''I Am a Strange Loop'' is a 2007 book by
Douglas Hofstadter, examining in depth the concept of a ''
strange loop'' to explain the sense of "I". The concept of a ''strange loop'' was originally developed in his 1979 book ''
Gödel, Escher, Bach''.
Hofstadter had previously expressed disappointment with how ''Gödel, Escher, Bach'', which won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for general nonfiction, was received. In the preface to its 20th anniversary edition, Hofstadter laments that the book was perceived as a hodgepodge of neat things with no central theme. He states: "GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?"
Hofstadter seeks to remedy this problem in ''I Am a Strange Loop'' by focusing on and expounding the central message of ''Gödel, Escher, Bach''. He demonstrates how the properties of
self-referential
Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philoso ...
systems, demonstrated most famously in
Gödel's incompleteness theorems, can be used to describe the unique properties of
minds.
As an exploration of the sense of "I", Hofstadter explores his own life and those to whom he has been close.
[The Mind Reader](_blank)
''New York Times Magazine'', April 1, 2007
Editions
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See also
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Feedback loop
Feedback occurs when outputs of a system are routed back as inputs as part of a chain of cause-and-effect that forms a circuit or loop. The system can then be said to ''feed back'' into itself. The notion of cause-and-effect has to be handled c ...
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Phenomenology (philosophy)
Phenomenology (from Greek φαινόμενον, ''phainómenon'' "that which appears" and λόγος, ''lógos'' "study") is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded ...
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Identity: in particular, the
Ship of Theseus
The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment about whether an object that has had all of its original components replaced remains the same object. According to legend, Theseus, the mythical Greek founder-king of Athens, had rescued the children ...
paradox
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Russell's paradox
In mathematical logic, Russell's paradox (also known as Russell's antinomy) is a set-theoretic paradox discovered by the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell in 1901. Russell's paradox shows that every set theory that contains ...
References
2007 non-fiction books
Science books
Cognitive science literature
Books by Douglas Hofstadter
Basic Books books
Self
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