Word: loops
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Hofstadter's unique intellectual makeup is rooted in his childhood. His father was Robert Hofstadter, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1961. As a boy, Hofstadter was fascinated by visual and conceptual loops: feedback, self-reference, recursiveness, anything that curved back on itself in an unexpected way. He provides several examples in I Am a Strange Loop (which is, among many other things, an intellectual autobiography). In the comic strip Nancy, Sluggo has a dream about a dreaming Sluggo, who is also dreaming of Sluggo, and so on in an infinite chain. The girl on the Morton...
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 Gödel, Escher, Bach: exploring the nature of the human mind through the work of Gödel, 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, Gödel discovered there are mathematical statements that, while true, can never be proved...
...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 Gödel'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't believe that it was perceiving a mirage, but no matter--it still was a mirage...
...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 beloved wife Carol died suddenly of a brain tumor at only 42, leaving him with two young children to care for. Hofstadter was overwhelmed by grief, and much of I Am a Strange Loop flows from his sense that Carol lives on in him--that the strange loop of her mind persists in his, a faint but real copy of her software running on his neural hardware, her tune played...
Just before the epilogue of I Am a Strange Loop, there's a photograph of a sculpture, an in-curving, interlaced metal knot that could almost be a three-dimensional map of one of 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 Gödel, Escher, Bach 28 years ago. Purely by chance, it was given to Hofstadter for Christmas one year...