The Mind's I
The author of "G?del, Escher, Bach" wonders what makes the self.
By Reviewed by Peter D. Kramer
Sunday, April 29, 2007; BW04
I AM A STRANGE LOOP
By Douglas Hofstadter
Basic. 412 pp. $26.95
Okay, I think, therefore I am. But who gets to play that game? A newborn? A mosquito? A computer? If my thoughts are elsewhere, am I here or there? When I no longer think as I once did, am I the same person? What composes this "I," molecules or memories?
Questions about the boundaries, location, continuity and constituents of the self stand at the heart of philosophy, but a mathematician and physicist, Ren? Descartes, set the terms of the discussion. Who better to bring us up to date than Douglas Hofstadter? Trained in math and physics, Hofstadter won a 1980 Pulitzer Prize for G?del, Escher, Bach, a bravura performance linking logic, art and music. He returns now to apply a concept from that book, the strange loop, to the definition of self.
Like consciousness, the strange loop is elusive. When a brilliant author uses one slippery concept to clarify another, the result for the reader can be anxiety. Page after page, we may wonder whether we will reach the limit of our understanding and whether the journey will be worth the effort.
Fortunately, Hofstadter is a gifted raconteur and a master of metaphor. He conjures up a car with a 16-cylinder motor and what the salesman calls Racecar Power?. It's not as if you can get a model that has the engine without the trademark feature. Similarly, Hofstadter writes, "consciousness is not an [added] option" for beings evolved to engage in symbolic thought, recognize patterns, create categories, reason via analogies and wonder about the self. Consciousness is "the upper end of a continuous spectrum of self-perception levels that brains automatically possess as a result of their design."
Hofstadter's strange loop is the feedback loop. Point a video camera at a TV displaying the camera's output, and you will produce a receding corridor of screens. Pixels make up the picture, but our interest is in the image, the tunnel of rectangles. Identity resembles that phenomenon. Never mind the neurons that make up our brain. Our emotions, others' responses and our repeated looks outward to the world and inward to ourselves shape what we call our self. Nor is ours the only loop we contain. We know how our friends see things; our mind houses their perspectives -- it has the formulae for producing their thoughts.
However mechanistic, Hofstadter's account of the self emerges from deep emotion. In 1993, when she was 43, Hofstadter's wife and soul mate, Carol, died suddenly of a brain tumor. Three months into his mourning, Hofstadter initiated a heartfelt correspondence with the philosopher Daniel Dennett. What emerged was Hofstadter's understanding of self as distributed over many minds, a concept that explained how Carol's "personal sense of 'I' " lived on (in "low-resolution fashion") as a "loop" in Hofstadter's consciousness.
I have so far given a superficial account of Hofstadter's position. As his book title indicates, for Hofstadter the self is a strange loop. Strange loops are reflexive and paradoxical, like M.C. Escher's impossible image of right and left hands drawing each other into existence. Hofstadter's example of a real-world strange loop is a key construct in Kurt G?del's incompleteness theorem, published in 1931, a proof that any seemingly comprehensive mathematical system will contain true statements that cannot be proven. The theorem is notoriously indigestible.
How elusive is this strange loop? I was a young math buff. Last year, when Discover magazine surveyed authors about science writing that had influenced them, atop my list was a popularization of G?del's proof by Ernest Nagel and James Newman -- the same book that inspired Hofstadter in his teens. If I am, for that reason, an ideal audience for the strange loop theory, there's good news and bad. I found Hofstadter's explication of G?del revelatory. There were implications of the proof that I had never appreciated. But then (here's evidence for discontinuity), I no longer quite understand the proof. Nor, given what I do grasp, am I convinced that the entities G?del conceived are apt analogues of the self.
This difficulty does surprisingly little to diminish Hofstadter's achievement. Philosophers of mind are divided between those who see consciousness as a special quality (like Racecar Power?) and those who see it as irredeemably physical (like neural networks). Hofstadter points to another level at which self might exist, up among the symbols and patterns -- or rather, to various levels on which self exists simultaneously. His conclusions mesh well with those of psychotherapy. We are not selves first and social creatures later. It's through empathy that we develop a rich sense of self. Nor is the self neatly demarcated. We contain multitudes. ?
Peter D. Kramer is the author of "Against Depression" and, most recently, "Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind."
- posted on 04/30/2007
正在看这本书。和以前看 GEB 的一个感觉一样，他可真够罗嗦的。我不想读小说，就想用最短的时间读到他要说的最本质的思想，可我先得读一大堆不大相关的话，比如他关于素食主义的布道，满嘴里跑舌头，唉！:-)
自我意识问题一直是个很有兴趣的哲学、科学问题，前几年 Crick 写的 "The Astonishing Hypothesis" 在科普的水平上从神经生理的角度讲过意识的问题。（在心理学上讲意识的人就太多了，但对我来说都有点隔靴搔痒的感觉，要讲的透彻，就得从低层次讲起。心理学的讨论总让我联想到燃素，以太之类似是而非的东东）其实他真正能比较深入讲的也只是视觉上的 awareness，因为这是目前脑科学里了解相对最多比较成熟的领域。
Hofstadter 不是搞生物的，他在逻辑哲学的意义上讨论意识，应该会同样有意思。只不过得耐着性子读那些不大相关的闲话。
他在前言里说，很多人不真的懂他在 GEB 里讲的意思，我很同情他。其实他想讲的核心是 self reference，recursion, 哥德尔的 Incompleteness Theorem，他把巴赫，埃舍尔拉出来是给哥德尔垫背，很多人没看出来，反倒津津乐道地谈 B 和 E, 怪不得Hofstadter 觉得失望了。 - Re: Review of I AM A STRANGE LOOPposted on 04/30/2007
讲得清楚的东西没意思，有意思的东西讲不清楚，古来如此，将来大概也如此。
这就是为什么维特根斯坦在这两“东西”之间舍命一刀，大喊闭嘴的缘故。
有能耐的，就领着一班有“悟性”的，在隐喻串里穿行，到达似非似是的境界。
没有能耐的，就是这网上博客泡饭的。 - Re: Review of I AM A STRANGE LOOPposted on 05/01/2007
Oh, you poor thing! You don't seem to have been happy here for so long. You have my sympathy. :-D
Why bother yourself to mingle with a bunch of 网上博客泡饭的? - Re: Review of I AM A STRANGE LOOPposted on 05/01/2007
哈哈哈，怎么像个老娘姨似的讲话？你又不博客，急啥子急？
博客是不请自脱的东西，从来不看。;) - Re: Review of I AM A STRANGE LOOPposted on 05/01/2007
你误会了，我只不过是有点可怜你啊，一天到晚一肚子怨气，别伤了身子啊！:-D
You deserve a little more self-pity, you can easily put yourself out of your misery, you know? :-) - Re: Review of I AM A STRANGE LOOPposted on 05/01/2007
Did I ever sound pitiful and miserable to you? ;)
I admit being caustic, quite so often. But it's just me.
By the way I zted the review.
Thank you for your concern.
Recursively yours,
- Re: Review of I AM A STRANGE LOOPposted on 05/01/2007
so long as you are happy here as you say, it is really not my business anyway. :-)
BTW, how many masks do you use here nowadays? Can I assume all those by zt are yours? Are you the old devil and some even older whatever as they say? sometimes I just wonder whom I am speaking to... - Re: Review of I AM A STRANGE LOOPposted on 05/01/2007
guanzhong大人说得跟我想得一模一样，而且我也觉得H有点罗嗦，真正的思想反而被掩藏。我也觉得GEB里的G才是根本，剩下两个说得很皮毛，当玩笑看即可。当然，H是真心喜欢他们的，不过没说出什么非他说不可的东西。
- posted on 05/01/2007
就是那个传说中的管风琴吧？难怪所见略同，一笔写不出两个管字啊！（你可能不知道，他们也有人叫我管仲呢）
还是别管我叫大人了吧，要不你该显得象个小孩儿了，那不亏了！:-)
你是巴赫的专家，当然更喜欢听你忽悠巴赫，谁还听 H 的呀？:-)
马慧元 wrote:
guanzhong大人说得跟我想得一模一样，而且我也觉得H有点罗嗦，真正的思想反而被掩藏。我也觉得GEB里的G才是根本，剩下两个说得很皮毛，当玩笑看即可。当然，H是真心喜欢他们的，不过没说出什么非他说不可的东西。
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