I Am a Strange Loop @ richardeward.com

I Am a Strange Loop
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
from Basic Books

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0

• Let's just let the boy-in-the-man play
  After skimming over some of the reviews, I realized a good read can be judged "good" by the fact that even readers who rate the work with 3 or fewer stars spend a lot of time proving at some level they were inspired by the book. I like reading DH just for the fact that when I am trudging through sections that seem irrelevant or too-too wordy I look forward to and I'm never disappointed in finding the "gem" of a thought inspiring approach to such philosophical questions. So I forgive him, his playing with... more info

• I love Amazonmarketplace and I love Douglas Hofstadter.
  Every book written by Hofstadter or co-authored by him is sitting on my "bible" shelf -- next to my bed. I've read them all several times over. Being able to get one from Amazon is so good. I am now homebound and I love the reviews, suggestions, etc. that I get here. Sometimes I feel I'm having my soul cookied. After I bought one book, the next time I checked in there were three suggestions for other books to buy --I already owned them all!

• Has he read LeDoux or Damasio, or only Dennett and himself?
  Loved Goedel Escher Bach; utterly disappointed by this new work. Again, Hofstadter uses Goedel's theorem as an (overly abstract) analogy for how tangled mappings "just might" lead to a sense of autobiographical self. Details are missing.
  DH gives a poignant and worthwhile story of how we make a coarse-grained internal model for the autobiographical self of those close to us, and that after their death, that rough model can continue to run as software in our brain, giving a kind of fleeting... more info

• A sleight of hand to kill off all sleights of hand
  Philosophy, to those who are disdainful of it, is a sucker for *a priori* sleights of hand: purely logical arguments which do not rely for grip on empirical reality, but purport to explain it all the same: chestnuts like "cogito ergo sum", from which Descartes concluded a necessary distinction between a non-material soul and the rest of the world.
  Douglas Hofstadter is not a philosopher (though he's friends with one), and in "I am a Strange Loop" he is mightily disdainful of the discipline and its... more info

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