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Can a self, a soul, a consciousness, an "I" arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here? If it can, then how can we understand this baffling emergence?
Deep down, a human brain is a chaotic, seething soup of particles, on a higher level it is a jungle of neurons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call "symbols." The most central and complex symbol in your brain or mine is the one we both call "I." An "I" is a strange loop in a brain where symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down, with symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.
For each human being, this "I" seems to be the realest thing in the world. But how can such 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 all-powerful law of physics?
How do we mirror other beings inside our mind? Can many strange loops of different "strengths" inhabit one brain? If so, then a hallowed tenet of our culture -- that one human brain houses one human soul -- is an illusion.
These are among the mysteries tackled in I Am A Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter’s first book-length journey into philosophy since Godel, Escher, Bach. It is a tale crisply told, rife with anecdotes, analogies, and metaphors. It is cutting-edge philosophy that any strange loop can understand. Clear, compelling, and provocative, this is the book Hofstadter’s readers have long been waiting for.
Douglas Hofstadter is College of Arts and Sciences Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University. His previous books, all published by Basic Books are Godel, Escher, Bach (1979, Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction), The Mind’s I (1981, with Daniel Dennett), Metamagical Themas (1985), Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (1995), Le Ton beau de Marot (1997), and a novel versification of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1999).
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