Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

Page 298 The…self-pointing loop that the pronoun “I” involves … See [Brinck] and [Kent].

Page 299 This is what John von Neumann unwittingly revealed… See [von Neumann] for a very difficult and [Poundstone] for a very lucid discussion of self-replicating automata.

See Chapters 2 and 3 of [Hofstadter 1985] for a simpler discussion of the same ideas. Chapter 16 of [Hofstadter 1979] carefully spells out the mapping between Gödel’s self-referential construction and the self-replicating mechanisms at the core of life.

Page 300 too marbelous for words… Borrowing a few words from a love song by Johnny Mercer and Richard Whiting, sung in an unsurpassable fashion by Frank Sinatra.

Page 300 with alacrity, celerity, assiduity, vim, vigor, vitality… My father’s friend Bob Herman (a top-notch physicist who famously co-predicted the cosmic background radiation fifteen years before it was observed) loved to recite this riddle, putting on a strong Yiddish accent: “A tramp in the woods happened upon a hornets’ nest. When they stung him with alacrity, celerity, assiduity, vim, vigor, vitality, savoir-faire, and undue velocity, ‘Oh!’, he mused, counting his bumps, ‘If I had as many bumps on the left side of my right adenoid as six and three-quarters times seven-eighths of those between the heel of Achilles and the circumference of Adam’s apple, how long would it take a boy rolling a hoop up a moving stairway going down to count the splinters on a boardwalk if a horse had six legs?’ ” And so I thought I’d give a little posthumous hat-tip to Bob.

Page 305 Dan calls such carefully crafted fables ‘intuition pumps’… Dennett introduced his term “intuition pump”, I believe, in the Reflections that he wrote on John Searle’s “Chinese room” thought experiment in Chapter 22 of [Hofstadter and Dennett].

Page 308 The term Parfit prefers is “psychological continuity”… See [Nozick] for a lengthy treatment of the closely related concept of “closest continuer”.

Page 309 what Einstein accomplished in creating special relativity… See [Hoffmann].

Page 309 what a whole generation of brilliant physicists, with Einstein at their core… See [Pais 1986], [Pais 1991], and [Pullman].

Page 315 just tendencies and inclinations and habits, including verbal ones… See the Prologue for my first inklings of this viewpoint. See also my Achilles–Tortoise dialogue entitled “A Conversation with Einstein’s Brain”, which is Chapter 26 in [Hofstadter and Dennett], for more evolved ideas on it.

Page 320 Dave Chalmers explores these issues… See [Chalmers]. I always find it ironic that Dave’s highly articulate and subtle ideas on consciousness, so wildly opposed to my own, took shape right under my nose some fifteen or so years ago, in my very own Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, at Indiana University (although the old oaken table in Room 641 is a bit of a tall tale…). Dave added enormous verve to our research group, and he was a good friend to both Carol and me. Despite our disagreements on qualia, zombies, and consciousness, we remain good friends.

Page 321 with a nine-planet solar system… I’m not about to enter into the raging debate over poor Pluto’s possible planethood (is Disney’s Pluto a dog?), although I think the question is a fascinating one from the point of view of cognitive science, since it opens up deep questions about the nature of categories and analogies in the human mind.

Page 322 Z-people… laugh exactly the same as …Q-people… See “Planet without Laughter” in [Smullyan 1980], a wonderful tale about vacuously laughing zombies.

Page 324 Dan Dennett’s criticism of such philosophers hits the nail on the head… See especially “The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies” in [Dennett 1998] and “The Zombic Hunch” in [Dennett 2005] for marvelous Dennettian arguments.

Page 325 you can quote me on that… Actually, the image is Bill Frucht’s, so you can quote Bill on that. I had originally written something about a Flash Gordon–style hood ornament, and Bill, probably correctly seeing this 1950’s image as too passé, perhaps even camp, pulled me single-handedly into the twenty-first century.

Page 326 What is this nutty Capitalized Essence all about? I concocted the phrase “Capitalized Essences” when I wrote the dialogue “Three-Part Invention” in [Hofstadter 1979].

Page 333 for all you know, what I am experiencing as redness… The most penetrating discussion of the inverted-spectrum riddle that I have read is that in [Dennett 1991].

Page 333 Bleu Blanc Rouge… The colors of the French flag are red, white, and blue, but the French always recite them in the order “blue, white, red”. This makes for a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that their color experiences are “just like ours, but flipped”.

Page 339 the so-called problem of “free will”… There had to be some arena in which Dan Dennett and I do not quite see eye to eye, and at this late point in my book we have finally hit it. It is the question of free will. I agree with most of Dan’s arguments in [Dennett 1984], and yet I can’t go along with him that we have free will, of any sort. One day, Dan and I will thrash this out between ourselves.

Page 340 the analogy to our electoral process is such a blatant elephant… This idea of “votes” in the brain is discussed in Chapter 33 of [Hofstadter 1985], as well as in the Careenium dialogue, which is Chapter 25 of the same book.

Page 345 gentle people such as…César Chávez… In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, deeply depressed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, I worked intensely for the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (later known as the “United Farm Workers of America”) for a couple of years, first as a frequent volunteer and then for several months as a boycott organizer (first for grapes, then for lettuce). In this capacity I had the chance to meet with César Chávez a few times, although to my great regret I never truly got to know him as a person.

Page 346 As far as I can peer back… The translation is my own.

Page 347 This was an abhorrent proposal… The translation is my own.

Page 347 a book entitled ‘Le Cerveau et la conscience’… This was [Chauchard].

Page 351 Many performers have been performing… The translation is my own.

Page 361 Riposte: A Soft Poem… There is a method to my madness in this section. In particular, both paragraphs were written to an ancient kind of meter called “paeonic”. What this means is that three syllables go by without a stress, but on the fourth a stress is placed, without its seeming (so I hope) to have been forced: “And yet to you, my faithful read er who has plowed all through this book up to its near ly final page… ” One last constraint upon both paragraphs is simply on their length in terms of “feet” (which means stressed syllables). The number of these “paeons” must be forty, and the reason is, I’m mimicking two paragraphs of forty paeons each on page 5a of Le Ton beau.

Page 376 There is a method to my madness… There is a method to my madness in this footnote. In particular, the footnote both describes and represents an ancient meter called “paeonic”. What this means is that three syllables go by without a stress, but on the fourth a stress is placed, without its seeming (so I hope) to have been forced. I now will offer one small sample for your pleasure, and respectfully suggest that you try reading it aloud: “There is a meth od to my mad ness in this foot note…” In particular, I’ve got to use exactly forty feet because I’m mimicking two paragraphs of forty paeons each on page three hundred six-and-seventy of I Am a Strange Loop.