Nerdy, sometimes tangent yet poetic and rational

I listened to this after reading Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained". They are actually pretty similar on the overall take on consciousness (and the authors reference each other pretty often in both books - not surprising since the two are friends and have similar views). However, they differ greatly in style.

Dennett's book is more on-topic, better at explaining the issue at hand as early and deep as possible. He has a more "scientific" style, using thought experiments, philosophical debates and definitions rather than personal anecdotes. But this might come off as cold, academical, maybe even "too materialistic" at times.

On the other hand, Hofstadter has a more enthusiastic, story-telling style which can be poetic and captivating, but he sometimes dives too deep in examples and anecdotes or secondary topics such as Godel's numbers and Principia Mathematica that it can come off as "tangent". To be honest, I was so bored in such chapters that I was about to just throw the book away. If you feel that way at some point: don't stop reading. It gets better. Towards the end of the book, it starts to stay more on topic, plus show some really artistic ways to tie up the loose ends and summarize the issue at hand in a poetical way.

We all have an innate fear of explaining consciousness, mainly because of our fear that explaining it will kill its magic. We try not to think about it in a materialistic way, we feel it's somehow special and cannot be fully explained. This book appreciates this feeling, but debates and wins over it in a beautiful way.

To sum up: This is a really good book on consciousness if you want a good materialistic explanation of the issue in a more lightweight, story-like way. However, it may feel tangent, almost off-topic at times because of this. If you want to complement it with a more debate-like, systematic explanation, read Dennett's "Consciousness Explained". But whichever you choose, go read the other one afterwards, because I think they complement each other in a beautiful way.

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5 Leute fanden das hilfreich

"... we're... unpredictable self-writing poems..."

I lost my marbles just when I started looking more deeply into the envelop... ;)

Doug Hofstadter wrote down a really lovely and logically coherent stack of ideas on the strange loopy question of consciousness.

This strange loop is now thinking about a strange loopy way to find a synthesis between Doug Hofstadter's and Galen Strawson's views...
Where Hofstadter sees consciousness emerge in special self referential structures in the physical substrate Stawson claims that the very basic constituting properties of what it means to be conscious are to be assumed in all kinds of interactions of (more or less basic) physical stuff. There's not necessarily a contradiction here.
I'd consider the possibility that both views can be correct or there can be some sort of synthesis even if I have to concede that Strawson seems to think of some sort of "Elan Mental" in all physical stuff... and one could argue that if we assume consciousness is everywhere it's nowhere to be found, because there is no backdrop of anything other than conscious and experiential stuff...

But perhaps in some strange loopy way consciousness is really fundamental to all the reality that we can refer to as physical (and vice versa!)... so we're looking at a Moebius band strange loop of reality./ "neti neti!": neither the physical stuff nor the emergent experiential features of consciuos beings are really real... and both are just as valid... consciousness being fundamental to the emergence of physical reality just as physical reality can be regarded as the the medium and basis for the formation of experiential/ self-conscious strange loop structures... (all of reality being essentially just a perspective of a single sided twisted and looped "eternal golden braid"? that would be a strictly monist perspective.)

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A strange book

I loved the title and was also intrigued by the title of the author's previous main publication on the topic. Sadly, the book itself doesn't live up to this quality and originality.

I'm a former reductionist and fierce atheist myself whose convictions were challenged and eventually turned around mainly by overwhelming personal experience. Ever since my personal revelation experiences I've been reading into literature about consciousness, origin of life, evolution and origin of the universe (most of it strictly reductionist), in a kind of intellectually masochistic attempt to challenge my new views and find a loophole to bring me back on the mainstream science track. So far this has failed and "I am a strange loop" has, if anything, only contributed to this failure.

Mr Hofstadter asserts time and again that there isn't anything more to the "I" and to consciousness than the workings of the individual brain. He does not present the slightest shred of empirical evidence for that. His book is an endless tirade of conjectures presented as indisputable givens, mostly by packing them into a mixture of autobiographical anecdotes and, sometimes entertaining, sometimes really weird, analogies, as is, sadly, so fashionable in popular scientific writing. I knew I might be heading for a weird ride here when the author, quite at the beginning, asserts not only that a mosquito was, unquestionably of course, nothing more than an automaton but also that human babies can't be seen as proper human personalities, rather as blank minds waiting to be filled. Hard to believe that he was around a lot when his children were babies because I can assure him that my kids had amazingly distinct personalities from the very start. Same for the mosquito assertion: there is so much literature on the incredible abilities of small brained insects and other animals - is he fully unaware of this or does he just choose to ignore it? I'm quite an accomplished fruitfly killer and even the experience from that job makes it seem unlikely to me that these creatures do not have thoughts and feelings (as he asserts). They act in so distinct ways, for instance getting more cautious once they've seen me kill one of their likes, and some even show such irrational movements that a) bear not the slightest resemblance of automaton behaviour and b) would, in a human, be interpreted as signs of panic.

Alright, so there's a difference in view points here, and, clearly, I find Hofstadter's assertions unconvincing. That's normal, that's okay. But what I really dislike is the self-conviction he shows in presenting his assertions, the permanent implication that these assertions were scientific, and the way he, at times, makes fun of other scholars with different views.

If the book "I am a strange loop" were conscious it might think "I am a strange book".

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