I Am a Strange Loop

One of our greatest philosophers and scientists of the mind asks, where does the self come from--and how our selves can exist in the minds of others

One of our greatest philosophers and scientists of the mind examines where the self comes from – and how our selves can exist in the minds of others.

“I Am a Strange Loop is a work of rigorous thinking, but it’s also an extraordinary tribute to the memory of romantic love: The Year of Magical Thinking for mathematicians.” ―Time

Deep down, your brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles. On a higher level it is a jungle of neurons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call “symbols.” The most central and complex symbol is the one you call “I.” An “I” is a strange loop where the brain’s symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down so that symbols seem to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.

To each human being, this “I” is the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real? Is our “I” merely a convenient fiction? Does “I” exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics?

These are among the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter’s first book-length journey into philosophy since his Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach. It is a tale crisply told, rife with anecdotes, analogies, and metaphors – cutting-edge philosophy that any strange loop can understand.