I Am a Strange Loop Audiobook By Douglas R. Hofstadter cover art

I Am a Strange Loop

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I Am a Strange Loop

By: Douglas R. Hofstadter
Narrated by: Greg Baglia
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About this listen

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
Biological Sciences Consciousness & Thought History & Philosophy Philosophy Science Society Thought-Provoking Human Brain Suspenseful
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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)

Thought-provoking Concepts • Fascinating Philosophical Ideas • Pleasant Narration • Intelligent Exploration
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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.

it will make you think about thinking

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

Must reading for thinking persons

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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.

interesting but too long

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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.

A Good idea that needs an editor

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

brilliant, personal, and so readable/audible!

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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.

nerdgasm

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

Some good points, but goes off the rails in spots

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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.

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

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It has been said that it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Despite having previously put aside Douglas Hofstadter's book "Gödel, Escher, Bach" and this book I finally reconsidered to take in was this book had to say. I was surely not disappointed. Hofstadter has a substantial mathematical, logical, and philosophical rigour with which he decomposes the perhaps most difficult subject matter that we know of. The very nature of subjectivity itself. What is this elusive I, that we build our world around and we can hardly think or speak without invoking it in one form or another. The very essense of who we think we are.

Hofstadter suggest that "self" referential structures are at the very core and uses Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem as the vehicle to explain it. The book does cover areas of logic and math that might seem a bit excessive in order to prove his point.

Although I still do not think that the mind, the self, and consciousness is best viewed as symbol manipulation, this was still an very enlightning book. Many of the though experiments holds equally well for people thinking that subsymbolic representation is a better approch to bring lights to this lacuna of ignorance that we still have concerning of who and what we in essence are.

Enlightning even if you don't agree with it

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This was a fascinating look into the understanding of self and I. I enjoyed the easy to follow examples and thought exercises.

Amazing

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