I Am a Strange Loop

Name: I Am a Strange Loop
Price: 4.9 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9780465030798

ISBN-10: 0465030793

ISBN-13: 9780465030798

Edition: 2008

Authors: Douglas R. Hofstadter

List price: $21.99

30 day, 100% satisfaction guarantee!

Buy new: $16.75

Marketplace

3 new & used from $4.90

what's this?

Rush Rewards U
Members Receive:

You have reached 400 XP and carrot coins. That is the daily max!

Description:

Can thought arise out of matter? Can self, soul, consciousness, "I" arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here? I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the "strange loop"a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. The most central and complex symbol in your brain is the one called "I." The "I" is the nexus in our brain, one of many symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse. How can a mysterious abstraction be realor is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our…

Book details

List price: $21.99
Copyright year: 2008
Publisher: Basic Books
Publication date: 7/8/2008
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 436
Size: 7.01" wide x 8.19" long x 1.18" tall
Weight: 1.188
Language: English



Words of Thanks


Preface: An Author and His Book


Prologue: An Affable Locking of Horns



On Souls and Their Sizes



This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream



The Causal Potency of Patterns



Loops, Goals, and Loopholes



On Video Feedback



Of Selves and Symbols



The Epi Phenomenon



Embarking on a Strange-Loop Safari



Pattern and Provability



Godel's Quintessential Strange Loop



How Analogy Makes Meaning



On Downward Causality



The Elusive Apple of My "I"



Strangeness in the "I" of the Beholder



Entwinement



Grappling with the Deepest Mystery



How We Live in Each Other



The Blurry Glow of Human Identity



Consciousness = Thinking



A Courteous Crossing of Words



A Brief Brush with Cartesian Egos



A Tango with Zombies and Dualism



Killing a Couple of Sacred Cows



On Magnanimity and Friendship


Epilogue: The Quandary


Notes


Bibliography


Permissions and Acknowledgments


Index