I Am a Strange Loop

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English language

Published July 8, 2008

ISBN:
978-0-465-03079-8
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4 stars (3 reviews)

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.

In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference. 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 …

4 editions

reviewed I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Review of 'I Am a Strange Loop' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

The author's key strength is his ability to effectively explain complex topics in layman's terms using analogies. That helps a lot in this book, considering its complex topic - Consciousness. I found myself almost always agreeing with the author's idea about the existence/non-existence of the 'self'. Since I am not well-read on this topic, I will reserve from commenting too much on the topic of the 'self'. Instead, I will say that the author does a decent job of presenting the arguments objectively. And this is quite hard to achieve for a complex philosophical topic while keeping the text light and understandable.
The only minor complaint I have was that towards the end there are some sections - talking about musical tastes and their relation to the idea of self - that I found a bit out of place. I would not hold this against the author as the rest …

reviewed I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter

什么定义了“我”

5 stars

我曾反复讨论过这个问题，我记得我当时的描述是：我是一个时间函数，我是我经历的一切的总和。我记得我讨论过，“我”是时刻在变化的，但通常来说光滑；而一些重大的改变会导致“我”急剧变化（连续但不光滑）。

然而，这个答案是如此被动，仿佛人本身的意愿无关紧要，仿佛一切只是随机发生的事件。在被所谓马原思修熏陶了二十年的我眼中，讨论人的主观就有滑向唯心论的风险，而后者是违背了“科学”的。

这本书则清晰地讨论了，为什么抽象的概念也是“唯物”的，为什么我们应该讨论抽象的符号，而不是物理实体（一滩软滑的器官）。更进一步，在这些抽象符号的基础上，“我”的概念是如何不可避免地产生。

我提到过，这本书语气说是一本教程，不如说是作者分享他在这条路上的旅程。这条路由坚实的（起码在我看来自洽并且能够重现的）逻辑构成，沿途充斥着有趣的、精心设计的例子，基本没有废笔。

我曾经提到过，我觉得作者用笔不太经济，阅读时可以适当略读。我想这也许是所谓“文学性”的体现，这一点让这本书不那么“硬核”，让它的受众变得更大。这种文学性起初让我觉得烦躁，但这是因为我怀抱着想要学点什么的预期来读它。如果放平心态，只当是闲谈，有所收获只是意外，那么阅读体验立刻就好了很多。

总的来说，这本书提供了一定程度的思维刺激，但相当温和。它既能提供智力游戏的快感，又能提供文字上的美感，我觉得我在阅读它时得到的享受和收获是值得一个五星的（即使我现在还没看完）。