Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

Page xviii not indulging in Pushkinian digressions… See James Falen’s sparkling anglicization of Pushkin’s classic novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin [Pushkin 1995], or see my own translation [Pushkin 1999]. There is no sublimer marriage of form to content than Eugene Onegin.

Page xviii typeset it down to the finest level of detail… In this book, one of my chief esthetic concerns has been where page breaks fall. A cardinal rule has been that no paragraph (or section) should ever break in such a way that only one line of it occurs at the top or bottom of a page. Another guiding principle has been that the interword spacing in each line should look pleasing, and, in particular, not too loose (which is a frequent and annoying eyesore in computer-set text). In order to avoid such blemishes, I have done touch-up rewriting, often quite extensive, of just about every paragraph in the book. Page xviii itself is a typical example of the end result. And of course the page you are right now reading (and that I am right now touching up so that it will please your eye) is another such example.

The foregoing esthetic constraints (along with a number of others that I won’t describe here) amount to random darts being thrown at every page in the book, with each dart saying to me, in effect, “Here — don’t you think you could rewrite this sentence so that it not only looks better but also makes its point even more clearly and elegantly?” Some authors might find this tiresome, but I freely confess that I love these random darts and the two-sided challenges that they offer me, and I have worked extremely hard to meet those challenges throughout. There is not a shadow of a doubt that form–content pressures — relentless, intense, and unpredictable — have greatly improved the quality of this book, not only visually but also intellectually.

For a more explicit spelling-out of my views on the magical power of form–content interplay, see [Hofstadter 1997], especially its Introduction and Chapter 5.

Page 5 no machine can know what words are, or mean… This ancient idea is the rallying cry of many philosophers, such as John Searle. See Chapter 20 of [Hofstadter and Dennett].

Page 5 the laws of whose operation are arithmetical… This is an allusion to the idea that a “Giant Electronic Brain”, whose very fiber is arithmetical, could act indistinguishably from a human or animal brain by modeling the arithmetical behavior of all of its neurons. This would give rise to a kind of artificial intelligence, but very different from models in which the basic entities are words or concepts governed by rules that reflect the abstract flow of ideas in a mind rather than the microscopic flow of currents and chemicals in biological hardware. Chapter XVII of [Hofstadter 1979], Chapter 26 of [Hofstadter and Dennett], and Chapter 26 of [Hofstadter 1985] all represent elaborations of this subtle distinction, which I was beginning to explore in my teens.

Page 10 I don’t know what effect it had on her feelings about the picture… With some trepidation, I recently read aloud this opening section of my book to my mother, who, at almost 87, can only move around her old Stanford house in a wheelchair, but who remains sharp as a tack and intensely interested in the world around her. She listened with care and then remarked, “I must have changed a lot since then, because now, those pictures mean everything to me. I couldn’t live without them.” I doubt that what I said to her that gloomy day nearly sixteen years ago played much of a role in this evolution of her feelings, but I was glad in any case to hear that she had come to feel that way.

Page 10 a tomato is a desireless, soulless, nonconscious entity… On the other hand, [Rucker] proposes that tomatoes, potatoes, cabbages, quarks, and sealing-wax are all conscious.

Page 11 a short story called “Pig”… Found in [Dahl].

Page 16 In his preface to the volume of Chopin’s études… All the prefaces that Huneker wrote in the Schirmer editions can be found in [Huneker].

Page 18 What gives us word-users the right to make… See [Singer and Mason].

Page 20 it is made of ‘the wrong stuff’… That brains but not computers are made of “the right stuff” is a slogan of John Searle. See Chapter 20 in [Hofstadter and Dennett].

Page 23 Philosophers of mind often use the terms… See, for example, [Dennett 1987].

Page 25 “What do I mean…by ‘brain research’?”… See [Churchland], [Dennett 1978], [Damasio], [Flanagan], [Hart], [Harth], [Penfield], [Pfeiffer], and [Sperry].

Page 26 these are all legitimate and important objects of neurological study… See [Damasio], [Kuffler and Nicholls], [Wooldridge], and [Penfield and Roberts].

Page 26 abstractions are central…in the study of the brain… See [Treisman], [Minsky 1986], [Schank], [Hofstadter and FARG], [Kanerva], [Fauconnier], [Dawkins], [Blackmore], and [Wheelis] for spellings-out of these abstract ideas.

Page 27 Just as the notion of “gene” as an invisible entity that enabled… See [ Judson].

Page 27 and just as the notion of “atoms” as the building blocks… See [Pais 1986], [Pais 1991], [Hoffmann], and [Pullman].

Page 28 Turing machines are…idealized computers… See [Hennie] and [Boolos and Jeffrey].

Page 29 In his vivid writings, Searle gives… See Chapter 22 of [Hofstadter and Dennett].

Page 29 one particular can that would “pop up”… In his smugly dismissive review [Searle] of [Hofstadter and Dennett], Searle states: “So let us imagine our thirst-simulating program running on a computer made entirely of old beer cans, millions (or billions) of old beer cans that are rigged up to levers and powered by windmills. We can imagine that the program simulates the neuron firings at the synapses by having beer cans bang into each other, thus achieving a strict correspondence between neuron firings and beer-can bangings. And at the end of the sequence a beer can pops up on which is written ‘I am thirsty.’ Now, to repeat the question, does anyone suppose that this Rube Goldberg apparatus is literally thirsty in the sense in which you and I are?”

Page 30 Dealing with brains as multi-level systems… See [Simon], [Pattee], [Atlan], [Dennett 1987], [Sperry], [Andersen], [Harth], [Holland 1995], [Holland 1997], and the dialogue “Prelude… Ant Fugue” in [Hofstadter 1979] or in [Hofstadter and Dennett].

Page 31 such as a column in the cerebral cortex… See [Kuffler and Nicholls].

Page 31 I once saw a book whose title was “Molecular Gods…” This was [Applewhite].

Page 31 to quote here a short passage from Sperry’s essay… Taken from [Sperry].

Page 32 taken from “The Floor”… See [Edson], which is a thin, remarkably vivid, highly surrealistic, often hilarious, and yet profoundly depressing collection of prose poems.

Page 33 such macroscopic phenomena as friction… A beautiful and accessible account of the emergence of everyday phenomena (such as how paper tears) out of the surrealistically weird quantum-mechanical substrate of our world is given in [Chandrasekhar].

Page 34 quarks, gluons, W and Z bosons… See [Pais 1986] and [Weinberg 1992].

Page 35 Drastic simplification is what allows us to…discover abstract essences… See [Kanerva], [Kahneman and Miller], [Margolis], [Sander], [Schank], [Hofstadter and FARG], [Minsky 1986], and [Gentner et al. ].

Page 38 641, say… I chose the oddball integer 641 because it plays a famous role in the history of mathematics. Fermat conjectured that all integers of the form are prime, but Euler discovered that 641 (itself a prime) divides , thus refuting Fermat’s conjecture. See [Wells 1986], [Wells 2005], and [Hardy and Wright].