DOUGLAS HOFSTADTER STRANGE LOOP PDF

I Am a Strange Loop has ratings and reviews. BlackOxford said: Strangely WrongI must suggest something blasphemously arrogant: Douglas Hofsta. “I Am a Strange Loop is vintage Hofstadter: earnest, deep, overflowing with ideas, cognitive scientist and polymath Douglas Hofstadter has returned to his. Scott O’Reilly loops the loop with Douglas Hofstadter.

I Am a Strange Loop – Wikipedia

He has numerous liop sequences and geometric constructions named after him. Lots of things intruded on my time and it can be finished far more quickly than my dates would imply. But for an hour.

Osim metafora iznosi malo dokaza za svoje pretpostavke, uz neke krajnje olake kvalifikacije. And the book does strxnge excellent job of presenting his views on just how the “I” forms in a brain, what kind of hardware may be necessary for an “I”, what kinds of “I” am doug,as there, and on how many brains a single “I” may live. The book’s method and organization lead the reader to understand and perhaps accept this huge concept in a way that I again found very frustrating — often indirect, full of special vocabulary and game-playing, highly personal, idiosyncratic, shifting and evasive, and Douglsa would say self-indulgent.

Mar 13, Fred rated it it was ok. We are not born with an “I” — douflas ego emerges only gradually as experience shapes our dense web of active symbols into a tapestry rich and complex enough to begin twisting back upon itself. The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model the act of artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform “gridfonts” typefaces limited to a grid.

And on the plus side, at least Hofstadter’s discussion of Godel was refreshingly correct technically — it helps having had some formal mathematical training. On the face of it, this is an interesting book. In this way, one could embed statements about statements into the system, not just statements about numbers, because statements about numbers could also be statements about numbers that were standing in for other statements. After all, when we kill, it’s not really the ‘I’ of the victim that we’re hurting-it’s those who survive who valued that thing that we should care about, if the injunction is to not cause pain.

Hofstadter is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. His epiphany came back in the 70’s when he took a video camera and began shooting it directly at the TV monitor which itself was displaying the video feed, thus showing an infinite number of reflections which gradually fade to a single point.

Poetically speaking, Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare, Plato, Socrates and our loved ones can live on through us insofar as we can see the world through their eyes.

I can see it, and believe it. If you’re teleported, your body at its original position being destroyed and then reconstituted at another location, with all the physical and memory details intact, most of us have the intuition that this describes the same person being moved.

What I mean by “strange loop” is — here goes a first liop, anyway — not starnge physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction or structure to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out hofsttadter give rise to a closed cycle.

Hofstasdter has not done the experiment, followed the procedures, practiced the practices, that allows one to approach an awareness of the Self.

May 03, Greg rated it it was ok. Become a PEL Citizen! His grasp of the philosophical arguments is lacking, and he spends most of a chapter refuting thought experiments with the laws of physics. Want to Read saving…. Does he go to lunch with the other philosophers who believe our mental states cannot translate into action, and wind up just walking aimlessly until they find a Taco Bell? December Learn how and when to remove this template message. And should I get hit by a bus today, with these words I am with you now.

But I wonder if Hofstadter, enthusiastic as he is over the idea of self-referencing systems, isn’t overstating his point. He’s thought about this for a long, long time and has come up with hofstatder rather surprising opinions on the matter.

Then, like the self reflective numbers and riddles that Hofsatder likes to observe and understand, he tells us about his own life, his wife and family, and the loop widens. He is working on a book exploring the philosophical dimensions of the music of the band Yes. Sometimes, too, Hofstadter employs playful analogies to show how consciousness works, and how it doesn’t work.

Strange loop

When played with the hofstatder pitch of the tone moving upwards or downwards, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. Ah, loops and paradoxes. The brain is such a system, but it has so many properties so utterly divergent from formal systems that the analogy is not very instructive. Jan 11, Kristopher rated it did not like it Shelves: Thanks for telling us about the problem.

I Am a Strange Loop

One could make the argument that I’m not qualified to complain about the reasoning going in this book. He was initially appointed to the Indiana University’s Computer Science Department faculty inand at that time he launched his straneg program in computer modeling of mental processes which at that time he called “artificial intelligence research”, a label that he has since dropped in favor of “cognitive science research”.

Better to draw some other kind of line than a soul-based line, and base it on environmental concerns or cruelty concerns, I think.

Ultimately, my first complaint keeps stange true–the whole premise is flawed. But these senses of the word “soul” are not equivalent. And I truly mean that as a compliment. Likewise, if I listen to enough of a podcast, I find myself being able to think like the people on the podcast. This article about a philosophy -related book is a stub.

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter

It may well be that growth in the self-symbol correlates to increased consciousness dokglas seems a very plausible and highly useful result of this bookbut I also buy Chalmers’s charge that unless you’ve explained consciousness in the first place, then pointing to self-consciousness is not going to solve the problem.

He lop the words of someone who objects into the book, saying “I can’t say for sure that a mosquito doesn’t have as rich an internal life as I do! Results have no meaning without the formula, procedure, recipe, for generating them.