I Am a Strange Loop

Page 296 the story of an “I” is a tale about a central essence… See [Dennett 1992] and [Kent].

Page 298 The…self-pointing loop that the pronoun “I” involves … See [Brinck] and [Kent].

Page 299 This is what John von Neumann unwittingly revealed… See [von Neumann] for a very difficult and [Poundstone] for a very lucid discussion of self-replicating automata.

See Chapters 2 and 3 of [Hofstadter 1985] for a simpler discussion of the same ideas. Chapter 16 of [Hofstadter 1979] carefully spells out the mapping between Gödel’s self-referential construction and the self-replicating mechanisms at the core of life.

Page 300 too marbelous for words… Borrowing a few words from a love song by Johnny Mercer and Richard Whiting, sung in an unsurpassable fashion by Frank Sinatra.

Page 300 with alacrity, celerity, assiduity, vim, vigor, vitality… My father’s friend Bob Herman (a top-notch physicist who famously co-predicted the cosmic background radiation fifteen years before it was observed) loved to recite this riddle, putting on a strong Yiddish accent: “A tramp in the woods happened upon a hornets’ nest. When they stung him with alacrity, celerity, assiduity, vim, vigor, vitality, savoir-faire, and undue velocity, ‘Oh!’, he mused, counting his bumps, ‘If I had as many bumps on the left side of my right adenoid as six and three-quarters times seven-eighths of those between the heel of Achilles and the circumference of Adam’s apple, how long would it take a boy rolling a hoop up a moving stairway going down to count the splinters on a boardwalk if a horse had six legs?’ ” And so I thought I’d give a little posthumous hat-tip to Bob.

Page 305 Dan calls such carefully crafted fables ‘intuition pumps’… Dennett introduced his term “intuition pump”, I believe, in the Reflections that he wrote on John Searle’s “Chinese room” thought experiment in Chapter 22 of [Hofstadter and Dennett].

Page 308 The term Parfit prefers is “psychological continuity”… See [Nozick] for a lengthy treatment of the closely related concept of “closest continuer”.

Page 309 what Einstein accomplished in creating special relativity… See [Hoffmann].

Page 309 what a whole generation of brilliant physicists, with Einstein at their core… See [Pais 1986], [Pais 1991], and [Pullman].

Page 315 just tendencies and inclinations and habits, including verbal ones… See the Prologue for my first inklings of this viewpoint. See also my Achilles–Tortoise dialogue entitled “A Conversation with Einstein’s Brain”, which is Chapter 26 in [Hofstadter and Dennett], for more evolved ideas on it.

Page 320 Dave Chalmers explores these issues… See [Chalmers]. I always find it ironic that Dave’s highly articulate and subtle ideas on consciousness, so wildly opposed to my own, took shape right under my nose some fifteen or so years ago, in my very own Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, at Indiana University (although the old oaken table in Room 641 is a bit of a tall tale…). Dave added enormous verve to our research group, and he was a good friend to both Carol and me. Despite our disagreements on qualia, zombies, and consciousness, we remain good friends.

Page 321 with a nine-planet solar system… I’m not about to enter into the raging debate over poor Pluto’s possible planethood (is Disney’s Pluto a dog?), although I think the question is a fascinating one from the point of view of cognitive science, since it opens up deep questions about the nature of categories and analogies in the human mind.

Page 322 Z-people… laugh exactly the same as …Q-people… See “Planet without Laughter” in [Smullyan 1980], a wonderful tale about vacuously laughing zombies.

Page 324 Dan Dennett’s criticism of such philosophers hits the nail on the head… See especially “The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies” in [Dennett 1998] and “The Zombic Hunch” in [Dennett 2005] for marvelous Dennettian arguments.

Page 325 you can quote me on that… Actually, the image is Bill Frucht’s, so you can quote Bill on that. I had originally written something about a Flash Gordon–style hood ornament, and Bill, probably correctly seeing this 1950’s image as too passé, perhaps even camp, pulled me single-handedly into the twenty-first century.