Douglas Hofstadter Is a Strange Loop

Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop

I've begun reading Douglas Hofstadter's new book, I Am a Strange Loop. It takes up where his classic book Gödel, Escher, Bach left off almost 30 years ago — I talked about it in several earlier posts, most recently with "Brains and Thoughts." In Strange Loop, as in GEB, Hofstadter lays out a theory of how our brains work to produce a sense of self or "I."

In his introduction to the new book, Hofstadter restates the "overarching goal" of the former book: "to relate the concept of a human self and the mystery of consciousness to [Austrian mathematician/logician Kurt] Gödel's stunning discovery of a majestic wraparound self-referential structure (a 'strange loop,' as I later came to call it) in the very midst of a formidable bastion from which self-reference had been strictly banished by its audacious architects" (p. xiii).

The "formidable bastion" Hofstadter refers to was devised by mathematician/philosopher Bertrand Russell. Russell made an attempt to exorcise self-reference from the formal-logical system that he hoped to show could be made the basis of all mathematics: set theory. For that to happen, mathematical sets that contain themselves — as in "the set of all non-empty sets (including this one)" — had to be eliminated. They were seen by Russell as seeds of logical inconsistency. Banning them from set theory was, Hofstadter says, a counterproductive move which stripped Russell's Principia Mathematica, written with Alfred North Whitehead, of practical utility.


Gödel proved that formal systems of logic like Russell's either must harbor logical inconsistency, or else be "incomplete": unable to represent in symbolic fashion all knowable truths about themselves.

In accomplishing his remarkable proof of this insight Gödel found a way to arrange (see I Am a Strange Loop, p. xiii) for the "miraculous manufacture of self-reference out of a substrate of meaningless symbols."

Translation: formal systems of logic do nothing more than define "meaningless symbols" that can be combined in certain ways to make up symbol strings. Strictly speaking these strings, although they can often be mapped to statements in everyday language, are entirely devoid of meaning.

In a formal system there are also rules by which new symbol strings can be properly generated from existing, equally meaningless symbol strings.

In the proof of his so-called "Incompleteness Theorem," Gödel showed how these ordinarily semantically vacuous symbol strings could be co-opted to represent meaningful statements of truth ... truths about the very formal systems within which they exist.

By analogy, Hofstadter maintains, our "I"-ness likewise represents "the miraculous appearance of selves and souls in substrates consisting of inanimate matter" (p. xiii). Here, the substrate is not meaningless symbols but the physical material of the human brain. Hofstadter hopes to show how Gödelian self-reference might account for the arising, within that substrate, of the epiphenomenon of the self that we each call "I."


My initial problem with what Hofstadter is saying about the origin of our self-awareness is that he conflates that property of the human mind with "consciousness," and thus with "soul" itself.

As I discussed in a series of posts starting with "Quickening to Qualia, or Taking Consciousness Seriously" and ending with "The Mind's Enigmas," there are legitimate philosophical reasons for disagreeing with Hofstadter in his assumption that everything about the mind is physical — everything, that is, including the fact that we humans seem to be ineffably conscious.

In other words, we have subjective experiences. Philosophers of mind refer to the things we experience consciously and subjectively as "qualia" or "raw sensations." Why do we have these raw sensations of "what it is like" to (for instance) see the color red?

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

Such philosophers of mind as David J. Chalmers, author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, argue persuasively that our conscious awareness plays zero role in causing actual behavior on our parts. Everything we do, we would also do if we were "zombies" lacking consciousness entirely. Consciousness is accordingly not physical at all, to Chalmers. It supervenes on the physical, but it is wholly mental — "mind" and "matter" are to this extent different.

That's not to say that Chalmers thinks consciousness equates to soul, in the religious or theological sense of the word. As far as I can tell, he does not believe in God or the soul.

So a good question is, what are people like myself who believe in a God-given soul to make of Hofstadter's (or Chalmers') view of the mind?


Here's one possibility. Suppose we start from the notion that a soul is conferred upon each of us by virtue of the fact that God sees us from the first moment of our conception — and as he does so, he sees us as "Thou," not "It."

By "Thou," I mean what Martin Buber was getting at in I and Thou, the seminal work of philosophy in which he posits an "I-Thou" dialogue between man and God. No dialogue can happen unless each participant confers upon the other the status of "Thou" rather than "It." To see another as "It" is to treat that other as a thing, an object. In contrast, the ideal served by the Judeo-Christian belief in a God who is a person and not just a being is to treat the other — God himself, another human person — as we would wish to be treated, i.e., as "Thou."

For me to confer "Thouness" upon you, first I have to impute consciousness or sentience to you. I know that I have conscious experiences, and I assume you do too. It is that assumption which unlocks the door to conferring "Thouness."


Hofstadter, for instance, talks in Strange Loop of how he became a vegetarian. It all had to do with musings, which he started as a teenager, about what it means to have a self, or be an "I." In the course of thinking about the human self or soul, he became convinced that animals have souls, too — albeit, in some sense, "smaller" ones than we have. He posits a hierarchy of "interiority" or "souledness" such that mammals have "larger" amounts of it than chickens and other birds ... whose mini-souls are in turn larger than those of, say, mosquitoes. Over the course of several years he came to believe that to swat a mosquito is not wrong, but to eat a chicken is.

In the language of "Thouness," Hofstadter decided that he would confer the status of "Thou" rather than "It" on all animals that we customarily eat as meat — which meant he could no longer countenance eating them.


To have a soul is, then, to qualify as "Thou." If "soul" and "spirit" are the same, then God has a soul — the Holy Spirit — and is to be seen as "Thou." God sees each of us as "Thou"; ergo, we each have a soul. Maybe it's as simple as that — however hard it may be for us to keep this truth in mind as we go about our daily business.

If that's right, then the fact that each of us is conscious — has an interior sense of self, has subjective experiences, has sentience — makes us think of every other person as equally conscious. That is an essential prerequisite of our ability to confer "Thouness" on anyone who would otherwise be seen as "It."