I Am a Strange Loop

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I Am A Strange Loop  
Image: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
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][5][6][7][8][9]

[edit] External links

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1999). Gödel, Escher, Bach. Basic Books. pp. P–2 (Twentieth-anniversary preface). ISBN 0465026567. 
  2. ^ The Year of Mathemagical Thinking March 15, 2007
  3. ^ Hofstadter pages at Megite/Discover
  4. ^ A New Journey into Hofstadter's Mind - book review by George Johnson in Scientific American, March 2007
  5. ^ "Me, My Soul, and I". Wired. March 2007. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/play.html?pg=3. Retrieved on 2007-12-10. 
  6. ^ Author Interview by Greg Ross, American Scientist Online, March 22, 2007
  7. ^ The I's Have It - book review by John Derbyshire, The Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2007
  8. ^ The Mind Reader New York Times Magazine, April 1, 2007
  9. ^ Gardner, Martin (august 2007). "Do Loops Explain Consciousness? Review of I Am a Strange Loop" (pdf). Notices of the American Mathematical Society 54 (7): 853. http://www.ams.org/notices/200707/tx070700852p.pdf. Retrieved on 2007-12-10. 
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