Comments on: I Am a Strange Loop

By: adam

adam — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:21:09 +0000

I put GEB back on the shelf 4 or 5 years ago after reading the introduction. Might pick it up again this winter, but I said the same about Gravity’s Rainbow last year (which I liked, it’s just so very long, and I was still recovering from the Baroque Cycle).

By: Heliologue

Heliologue — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:17:28 +0000

That would be the danger of mistyping once and copying and pasting multiple times.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:48:49 +0000

Unless you were trying to be funny, "an eternal golden braid" is quite different from an "eternal golden brain". Re-read the book . . . it might make more sense to you if you s l o w down and read the actual words . . .

By: Johnsenclan » Blog Archive » Book Review: Resolution

Johnsenclan » Blog Archive » Book Review: Resolution — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:11:35 +0000

[...] reviews I am a Strange Loop by Douglas [...]

By: Brady

Brady — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:22:05 +0000

Perhaps it wasn’t his intention, but I think the idea of being "caught in an endless loop of statement and clarification" applies fairly well to the human experience.

"And that’s like us, isn’t it?"

By: Heliologue

Heliologue — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:18:29 +0000

Don’t worry: I’m not being so diplomatic because I fear criticizing your suggestion; I just understand that Hofstadter is very smart, and I might have enjoyed the book more had I the time and expanded facilities to fully appreciate it.

Not to be too timely, but I compare Hofstadter’s verbosity against the similar verbosity of the late, great David Foster Wallace, and I can’t help but feel as though every single word of Wallace’s verbosity was necessary and great. Hofstadter, by comparison, seems a bit convoluted, as though caught in an endless loop of statement and clarification.

Wait, maybe it’s all just meta-irony?

By: Brady

Brady — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:59:40 +0000

You know, you don’t have to be so apologetic if you don’t like a book that I do like. I appreciate the attempt at being diplomatic, though.

The previous commenter is right in that Hofstader is more profound when he’s obliquely referring to ideas of consciousness through his thoughts on math, music, language, and art than when he is trying to be "straightforward" about it.

Your criticism of his writing is valid, because you tend to favor clarity in writing whose goal is to clarify, and Hofstader, while accessible, is not exactly what I would call clear. However, something about Hofstader’s inability to get to the core of the thing, the way he eternally seems to dance around a clear, concise theory of consciousness, appeals to me. His corny, complex, convoluted wordplay appeals to my love of the same, and the paradoxes he explores have the function of a Zen koan on me, not handing me truth on a platter but putting me into "feeling" of it beyond words, something on the tip of my tongue but never further.

Thanks for taking my suggestion though- I’ll try to hit closer to your mark next time.

By: Nicholas Tam

Nicholas Tam — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 11:02:50 +0000

Hmm. I Am a Strange Loop is on my shelf unread, but I've read a significant chunk of Hofstadter's works (and am in fact working through his book on translation, Le Ton beau de Marot, this week). Curiously, I've always felt that he offers his best explications of human cognition not when he is talking about human consciousness in and of itself, but when he coaxes it out as a conclusion to some statement or other that he makes about a work of art, music, or literature. I think you would be more satisfied with a work like Metamagical Themas, his collected essays as a Scientific American columnist in the 1980s. There, he focuses on tight, manageable examples in small packages, and he also has room to go into a bit more detail than he does in his longer works. The attraction of behemoths like GEB is as much the intricate structural composition as the ideas themselves (you can probably tell he's big on toying with the form/content boundary, as anyone serious about music appreciation needs to be), but if that's a bit too circumlocutory for your tastes, Themas will be more to your liking. I happen to like Hofstadter's digressions, but that's my fetish for wordplay talking.