can have physical minds that are equal to our brains (as opposed to some non-physical mind that interfaces with the world through our brains) and not be simple automatons. Along the way, he tells deep and touching stories about his own life and the loss of his wife to cancer. An (unintended) outcome of his reasoning is a "Proof for the Existence of god" that is just as strong as his reasoning about the existence of human consciousness. This is an incredibly rich book. As I kept reading it, new ideas and points of view kept spinning off from the text. I don't always agree with Hofstadter. For example, I find his reasoning about the "Inverted Spectrum Theory" of the experience of colors overly simplistic. If he stuck by his guns, he'd see the analogy between knurking and glebbing and his different reactions to Prokovief and Bartok. It takes no special mathematic or philosophical training to follow or enjoy the work. Although I enjoyed it more than GEB, part of me sees GEB as the greater work, but it encompasses less than Strange Loop. Any educated person should attempt GEB and force themselves through Strange Loop. |
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