| I Am A Strange Loop | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Douglas Hofstadter |
| Country | USA |
| Language | English |
| Subject(s) | Consciousness, strange loops, intelligence |
| Publisher | Basic Books |
| Publication date | March 26th, 2007 |
| Media type | Hardback |
| Pages | 412 pages |
| ISBN | 978-0465030781 |
| OCLC Number | 64554976 |
| LC Classification | BD438.5 .H64 2007 |
| Preceded by | Gödel, Escher, Bach |
I Am a Strange Loop is a 2007 book by Douglas Hofstadter, examining in depth the concept of a strange loop originally developed in his 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach.
| “ | In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference. | ” |
|
— Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop p.363
|
Hofstadter had previously expressed disappointment with how Gödel, Escher, Bach, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for general nonfiction, was received. In the preface to its 20th-anniversary edition, Hofstadter laments that the book was perceived as a hodgepodge of neat things with no central theme. He states: "GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?"[1]
Hofstadter seeks to remedy this problem in I Am a Strange Loop by focusing and expounding on the central message of Gödel, Escher, Bach. He demonstrates how the properties of self-referential systems, demonstrated most famously in Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, can be used to describe the unique properties of minds.[2][3]
As an exploration of the concept of "self", Hofstadter explores his own life, and those he has been close to.[4][5][6][7][8][9]