I Am a Strange Loop

Of Hogs, Dogs, and Bogs

CHAPTER 13 - The Elusive Apple of My “I”

The Patterns that Constitute Experience

Reflected Communist Bachelors with Spin 1/2 are All Wet

Am I a Strange Marble?

A Pearl Necklace I Am Not

I Am My Brain’s Most Complex Symbol

Internalizing Our Weres, Our Wills, and Our Woulds

I Cannot Live without My Self

The Slow Buildup of a Self

Making Tosses, Internalizing Bounces

Smiling Like Hopalong Cassidy

The Lies in our I’s

The Locking-in of the “I” Loop

I Am Not a Video Feedback Loop

I Am Ineradicably Entrenched…

…But Am I Real?

The Size of the Strange Loop that Constitutes a Self

The Supposed Selves of Robot Vehicles

A Counterfactual Stanley

CHAPTER 14 - Strangeness in the “I” of the Beholder

The Inert Sponges inside our Heads

Squirting Chemicals

The Stately Dance of the Symbols

In which the Alfbert Visits Austranius

Brief Debriefing

Soaps in Sanskrit

Winding Up the Debriefing

Trapped at the High Level

First Key Ingredient of Strangeness

Second Key Ingredient of Strangeness

Sperry Redux

CHAPTER 15 - Entwinement

Multiple Strange Loops in One Brain

Content-free Feedback Loops

Baby Feedback Loops and Baby “I” ’s

Entwined Feedback Loops

One Privileged Loop inside our Skull

Shared Perception, Shared Control

A Twirlwind Trip to Twinwirld

Is One or Two Letters of the Alphabet?

Pairsonal Identity in Twinwirld

“Twe”-tweaking by Twinwirld-twiddling

Post Scriptum re Twinwirld

Soulmates and Matesouls

Children as Gluons

CHAPTER 16 - Grappling with the Deepest Mystery

A Random Event Changes Everything

Desperate Lark

Post Scriptum

CHAPTER 17 - How We Live in Each Other

Universal Machines

The Unexpectedness of Universality

Universal Beings

Being Visited

Chemistry and Its Lack

Copycat Planetoids Grow by Absorbing Melting Meteorites

How Much Can One Import of Another’s Interiority?

Double-clicking on the Icon for a Loved One’s Soul

Thinking with Another’s Brain

Mosaics of Different Grain Size

Transplantation of Patterns

CHAPTER 18 - The Blurry Glow of Human Identity

I Host and Am Hosted by Others

Feeling that One is Elsewhere

Telepresence versus “Real” Presence

Which Viewpoint is Really Mine?

Where Am I?

Varying Degrees of Being Another

The Naïve Viewpoint is Usually Good Enough

Where Does a Hammerhead Shark Think it is?

Sympathetic Vibrations

Am I No One Else or Am I Everyone Else?

Interpenetration of National Souls

Halos, Afterglows, Coronas

CHAPTER 19 - Consciousness = Thinking

So Where’s Consciousness in my Loopy Tale?

Enter the Skeptics

Symbols Trigger More Symbols

The Central Loop of Cognition

CHAPTER 20 - A Courteous Crossing of Words

CHAPTER 21 - A Brief Brush with Cartesian Egos

Well-told Stories Pluck Powerful Chords

What Pushovers We Are!

Teleportation of a Thought Experiment across the Atlantic

The Murky Whereabouts of Cartesian Egos

Am I on Venus, or Am I on Mars?

The Radical Nature of Parfit’s Views

Self-confidence, Humility, and Self-doubt

Morphing Parfit into Bonaparte

The Radical Redesign of Douglas R. Hofstadter

On “Who” and on “How”

Double or Nothing

Trains Who Roll

The Glow of the Soular Corona

CHAPTER 22 - A Tango with Zombies and Dualism

Pedantic Semantics?

Two Machines

Two Daves

The Nagging Worry that One Might Be a Zombie

Consciousness Is Not a Power Moonroof

Liphosophy

Consciousness: A Capitalized Essence

A Sliding Scale of Élan Mental

Semantic Quibbling in Universe Z

Quibbling in Universe Q

CHAPTER 23 - Killing a Couple of Sacred Cows

A Cerulean Sardine

Bleu Blanc Rouge = Red, White, and Blue

Inverting the Sonic Spectrum

Glebbing and Knurking

The Inverted Political Spectrum

Violets Are Red, Roses Are Blue

A Scarlet Sardine

Yes, People Want Things

The Hedge Maze of Life

There’s No Such Thing as a Free Will

CHAPTER 24 - On Magnanimity and Friendship

Are There Small and Large Souls?

From the Depths to the Heights

The Magnanimity of Albert Schweitzer

Does Conscience Constitute Consciousness?

Albert Schweitzer and Johann Sebastian Bach

Dig that Profundity!

Alle Grashüpfer Müssen Sterben

Friends

EPILOGUE

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acknowledgements

INDEX

Copyright Page

Praise for I Am A Strange Loop

“[F]ascinating . . . original and thought-provoking . . . [T]here are many pleasures in I Am a Strange Loop.”

— Wall Street Journal

“I Am a Strange Loop scales some lofty conceptual heights, but it remains very personal, and it’s deeply colored by the facts of Hofstadter’s later life. In 1993 Hofstadter’s wife Carol died suddenly of a brain tumor at only 42, leaving him with two young children to care for . . . I Am a Strange Loop is a work of rigorous thinking.”

— Time