I Am A Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstadter

I remember back in the 80's reading Hofstadter's book Godel, Escher, Bach.  I still have that copy.  This book had been on my TBR for years and I finally found it this year at Bookmans.  Wonderful, wonderful read, full of challenging thinking and science and philosophy.  He asks us to think about how our brain can have the concept of ourself - the "I" in "I am".  

Quotes/Clips:

        p 153 "analogy has force in proportion to its precision and its visibility."

p 174 "This tendency to proceed slowly from intuitive understanding at a high level to scientific understanding at a low level is reminiscent of the fact that the abstract notion of a gene as the basic unit by which heredity is passed from parent to offspring was boldly postulated an then carefully studied in laboratories for many decades before any "hard" physical grounding was found for it.."

          p 179 "The key point, though, is that we perceive essentially everything in life at this level, and essentially nothing at the level of the invisible components that, intellectually, we know we are made out of.          ...The general rule is that we swim in the world of everyday concepts, and it is they, not micro-events, that define our reality."

"p 299 ...the Morton sale logo"..infinite images of self-reference of girl holding the salt box.

In Chapter 21 he discusses Reason and Persons, a book by  Derek Parfit... and Eugene Onegin by Pushkin, a novel in verse; added it to my TBR.

 

Published: 2007  Read: Feb-March 2020  Genre: Science, Philosophy