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...book was called G??del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid--G??del being the Austrian mathematician Kurt G??del; Escher, the fantastical Dutch artist M.C. Escher; and Bach, the Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach. The extraordinary mind that braided these three figures together in one book belonged to one Douglas Hofstadter, a physics Ph.D. who was only 34 years old at the time. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for G??del, Escher, Bach, and it went on to become a cult classic that influenced a generation of thinkers. Since then Hofstadter has published on numerous subjects...
Those themes--recursive loops and the physical origins of consciousness--get braided together in I Am a Strange Loop in unexpected ways. The book returns to a theme that Hofstadter first sounded in G??del, Escher, Bach: exploring the nature of the human mind through the work of G??del, who demonstrated in 1931 that conventional mathematics, which we think of as a supremely logical and consistent system, is actually capable of making all sorts of strange, paradoxical, self-referential statements about itself. For example, G??del discovered there are mathematical statements that, while true, can never be proved...
Hofstadter sees in G??del's work a structural parallel to the mystery that is the human mind. The brain, which is merely a squishy agglomeration of madly firing neurons, shouldn't by rights be able to think--it shouldn't be able to wake up, twist around, become aware of itself, and in doing so become an "I," but it does. Just like G??del's mathematics, the mind is a strange, self-referential loop--it's a mirage, Hofstadter writes, but "a very peculiar kind of mirage ... a mirage that perceived itself, and of course it didn...
...those recursive, self-referential arguments Hofstadter is so fond of. When I saw it, I was struck not just by how beautiful it was but also by the fact that I'd seen it before: it was made by my sister, who was so deeply inspired by G??del, Escher, Bach 28 years ago. Purely by chance, it was given to Hofstadter for Christmas one year, and he photographed it and put the picture in his book. I told Hofstadter, who loves this kind of spectacular oddity--it's evidence, maybe, that something of his mental pattern made...
...consider al-Dewachi enough of a security risk to deny him a visa. Yet now, with Iraq a democracy, the U.S. feels sufficiently threatened to nullify its former approvals and deny this legitimate student reentry. Worse, the only way al-Dewachi can receive an acceptable “G?? series passport is to return to Baghdad, a city torn apart by the war incited by the U.S., the very nation denying him a safe place to live and work. In an e-mail al-Dewachi wrote that, “the U.S. State Department has declared bureaucratic...