Name: I am a Strange Loop
Price: 761.00 TWD
Availability: InStock
Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
ISBN: 9780465030798

Type

Physical Book

Author

Douglas R. Hofstadter

Publisher

Basic Books

Language

English

Pages

436

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

23.1 x 15.7 x 2.9 cm

Weight

0.45 kg.

ISBN

0465030793

ISBN13

9780465030798

Synopsis "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. 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 real-or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the laws of physics? These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since Gödel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is a moving and profound inquiry into the nature of mind.

Douglas R. Hofstadter

(Author)

View Author's Page

Douglas R. Hofstadter was born in New York in 1945 and is the son of Robert Hofstadter, Nobel Prize in Physics in 1961. He studied mathematics at Stanford and physics at the University of Oregon. He was a professor of cognitive sciences at the University of Michigan until 1988 and, currently, at Indiana University, where he also directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. His work Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979) became a spectacular success in the United States shortly after its release, even before receiving the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1980 and the American Book Award that same year; readers and critics around the world welcomed the book with identical enthusiasm. Hofstadter has also published The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (1981), in collaboration with philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, and Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (1985), among other works, as well as an English translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

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