I Am a Strange Loop
2007 book by Douglas Hofstadter
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I Am a Strange Loop is a 2007 book by Douglas Hofstadter, examining in depth the concept of a strange loop to explain the sense of "I". The concept of a strange loop was originally developed in his 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Douglas Hofstadter |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Consciousness, strange loops, intelligence |
| Publisher | Basic Books |
| Publication date | March 26, 2007 |
| Publication place | US |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 412 pages |
| ISBN | 978-0-465-03078-1 |
| OCLC | 64554976 |
| LC Class | BD438.5 .H64 2007 |
| Preceded by | Gödel, Escher, Bach |
Synopsis
Hofstadter had expressed disappointment with how his book Gödel, Escher, Bach, which won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, was received. In the preface to its 20th-anniversary edition, he laments that the book was perceived as a hodgepodge of neat things with no central theme. He writes: "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]
Hofstadter seeks to remedy this problem in I Am a Strange Loop by focusing on and expounding the central message of Gödel, Escher, Bach. He demonstrates how the properties of self-referential systems, demonstrated most famously in Gödel's incompleteness theorems, can be used to describe the unique properties of minds.[2] As an exploration of the sense of "I", Hofstadter explores his own life and those to whom he has been close.[3][4][5][6][7][8]
Responses
The book received favorable reviews. The Wall Street Journal called it "fascinating", "original", and "thought-provoking".[6]
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek criticizes Hofstadter's approach to selfhood—described as an illusion produced by many self-referencing loops—in his book Less Than Nothing. Drawing on Lacan and Hegel, Žižek writes that Hofstadter's account fails to recognize the necessity of "downward-causality" and that "the unique dignity of a person has nothing to do with the 'greatness' of his or her soul in Hofstadter's sense of integrating elements of numerous other Selves."[9]