Douglas R. Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of “maps” or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. Gödel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.

Hofstadter's collection of quirky essays is unified by its primary concern: to examine the way people perceive and think.

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.

Analogy is the core of all thinking. This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize–winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over thirty years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making complex ideas vivid, he has partnered with Sander to put forth a highly novel perspective on cognition.We are constantly faced with a swirling and intermingling multitude of ill-defined situations. Our brain’s job is to try to make sense of this unpredictable, swarming chaos of stimuli. How does it do so? The ceaseless hail of input triggers analogies galore, helping us to pinpoint the essence of what is going on. Often this means the spontaneous evocation of words, sometimes idioms, sometimes the triggering of nameless, long-buried memories.Why did two-year-old Camille proudly exclaim, “I undressed the banana!”? Why do people who hear a story often blurt out, “Exactly the same thing happened to me!” when it was a completely different event? How do we recognize an aggressive driver from a split-second glance in our rearview mirror? What in a friend’s remark triggers the offhand reply, “That’s just sour grapes”? What did Albert Einstein see that made him suspect that light consists of particles when a century of research had driven the final nail in the coffin of that long-dead idea?The answer to all these questions, of course, is analogy-making—the meat and potatoes, the heart and soul, the fuel and fire, the gist and the crux, the lifeblood and the wellsprings of thought. Analogy-making, far from happening at rare intervals, occurs at all moments, defining thinking from top to toe, from the tiniest and most fleeting thoughts to the most creative scientific insights.Like Gödel, Escher, Bach before it, Surfaces and Essences will profoundly enrich our understanding of our own minds. By plunging the reader into an extraordinary variety of colorful situations involving language, thought, and memory, by revealing bit by bit the constantly churning cognitive mechanisms normally completely hidden from view, and by discovering in them one central, invariant core—the incessant, unconscious quest for strong analogical links to past experiences—this book puts forth a radical and deeply surprising new vision of the act of thinking.

Lost in an art—the art of translation. Thus, in an elegant anagram (translation = lost in an art), Pulitzer Prize-winning author and pioneering cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter hints at what led him to pen a deep personal homage to the witty sixteenth-century French poet Clément Marot.”Le ton beau de Marot” literally means ”The sweet tone of Marot”, but to a French ear it suggests ”Le tombeau de Marot”—that is, ”The tomb of Marot”. That double entendre foreshadows the linguistic exuberance of this book, which was sparked a decade ago when Hofstadter, under the spell of an exquisite French miniature by Marot, got hooked on the challenge of recreating both its sweet message and its tight rhymes in English—jumping through two tough hoops at once. In the next few years, he not only did many of his own translations of Marot's poem, but also enlisted friends, students, colleagues, family, noted poets, and translators—even three state-of-the-art translation programs!—to try their hand at this subtle challenge.The rich harvest is represented here by 88 wildly diverse variations on Marot's little theme. Yet this barely scratches the surface of Le Ton beau de Marot, for small groups of these poems alternate with chapters that run all over the map of language and thought.Not merely a set of translations of one poem, Le Ton beau de Marot is an autobiographical essay, a love letter to the French language, a series of musings on life, loss, and death, a sweet bouquet of stirring poetry—but most of all, it celebrates the limitless creativity fired by a passion for the music of words.Dozens of literary themes and creations are woven into the picture, including Pushkin's Eugene Onegin , Dante's Inferno, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye , Villon's Ballades, Nabokov’s essays, Georges Perec's La Disparition, Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, Horace's odes, and more.Rife with stunning form-content interplay, crammed with creative linguistic experiments yet always crystal-clear, this book is meant not only for lovers of literature, but also for people who wish to be brought into contact with current ideas about how creativity works, and who wish to see how today’s computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind.Le Ton beau de Marot is a sparkling, personal, and poetic exploration aimed at both the literary and the scientific world, and is sure to provoke great excitement and heated controversy among poets and translators, critics and writers, and those involved in the study of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.

Readers of earlier works by Douglas Hofstadter will find this book a natural extension of his style and his ideas about creativity and analogy; in addition, psychologists, philosophers, and artificial-intelligence researchers will find in this elaborate web of ingenious ideas a deep and challenging new view of mind.

Grace A. Tanner Lecture in Human Values, 1982

Italian (translation)Original English

Douglas Hofstadter is world-famous for his work as one of the world's leading cognitive scientists. He is the author of many books including the classic Godel, Escher, Bach. And he is a many-sided man of many accomplishments, including works as a visual artist, and as a composer of music. 'I fell in love with classical music when I was about eight' he begins in his extensive liner notes. He goes on to say, 'since music had touched my soul so deeply, I could not stand the fact that I myself was unable to use this most expressive of all possible media. Somehow I had to prove to myself that I could do it, and after several years, I guess I hadeffected the needed catharsis. These small pieces constitutethe fruit thereof, and clearly show what kinds of music meant the most to me.' The CD contains 31 short compositions, the greater part of them for piano alone, but some with vocals. Themes, inventions, preludes, canons, and experimental forms abound, showing many facets of music, and of Professor Hofstadter's fertile imagination. Jane Jackson performs most of the pieces, but Hofstadter himself plays a mini-cantata along with Brian Jones on bass. Two pieces feature Dafna Barenboim on piano, and Gitanjali Mathur, soprano.

Oh, this is me! 2The two editors Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, the masters of cognitive science, are I? It is confusing the reader with the question of the question. Why do you want to solve this problem that the authors did not get a clear answer? But this is to induce the flexibility of the solid thought system of those hardened by the environment rather than a lunatic mischief. The book is a way to go on a journey of deep struggle, and the ground discipline is carried out by introducing world scholars in various fields such as science, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and biology.

Oh, this is me! OneThe two editors Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, the masters of cognitive science, who is "me"? It is confusing the reader with the question of the question. Why do you want to solve this problem that the authors did not get a clear answer? But this is to induce the flexibility of the solid thought system of those hardened by the environment rather than a lunatic mischief. The book is a way to go on a journey of deep struggle, and the ground discipline is carried out by introducing world scholars in various fields such as science, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and biology.