I remember--it was actually about the same time Ayn Rand was making her last tour of universities--when Hofstadter visited my provincial podunk university, hawking his book. I recently just sold an autographed copy of the trade paperback (it didn't go for much but perhaps a hardback would be worth more?).
GEB is one of those books that must have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and got read by dozens of people, with the author then proclaiming most people didn't understand what he was trying to say. I don't think that happens too often because for whatever reasons most people never get their collection of confused ideas into print form backed by a commercial publisher. Hofstadter did. I remember after his talk one philosophy professor getting enthusiastic that GEB was on the verge of an explanation of human consciousness--and of course it had to involve formal logics. He was the same guy who was sure Chomsky was close on an explanation of human language--and of course it had to involve formal logics. Also an interesting conversation I recall at the time of the lecture was a professor's wife--the dean's wife maybe--remarking that Hofstatdter himself showed the value of a an education in the 'humanities', to which the author replied, something like, "Oh no, not at all. My education is in hard science." I think I made a comment to myself: yet note how it's just we humanities types who got suckered into coming to this lecture. The pure concentrated thesis that he never got around to stating very clearly in GEB is: we are conscious because we are strange loops. As an aside here, maybe my take on human consciousness has no value whatsoever, but my perspective is one that most people can not get: I'm an identical twin. And I always used to think that, even if I'm an exact genetic copy, we are not physically identical, not really. But what separated me from my brother is simply that I can not experience his being, his body, his life (unless ESP were possible, and nothing I ever thought or did made me think it was). That doesn't mean I thought that he and I have different souls. Rather, I always thought that even the simplest physical differences in the two copies helped bring this about. But later I thought --and still do--that even if the genes were the same and even if we were completely the same physically, we still couldn't experience each other's lives. Even if we were side by side, we weren't occupying the same space. But maybe this is attempting to contemplate an impossiblity. In the real world, we will always be different realizations, and different lived experiences, and different memories of those lived experiences adding to those lived experiences so long as life goes on. Oh, and even if DH is a significant thinker about such matters, I never did find his writing very interesting to read. Perhaps GEB really needed an editor that understood the author more? Or perhaps I ought to delve into his later stuff, now that he no longer sells hundreds of thousands of unread copies and he has stuck with 'cognitive science'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter Hofstadter's thesis about consciousness, first expressed in GEB but also present in several of his later books, is that it is an emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in the brain. In GEB he draws an analogy between the social organization of a colony of ants and the mind seen as a coherent "colony" of neurons. In particular, Hofstadter claims that our sense of having (or being) an "I" comes from the abstract pattern he terms a "strange loop", which is an abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena as audio and video feedback, and which Hofstadter has defined as "a level-crossing feedback loop". The prototypical example of this abstract notion is the self-referential structure at the core of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Hofstadter's 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop carries his vision of consciousness considerably further, including the idea that each human "I" is distributed over numerous brains, rather than being limited to precisely one brain.[20] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop I Am a Strange Loop >From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search I Am A Strange Loop Strageloop.jpg Author Douglas Hofstadter Country USA Language English Subject(s) Consciousness, strange loops, intelligence Publisher Basic Books Publication date March 26th, 2007 Media type Hardback Pages 412 pages ISBN 978-0465030781 OCLC Number 64554976 LC Classification BD438.5 .H64 2007 Preceded by Gödel, Escher, Bach I Am a Strange Loop is a 2007 book by Douglas Hofstadter, examining in depth the concept of a strange loop originally developed in his 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach. “ In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. ” — Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop p.363 Hofstadter had previously expressed disappointment with how Gödel, Escher, Bach, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for general nonfiction, was received. In the preface to the twentieth-anniversary edition, Hofstadter laments that his book has been misperceived as a hodge-podge of neat things with no central theme. He states: "GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?"[1] He sought to remedy this problem in I Am a Strange Loop, by focusing on and expounding upon the central message of Gödel, Escher, Bach. He seeks to demonstrate how the properties of self-referential systems, demonstrated most famously in Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, can be used to describe the unique properties of minds.[2][3] As an exploration of the concept of "self", Hofstadter explores his own life, and those he has been close to.[4 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/play.html?pg=3 WIRED: How is your new book different from Gödel, which touched on physics, genetics, mathematics, and computer science? HOFSTADTER: This time I’m only trying to figure out “What am I?” Well, given the book’s title, you seem to have found out. But what is a strange loop? One good prototype is the Escher drawing of two hands sketching each other. A more abstract one is the sentence I am lying. Such loops are, I think anyone would agree, strange. They seem paradoxical and even strike some people as dangerous. I argue that such a strange loop, paradoxical or not, is at the core of each human being. It is an abstract pattern that gives each of us an “I,” or, if you don’t mind the term, a soul. Does this insight increase your understanding of yourself? Of course. I believe that a soul is an abstract pattern, and we can therefore internalize in our brain the souls of other people. You have a great line: “I am a mirage that perceives itself.” If our fundamental sense of what is real — our own existence — is merely a self-reinforcing mirage, does that call into question the reality of the universe itself? I don’t think so. Even though subatomic particles engage in a deeply recursive process called renormalization, they don’t contain a self-model, and everything I talk about in this book — consciousness — derives from a self-model. Strange Loop describes the soul as a self-model that is very weak in insects and stronger in mammals. What happens when machines have very large souls? It’s a continuum, and a strange loop can arise in any substrate. Thinking about different sizes of souls led you to vegetarianism. Would you hesitate to turn off the small soul of Stanley, the autonomous robot that found its way across the desert during the Darpa Grand Challenge? Why not? Stanley doesn’t have a model of itself of any significance, let alone a persistent self-image built up over time. Unlike you and I, Stanley is no strange loop. What if Stanley had as much self-awareness as a chicken? Then I wouldn’t eat it, just as I wouldn’t eat a chicken. In Loop, you shy away from speculating about the souls or the intelligence of computers, yet you’ve been working in AI for 30 years. I avoid speculating about futuristic sci-fi AI scenarios, because I don’t think they respect the complexity of what we are thanks to evolution. But isn’t your research all about trying to bring about such scenarios? Thirty years ago, I didn’t distinguish between modeling the human mind and making smarter machines. After I realized this crucial difference, I focused exclusively on using computer models to try to understand the human mind. I no longer think of myself as an AI researcher but as a cognitive scientist. One of the attractions of your writing is the wordplay, a fascination with the kind of recursions that appeal to programmers and nerds. It is ironic because my whole life I have felt uncomfortable with the nerd culture that centers on computers. I always hope my writings will resonate with people who love literature, art, and music. But instead, a large fraction of my audience seems to be those who are fascinated by technology and who assume that I am, too. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
