I Am a Strange Loop

By: Douglas R. Hofstadter

Narrated by: Greg Baglia

One of our greatest philosophers and scientists of the mind asks where the self comes from - and how our selves can exist in the minds of others.

Can thought arise out of matter? Can self, soul, consciousness, "I" arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here?

I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the "strange loop" - a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. The most central and complex symbol in your brain is the one called "I". The "I" is the nexus in our brain, one of many symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.

How can a mysterious abstraction be real - or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the laws of physics?

These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since Gödel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively listenable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is a moving and profound inquiry into the nature of mind.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2007 Douglas R. Hofstadter (P)2018 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

"I Am a Strange Loop is vintage Hofstadter: earnest, deep, overflowing with ideas, building its argument into the experience of reading it - for if our souls can incorporate those of others, then I Am a Strange Loop can transmit Hofstadter's into ours. And indeed, it is impossible to come away from this book without having introduced elements of his point of view into our own. It may not make us kinder or more compassionate, but we will never look at the world, inside or out, in the same way again." (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

"Nearly thirty years after his best-selling book Gödel, Escher, Bach, cognitive scientist and polymath Douglas Hofstadter has returned to his extraordinary theory of self." (New Scientist)

"I Am a Strange Loop scales some lofty conceptual heights, but it remains very personal, and it's deeply colored by the facts of Hofstadter's later life. In 1993 Hofstadter's wife Carol died suddenly of a brain tumor at only 42, leaving him with two young children to care for.... I Am a Strange Loop is a work of rigorous thinking, but it's also an extraordinary tribute to the memory of romantic love: The Year of Magical Thinking for mathematicians." (Time)

it will make you think about thinking

This took a while to get through and some of the material is a bit dense. I found several a ha moments and I appreciated the discussion about symbols. I read this after his essences book and I think it was a nice follow on. You don't have to agree with everything in there, and in fact the author allows for that. The point is to reason it out and you might pick a different side. whatever... at least you're thinking about it.

Must reading for thinking persons

Highly rewarding ( even on second reading with 3 year interval) for motivated learner and thinkers.

interesting but too long

some interesting topics that could be explained without as much fluff. The book is partially a long list of examples of things that explain a simple idea, overly repeated.

A Good idea that needs an editor

This man is obviously brilliant, but the 16 hour run time of the audio book would be drastically reduced if the editors had bothered to trim the author’s incessant list-making. Literally half this book is the author listing examples of what he is talking about. That gets old real quick. My wife and I found ourselves shouting at the book: “We get it! Get to the point!” It might not seem like a big deal, but 6 hours in, it feels like we’ve only been introduced to maybe 3 hours of content. The rampant lists do become distracting, as a few times by the time he’s finished with his mondo list, I’ve forgotten what point he was building to. So that’s disappointing.

brilliant, personal, and so readable/audible!

Thanks for a great presentation with just the right tone, and for a great book with a lovely personality, and very clear ideas.

nerdgasm

I'm not quite smart enough for this book, but I appreciated it anyway. Math nerds like this are a special kind, and if I just let myself enjoy them instead of being annoyed, it's a fun ride. Consider yourself warned.

Some good points, but goes off the rails in spots

Needs more justification for his main thesis, rather than just contrasting it with conventional views.

A sufficiently general and extensible system can be used to analyze itself

Loved Hofstadter's explanation of Goedel's mapping of Whitehead-Russell PM onto integers and from there to self-reference that proves incompleteness. My biggest takeaway is that a sufficiently general and extensible system can be used to analyze itself, to evaluate itself, to reason about itself. The book also made me realize how much of computer science is mapping something about the world onto numbers, doing something with the numbers, and then mapping them back. This has profound consequences for cognitive science and AI.

Indeed a Strange Loop

I really enjoyed GEB but this book did not work for me. It was repetitive, a bit shallow, jumped around, and did not have the heart of GEB.

I already agreed with Hofstadter's main point, that consciousness is a repeating and evolving self referencing pattern (what he calls a strange loop) thus his repeated arguments about this quickly became boring to me. I also didn't like referring to it as a STRANGE loop...using the word strange when trying to clarify something seems, well, strange. He did not not quite explain what is strange about it.

His idea that his brain contains some of his dead wife's soul was not very convincing.

His criticisms of others ideas seemed to use strawman arguments. I agree with Hofstadter that these other ideas are faulty, but I think Hofstadter's take-downs were not strong.

The most enjoyable parts were his discussion of music.

The PDF included is only useful to understand a joke near the beginning of the book along with with Escher drawings and similar images.

The bibliography (not on audible but viewable elsewhere) was very interesting.

I can't really recommend this book. I do recommend several of the books referenced in this book including GEB and The Minds I (which were both great).

The narration was clear and pleasant.

Mindblowing in the best way - again

After reading "Surfaces & Essences," I knew I had to read more of Hofstadter's work. I hope this serves as a foundation for further insights - namely, I want to explore what symbols make up cognition and how they tend to be organized. There is clearly structure to our cognition that gives rise to the structure of our language, and I hope to learn even more.