I Am a Strange Loop

Page 174 leaving just a high-level picture of information-manipulating processes… See [Monod], [Berg and Singer], [Judson], and Chapter 27 of [Hofstadter 1985].

Page 177 symbols in our respective brains… See [Hofstadter 1979], especially the dialogue “Prelude… Ant Fugue” and Chapters 11 and 12, for a careful discussion of this notion.

Page 178 the forbidding and inaccessible level of quarks and gluons… See [Weinberg 1992] and [Pais 1986] for attempts at explanations of these incredibly abstruse notions.

Page 178 the only slightly more accessible level of genes… See [Monod], [Berg and Singer], [Judson], and Chapter 27 (“The Genetic Code: Arbitrary?”) in [Hofstadter 1985].

Page 179 we…best understand our own actions as… See [Dennett 1987] and [Dennett 1998].

Page 181 embellished by a fantastic folio of alternative versions… [Steiner 1975] has a rich and provocative discussion of “alternity”, and the dialogue “Contrafactus” in [Hofstadter 1979] features an amusing scenario involving “subjunctive instant replays”. See also [Kahneman and Miller] and Chapter 12 of [Hofstadter 1985] for further musings on the incessantly flickering presence of counterfactuals in the subconscious human mind. [Hofstadter and FARG] describes a family of computational models of human thought processes in which making constant forays into alternity is a key architectural feature.

Page 182 housing a loop of self-representation… See [Morden], [Kent], and [Metzinger].

Page 186 as the years pass, the “I” converges and stabilizes itself… See [Dennett 1992].

Page 188 we cannot help attributing reality to our “I” and to those of other people… See [Kent], [Dennett 1992], [Brinck], [Metzinger], [Perry], and [Hofstadter and Dennett].

Page 189 I was most impressed when I read about “Stanley”, a robot vehicle… See [Davis 2006].

Page 193 just a big spongy bulb of inanimate molecules… I suppose almost any book on the brain will convince one of this, but [Penfield and Roberts] did it to me as a teen-ager.

Page 194 pioneering roboticist and provocative writer Hans Moravec… For some of Moravec’s more provocative speculations about the near-term future of humanity, see [Moravec].

Page 194 from the organic chemistry of carbon… See Chapter 22 in [Hofstadter and Dennett], in which John Searle talks about “the right stuff”, which underwrites what he terms “the semantic causal powers of the brain”, a rather nice-sounding but murky term by which Searle means that when a human brain, such as his own or, say, that of poet Dylan Thomas, makes its owner come out with words, those words don’t just seem to stand for something, they really do stand for something. Unfortunately, in the case of poet Thomas, most of his output, though it sounds rather nice, is so full of murk that one has to wonder what sort of “stuff” could possibly make up the brain behind it.

Page 199 its symbol-count might well exceed “Graham’s constant”… See [Wells 1986].

Page 208 For those who enjoy the taboo thrills of non-wellfounded sets… See [Barwise and Moss].

Page 209 the deeper and richer an organism’s categorization equipment is… See [Hofstadter 2001].