I got a copy of Douglas Hofstadter’s “I Am a Strange Loop” (Amazon) for my birthday and spent the next month puzzling over why this inane book ever got written, other than to make a few bucks from aging technohippies with fond memories of Godel, Escher and Bach. It’s basically a random collection of unstructured jottings, boring personal stories, and contentless musings. Try as he might, Hofstadter never manages to convince us of the connection between Godel’s proof and some kind of loop that supposedly lies at the basis of our consciousness. Oddly, there’s almost no reference to any of the actual research in neuroscience or related fields which has started to cast light on the phenomenon of consciousness in recent years.

Hofstadter’s treatment of Zen in the book is emblematic of its problems. In a dialog between “Strange Loop #641”, a believer in the ideas of I Am a Strange Loop (such as they are), and “Strange Loop #642”, a doubter, he has them saying:

SL #642: Taoism and Zen long ago sensed this paradocical state of affairs and made it a point to try to dismantle or deconstruct or simply get rid of the “I”.

, which was then picked up by the New York Times in its “Reading File” column, dealing with Bob’s recent obsession, the Singularity. I’ll let the reader draw his own conclusions from the original interview, but I can’t avoid pointing out some of the more absurd things Hofstadter says:

I am a deep admirer of humanity at its finest and deepest and most powerful…I find endless depth in such people…I’d hate to think that all that beauty and profundity and goodness could be captured — even approximated in any way at all! — in the horribly rigid computational devices of our era.

But what does “admiration” and your subjectively perceived “depth” have to do with anything? Humanity will not be approximated in the computational devices of our era, but those of the next.

Do I still believe it will happen someday? I can’t say for sure, but I suppose it will eventually, yes. I wouldn’t want to be around then, though. Such a world would be too alien for me. I prefer living in a world where computers are still very very stupid.

He manages to impugn on of the leading futurists of our time with psycho-pop ad hominem arguments:

Ray Kurzweil is terrified by his own mortality and deeply longs to avoid death. I understand this obsession of his and am even somehow touched by its ferocious intensity, but I think it badly distorts his vision. As I see it, Kurzweil’s desperate hopes seriously cloud his scientific objectivity.

and goes on to call not just Kurzweil but also luminaries such as Marvin Minsky “overgrown teen-age sci-fi addicts.” Just out of curiousity, Doug, can you name a conclusion of Kurzweil’s that you think has been clouded by his “desperate hopes”?

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 16:13 and is filed under history and culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.