Reddit reviews I Am a Strange Loop

Ah, I see someone has been reading his Hofstadter.

I recommend some books to you:

http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Dennett/dp/0316180661

http://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp/0465030785

http://www.amazon.com/The-Minds-Fantasies-Reflections-Self/dp/0465030912

Your sense of self, your "I", your mind, is produced by your brain, which is a physical structure that is not destroyed and remade during sleep. This is why you remember what happened yesterday. "You" are a pile of grey goo in a skull.

Why is there something in the first place to give rise to the phenomenon of perception?

You should read I Am A Strange Loop for an attempt to use meta-analysis in explaining consciousness, no drugs required.

Why do patterns seem less real to us than concrete objects? Because they aren't detected by any sense directly? (Actually, some are, in the hardware of our eyes.) Because, being mediated by the brain, one person can see one way, and another, another? Because there are so many patterns possible, and so many of them turn out to be wrong, so we don't trust them as a rule?

Chapter 3 of Douglas Hofstadter's 'I am a Strange Loop' is titled, 'The Causal Potency of Patterns'. Well, if a pattern can cause something concrete, it has to be as real as what it caused. I think it's one of the last holdout areas of AI, getting an agent to discover, name, and make use of patterns.

I just finished Zen about a week ago and have now started "I Am A Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter. I have only read the prologue and the first chapter so I don't have a good feel for it yet, but it seems intriguing. So far Hofstadter has put forth questions of what "I" consists of and what consciousness is.

I Am A Strange Loop

After this on my reading list is Art & Physics by Leonard Schlain.

Douglas Hofstadter talks about something like this in I am a Strange Loop. Here's an interview that talks about it a bit. I recommend reading the book, though you may enjoy it more after reading Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

I recommend reading this

Your path towards becoming a vegan reminds me of Douglas Hofstadter's journey towards vegetariansim to a certain extent. If you get a chance, it in the first few chapters of his book, I Am a Strange Loop.

He's got a new book coming out soon, since forever. Just FYI.

Ah yes, Dollhouse...interesting because the twist is that it is the psyche being cloned not the physical body. Not Whedon's best but I must admit I liked it and miss it :(

Blade Runner...yes! How could I forget Dekker in the original Philip K Dick story? Don't want to spoil it for anyone but there's a twist!

If we're talking about the nature of consciousness, the classic story "Overdrawn At The Memory Bank" by John Varley is one of the first stories to explore consciousness encased within a digital medium. Then there's William Gibson's stories in the 80's with ROM-construct-encased human personalities, soul-catchers, Turing Registered AIs...wow, I never realised that this subject has been explored so widely.

That John Weldon short is a real gem! "The scientist was beside himself" - just beautiful! Thanks for the link!

Larry Niven explored this exact concept in his essay "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation", and of course as the OP mentioned, "The Prestige" takes this idea and runs with it...

BTW I got a 404 from the Hofstadter link, but googled it and got this

Upvote for you, and thanks for much food-for-thought!

Because human consciousness is an axiom. An omnipotent creator's conscious would supersede the subsystem (human mind) it created and couldn't be proved or disproved by anything within or created by that subsystem (in our case mathematics). You should check out I Am a Strange Loop Now could we be 'aware' of a God? sure, like an ant can be aware that something is horribly wrong when a kid burns it with a magnifying glass, but could we ever fully prove/disprove/understand?, I don't believe so. [Key word being believe, not know].

Check this one out

http://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp/0465030785

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. This single book changed my life more than any thing else I've ever read, and I couldn't put it down.

I recommend reading I am a strange loop. I can ashamedly admit that I'm only halfway through and my mind has been blown (I learned a lot of what I'd read from philosophy already, but when it got to the math parts...wow, just wow.)

I am a Strange Loop

http://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp/0465030785

Read I am a strange loop by Douglas Hofstadter.

It is an unconventional, but neither religious nor esoteric approach to our mind and consciousness, containing the insight that people we have known well indeed 'live on' in our memory after death, as we simulate their personalities when we think about them.

Douglas Hofstadter, author of "I Am a Strange Loop", has some interesting ideas on souls (Ctrl+F for "Another surprising argument in the book is the almost Zennish claim that the soul is nothing but an illusion; an illusion that exists because it hallucinates itself."), and what it would mean if they exist.

In the book, Hofstadter explores things like the origin, location, size, and other traits of theoretical souls. If a soul is created at conception, what does that mean for identical twins? Do they each get a half soul? Does the soul split and become two? Do they start out as identical souls? What happens in a Star Trek-like transporter beam scenario? Is the soul destroyed and recreated with the body each time? Does it travel with the information pattern transmitted via whatever medium is used for this? What happens when the transporter malfunctions and you end up with two copies of the original pattern?

Whether you agree with Hofstadter or not, treating an idea as potentially true, and then exploring what it would mean if it were true, can be a great way to see that it's not true. For example, I read a ton of sci-fi & fantasy as a kid, where things like telepathy and telekinesis and magic are real things within the story, allowing the author to explore these things. The ancient planet Vulcan had a pre-industrial telepathic world-wide communications network; a near-future earth had an "Associated Telepaths and Teleporters" company launching payloads into space; and I think we've all read Harry Potter here. The world I live in does not operate the way those worlds did, and so I don't believe in those things.


(Edits: spelling, accidentally a word, link formatting)

This explains in great mathematical/philosophical detail the idea of recursion and how this explains in great mathematical/philosophical detail the idea of recursion and how I Am a Strange Loop.

Or his book I am a Strange Loop would seem to be up your alley

First of all, free will is a bit different than consciousness:

Consciousness is (this is a pretty watered down definition) just the ability to perceive things, or be aware of things. It is commonly explained as a "self-referential loop" (Douglass Hofstadter wrote a book on this).

Free will is (again, pretty slack definition) the ability to affect a course of events in a way that is somehow deeper than or separated from neurons firing, chemical interaction, and all that good stuff going on in your brain.

Most philosophers (or at least many) reject free will on the grounds that there is simply no reason to believe that anything happening in our brains is more than physical reactions.

Lastly, the arguments that we are manipulating the universe tend to be made among guys like Deepak Chopra. I don't know of any serious philosophers who are making those arguments.

Just going to leave this here