BOOK REVIEW

'I Am a Strange Loop' by Douglas Hofstadter

On the nature of human consciousness
and its relation to empathy.

By Jesse Cohen

Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2007

I Am a Strange Loop
Douglas Hofstadter
Basic Books: 412 pp., $26.95

"The phonographs of hades in the brain / are tunnels that
re-wind themselves...." Hart Crane may have been thinking
of other things when he wrote these lines from "The Bridge,"
but they accord nicely with the ideas and obsessions of
Douglas Hofstadter. For close to 30 years, ever since his
remarkable debut with the bestselling "Goedel, Escher,
Bach," Hofstadter has been developing a model of
consciousness holding that the brain is a system of "tunnels
that re-wind themselves," turning recursively inward to
create what we think of as our selves.

Hofstadter's explanation of how brain becomes mind
dispenses with immaterial qualities and other kinds of
philosophical hocus-pocus that bedevil efforts to solve the
"mind-body problem." Trained as a physicist and a computer
scientist but endowed with the soul of a philosopher, he
posits that as our neurons fire in complex patterns that
represent our perceptions, and as these representations (or
symbols) swirl and dance in ever more complex ways, their
interplay is strong enough and rich enough to produce
awareness-- that is, to become self-referential.

This concept of self-reference allows Hofstadter to bring in
the work of famed logician Kurt Goedel, who proved the
incompleteness of sufficiently powerful mathematical
systems. The human brain is a system of symbols, and a
system of symbols is just what a mathematical language is--
the kind of language that Goedel proved could generate self-
referential statements. In "Goedel, Escher, Bach," Hofstadter
called this process of recursive self-representation-- think of
an Escher staircase, feeding endlessly into itself, or the lyrics
to "The Windmills of Your Mind"-- a "strange loop." And this
strange loop constitutes the illusion (yes, the illusion) of
consciousness, or the self, or "I"-- terms that, for Hofstadter,
are interchangeable.

Hence, "I Am a Strange Loop." (Hofstadter muses in the
introduction, "I should probably have called it ' "I" Is a
Strange Loop'-- but can you imagine a clunkier title?") His
new book is an amplification and extension of the central
thesis of "Goedel, Escher, Bach," which he felt compelled to
revisit: "People liked [it] for all sorts of reasons, but seldom
if ever for its most central raison d'etre." That is, they
grooved on his rich tapestry of fugues and formulas,
hypotheticals and counterfactuals, Zen and Zeno, DNA and AI,
but may well have missed his point about what
consciousness is.

The marvel of "Goedel, Escher, Bach" was not just its
abundant insights or its author's infectious joie de savoir and
range of reference, which cheerfully demolished the wall
between novelist C.P. Snow's "two cultures." Rather, it was
that the book itself, with its diverse modes of discourse and
stack of nested arguments, modeled the very processes of
self-referentiality and "loopiness" occurring in our brains.
There was an experiential component to it: How a reader
encountered the text was as important to the effectiveness of
its argument as the words were.

Something similar is afoot in "I Am a Strange Loop." Once
again, the method of argumentation is as important as the
argument. But here the structure is looser, the discussion
less technical. Having established the "I = strange loop"
formula, Hofstadter now wants to show what it means for our
souls.

"Soul" is certainly not a term one expects from a materialist
like Hofstadter. But in his lexicon, "soul" is interchangeable
with "I," "self" or "consciousness"-- just another name for
the mind's strange loop. And because a strange loop is an
aspect of a physical process, it-- like anything physical-- can
be measured.

Can one quantify a soul? Do some people have more "soul"
than others? Well, yes: "I believe that a human soul-- and, by
the way, it is my aim in this book to make clear what I mean
by this slippery, shifting word, often rife with religious
connotations, but here not having any-- comes slowly into
being over the course of years of development. It may sound
crass to put it this way, but I would like to suggest, at least
metaphorically, a numerical scale of 'degrees of souledness.'"
Citing a favorite comment from the early 20th century music
critic James Huneker to the effect that "small-souled men"
should not attempt a particularly demanding Chopin etude,
Hofstadter cheekily calls the units of this scale "hunekers."
Mature human beings average 100 hunekers. Dogs and
infants are in the single digits. Violent sociopaths are low on
the scale too. And some people have more than 100.

Hofstadter's justification for these rankings draws on his
personal experience of grief, giving the book the flavor of
memoir. His beloved wife, Carol, died when she was in her
early 40s, leaving behind two small children. Because she
was (the term is inescapable) his soul mate and they were
"one individual with two bodies," the loss was shattering.
"For brief periods of time in conversations, or even in
nonverbal moments of intense feeling, I was Carol, just as, at
times, she was Doug. So her 'personal gemma' (to borrow
Stanislaw Lem's term in his story 'Non Serviam') had brought
into existence a somewhat blurry, coarse-grained copy of
itself inside my brain, had created a secondary Goedelian
swirl inside my brain (the primary one of course being my
own self-swirl), a Goedelian swirl that allowed me to be her,
or, said otherwise, a Goedelian swirl that allowed her self,
her personal gemma, to ride (in simplified form) on my
hardware."

From his grief, he gained an insight into how our souls are
enlarged. Like Wagner's Parsifal, who goes from simpleton to
savior when he incorporates into his consciousness the
suffering of the Grail knights' king, we as individuals can
replicate in our own minds the strange loops of others,
seeing with their eyes, walking in their shoes, thinking their
thoughts-- and this ability to encompass others' points of
view is the basis of compassion. "The interpenetration of
souls is an inevitable consequence of the power of the
representationally universal machines that our brains are,"
Hofstadter writes. "That is the true meaning of the word
'empathy.' I am capable of being other people, even if it is
merely an 'economy class' version of the act of being."

So, to raise your hunekers, host more souls. Indeed,
Hofstadter proposes a list ("Mohandas Gandhi, Eleanor
Roosevelt, Raoul Wallenberg, Jean Moulin, Mother Teresa,
Martin Luther King, and Cesar Chavez") of "extraordinary
individuals whose deep empathy for those who suffer leads
them to devote a large part of their lives to helping others."
Since a soul is equivalent to consciousness, "such people, I
propose, are more conscious than normal adults are."

Without judging the worthiness of the people on Hofstadter's
list, I admit to some qualms. His contention that quanta of
our consciousness can form in other brains is a reasonable
ramification of his model. But can one convincingly say that
the more points of view you imagine, the more
compassionate you are? Could not such a person just as
easily use that acute understanding of others to exploit them?

And is his explanation the most elegant? Neurologists have
shown that there are two brain regions, the anterior cingulate
cortex and the frontoinsular cortex, involved in compassion.
Perhaps Gandhi et al. simply had larger ones than the rest of
us; perhaps their "hardware" disposed them to be more
compassionate and "strange loops" had nothing to do with it.

Hofstadter does not consider such neurological research in
his book. I wish he had; it would be interesting to know how
it validated or altered his model. I would also have liked to
see a rejoinder to British mathematical physicist Roger
Penrose's ideas about consciousness, since Penrose too
employs Goedel's incompleteness theorem, although with
radically different results.

But such lines of inquiry await another book. In the
meantime, "I Am a Strange Loop" is vintage Hofstadter:
earnest, deep, overflowing with ideas, building its argument
into the experience of reading it-- for if our souls can
incorporate those of others, then "I Am a Strange Loop" can
transmit Hofstadter's into ours. And indeed, it is impossible
to come away from this book without having introduced
elements of his point of view into our own. It may not make
us kinder or more compassionate, but we will never look at
the world, inside or out, in the same way again.

Jesse Cohen is the series editor of "The Best American
Science Writing 2006."


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