I am a mirage that perceives itself.

“I am a mirage that perceives itself.”

Q: If our fundamental sense of what is real — our own existence — is merely a self-reinforcing mirage, does that call into question the reality of the universe itself?
A: I don’t think so. Even though subatomic particles engage in a deeply recursive process called renormalization, they don’t contain a self-model, and everything I talk about in this book — consciousness — derives from a self-model.

Me, My Soul, and I -- from << WIRED>> - March 07

Excerpt lifted from WIRED ( this was found by an MSN search - its not on Google yet .. i.e. 23 March 07)

In 1979, an unknown just out of grad school published his first book, using a then-exotic computer to do his own typesetting. The work was the inimitable Gödel, Escher, Bach, and its creator, Douglas Hofstadter, stunned the world with his zany, in-depth, and utterly brilliant investigation of self-reference in art and mathematics. Gödel earned him a Pulitzer Prize and inspired legions of youth to study computer science, but Hofstadter always felt readers didn’t quite get it. So to make his point perfectly clear, he has expanded upon his original thesis in I Am a Strange Loop, due in March. Wired asked Hofstadter to elaborate on some of his more mind-bending ideas. — Kevin Kelly
WIRED: How is your new book different from Gödel, which touched on physics, genetics, mathematics, and computer science?
HOFSTADTER: This time I’m only trying to figure out “What am I?”
Well, given the book’s title, you seem to have found out. But what is a strange loop?
One good prototype is the Escher drawing of two hands sketching each other. A more abstract one is the sentence I am lying. Such loops are, I think anyone would agree, strange. They seem paradoxical and even strike some people as dangerous. I argue that such a strange loop, paradoxical or not, is at the core of each human being. It is an abstract pattern that gives each of us an “I,” or, if you don’t mind the term, a soul.
Does this insight increase your understanding of yourself?
Of course. I believe that a soul is an abstract pattern, and we can therefore internalize in our brain the souls of other people.
You have a great line: “I am a mirage that perceives itself.” If our fundamental sense of what is real — our own existence — is merely a self-reinforcing mirage, does that call into question the reality of the universe itself?
I don’t think so. Even though subatomic particles engage in a deeply recursive process called renormalization, they don’t contain a self-model, and everything I talk about in this book — consciousness — derives from a self-model.
Strange Loop describes the soul as a self-model that is very weak in insects and stronger in mammals. What happens when machines have very large souls?
It’s a continuum, and a strange loop can arise in any substrate.
Thinking about different sizes of souls led you to vegetarianism. Would you hesitate to turn off the small soul of Stanley, the autonomous robot that found its way across the desert during the Darpa Grand Challenge?
Why not? Stanley doesn’t have a model of itself of any significance, let alone a persistent self-image built up over time. Unlike you and I, Stanley is no strange loop.
What if Stanley had as much self-awareness as a chicken?
Then I wouldn’t eat it, just as I wouldn’t eat a chicken.
In Loop, you shy away from speculating about the souls or the intelligence of computers, yet you’ve been working in AI for 30 years.
I avoid speculating about futuristic sci-fi AI scenarios, because I don’t think they respect the complexity of what we are thanks to evolution.
But isn’t your research all about trying to bring about such scenarios?
Thirty years ago, I didn’t distinguish between modeling the human mind and making smarter machines. After I realized this crucial difference, I focused exclusively on using computer models to try to understand the human mind. I no longer think of myself as an AI researcher but as a cognitive scientist.
One of the attractions of your writing is the wordplay, a fascination with the kind of recursions that appeal to programmers and nerds.
It is ironic because my whole life I have felt uncomfortable with the nerd culture that centers on computers. I always hope my writings will resonate with people who love literature, art, and music. But instead, a large fraction of my audience seems to be those who are fascinated by technology and who assume that I am, too.

Amazon's About the Author

Douglas R. Hofstadter is College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. His previous books are the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach; Metamagical Themas, The Mind's I, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, Le Ton Beau de Marot, and Eugene Onegin.

Amazon's Book Description

Douglas Hofstadter's long-awaited return to the themes of Godel, Escher, Bach
--an original and controversial view of the nature of consciousness and identity.
Can thought arise out of matter? Can self, a soul, a consciousness, an "I" arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here?
I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the "strange loop"--a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. The most central and complex symbol in your brain or mine is the one called "I." The "I" is the nexus in our brain, one of many symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.
How can a mysterious abstraction be real--or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the laws of physics?
These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since Gödel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is the book Hofstadter's many readers have been waiting for.

review from Booklist

For more than 25 years, Hofstadter has been explaining the mystery of human consciousness
through a bold fusion of mathematical logic and cognitive science. Yet for all of the acclaim his fusion has garnered (including the Pulitzer for his Godel, Escher, Bach, 1979), this pioneer admits that few readers have really grasped its meaning. To dispel the lingering incomprehension, Hofstadter here amplifies his revolutionary conception of the mind. A repudiation of traditional dualism--in which a spirit or soul inhabits the body--this revolutionary conception defines the mind as the emergence of a neural feedback loop within the brain. It is this peculiar loop that allows a stream of cognitive symbols to twist back on itself, so creating the self-awareness and self-integration that constitute an "I." Hofstadter explains the dynamics of this reflective self in refreshingly lucid language, enlivened with personal anecdotes that translate arcane formulas into the wagging tail on a golden retriever or the smile on Hopalong Cassidy. Nonspecialists are thus able to assess the divide between human and animal minds, and even to plumb the mental links binding the living to the dead. Hofstadter's analysis will not convince all skeptics. But even skeptics will appreciate the way he forces us to think deeper thoughts about thought. Bryce ChristensenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

A Review from Publishers Weekly

Hofstadter—who won a Pulitzer for his 1979 book, Gödel, Escher, Bach

—blends a surprising array of disciplines and styles in his continuing rumination on the nature of consciousness. Eschewing the study of biological processes as inadequate to the task, he argues that the phenomenon of self-awareness is best explained by an abstract model based on symbols and self-referential "loops," which, as they accumulate experiences, create high-level consciousness. Theories aside, it's impossible not to experience this book as a tender, remarkably personal and poignant effort to understand the death of his wife from cancer in 1993—and to grasp how consciousness mediates our otherwise ineffable relationships. In the end, Hofstadter's view is deeply philosophical rather than scientific. It's hopeful and romantic as well, as his model allows one consciousness to create and maintain within itself true representations of the essence of another. The book is all Hofstadter—part theory, some of it difficult; part affecting memoir; part inventive thought experiment—presented for the most part with an incorrigible playfulness. And whatever readers' reaction to the underlying arguments for this unique view of consciousness, they will find the model provocative and heroically humane. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Wolfram MathWorld on Strange Loop

Strange Loop

this is lifted from the entry on Strange Loop in Wolfram MathWorld

A strange loop is a phenomenon in which, whenever movement is made upwards or downwards through the levels of some hierarchical system, the system unexpectedly arrives back where it started. Hofstadter (1987) uses the strange loop as a paradigm in which to interpret paradoxes in logic (such as Grelling's paradox, the liar's paradox, and Russell's paradox) and calls a system in which a strange loop appears a tangled hierarchy.
Canon 5 from Bach's Musical Offering (sometimes known as Bach's endlessly rising canon) is a musical piece that continues to rise in key, modulating through the entire chromatic scale until it ends in the same key in which it began. This is the first example cited by Hofstadter (1989) as a strange loop.
Other examples include the endlessly rising stairs in M. C. Escher 1960 lithograph Ascending and Descending, the endlessly falling waterfall in his 1961 lithograph Waterfall, and the pair of hands drawing each other in his lithograph Drawing Hands (Hofstadter 1989, pp. 10-15). Painter René Magritte's The Treachery of Images provides another example.
Various authors have written works whose titles involve strange loops. For example, Abbie Hoffman humorously attempted to undermine sales of his own book by entitling it Steal This Book, while the band "System of a Down" did the analogous thing with their album Steal This Album!
SEE ALSO: Grelling's Paradox, Liar's Paradox, Russell's Paradox, Tangled Hierarchy. [Pages Linking Here]
REFERENCES:
Escher, M. C. "Ascending and Descending." Lithograph. 1960. http://www.mcescher.com/Gallery/recogn-bmp/LW435.jpg.
Escher, M. C. "Waterfall." Lithograph. 1961. http://www.mcescher.com/Gallery/recogn-bmp/LW439.jpg.
Hoffman, A. Steal this Book, new ed. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002.
Hofstadter, D. R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Vintage Books, pp. 10-28, 1989.
LAST MODIFIED: September 12, 2006 CITE THIS AS:
Weisstein, Eric W. "Strange Loop." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/StrangeLoop.html

A review of Strange Loop from SciAm

A New Journey into Hofstadter's Mind

here is an excerpt ..

"You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated 'you' makes more decisions, and so forth, round and round," Hofstadter writes. What blossoms from the Gödelian vortex--this symbol system with the power to represent itself--is the "anatomically invisible, terribly murky thing called I." A self, or, to use the name he favors, a soul.

Wikipedia on Strange Loops

It's good to see Wikipedia giving prominence to Strange Loops.

Here's an extract :

A strange loop arises when, by moving up or down through a hierarchical system, one finds oneself back where one started. Strange loops may involve self-reference and paradox. The concept of a strange loop was proposed and extensively discussed by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach, and will presumably be further elaborated in the same author's new book I Am a Strange Loop, which is due to appear in 2007.

Is the Universe a Fractal ?

A fascinating coincidence is the fact that this article and the Douglas Hofstadter (I am a Strange Loop) interview are in the same edition of New Scientist. Here is the opening para.

Written across the sky is a secret, a hidden blueprint detailing the original design of the universe itself. The spread of matter throughout space follows a pattern laid out at the beginning of time and scaled up to incredible proportions by nearly 14 billion years of cosmic expansion. Today that pattern is gradually being decoded by analysing maps of the distribution of the stars, and what has been uncovered could shake modern cosmology to its foundations.

There are uncanny parallels between the infinite vortex of his strange loop and the ideas put forward in this piece on the possibility of a fractal universe. Well done New Scientist - although I guess it was unintentional - or was it ?!

THE INFINITE VORTEX

Ahead of the release of Douglas Hofstadter's latest book "I am a Strange Loop" a few profiles have been floating around in the media (see New Scientist, 10 March 2007). I have taken some notes which could be useful.

Hofstadter’s latest theme is “what is self ?” He says it’s not a physical object, but a pattern. It could be as simple as a smile — if that is how you remember somebody. Selves change over time … they are transient. They can be represented at many levels and exist in multiple places.

Hofstadter believes a self - although not physical - does requires a substrate to support its existence. This could be a photograph or a mirror. The patterns defining self may be captured within a place, an event, a certain style or culture. The pattern must have a minimum dimension to be a self. A summary or sketch may be too small or lack definition. He uses the notion of granularity. Like the dots in a newspaper photo, they may be too coarse to allow a face to be identified.

The key to the Strange Loop of the book’s title is the importance of self-referencing. Hofstadter uses the analogy of the video camera pointed at a monitor, which in turn is connected to the camera. He sees the effect of the infinite vortex of feedback as the model of building and representing a “self”

Together with self-reference he sees the unlikely partners of literature and science using familiar tools such as paradox, metaphor, irony and humour to help deal with (and explain) complex realities.

The author’s humanity comes to the fore when he well dwells on the ultimate definition of a wholesome and healthy self. He believes we should all reflect upon other people with empathy and co-operation. This sounds very much like the Golden Rule, long identified by the wise ancients of all cultures, that is — do unto others as you would have them do to yourself.