I Am a Strange Loop

who can understand,

and to our sister Molly,

who cannot.

A note from the Publisher

Doug Hofstadter, who over the years has been a friend to Basic Books in so many ways, has kindly lent us this page to remember a late colleague. We gratefully dedicate this book

To Liz Maguire

1958–2006

who lives on in all of us.

WORDS OF THANKS

SINCE my teen-age years, I have been fascinated by what the mind is and does, and have pondered such riddles for many decades. Some of my conclusions have come from personal experiences and private musings, but of course I have been profoundly marked by the ideas of many other people, stretching way back to elementary school, if not earlier.

Among the well-known authors who have most influenced my thinking on the interwoven topics of minds, brains, patterns, symbols, self-reference, and consciousness are, in some vague semblance of chronological order: Ernest Nagel, James R. Newman, Kurt Gödel, Martin Gardner, Raymond Smullyan, John Pfeiffer, Wilder Penfield, Patrick Suppes, David Hamburg, Albert Hastorf, M. C. Escher, Howard DeLong, Richard C. Jeffrey, Ray Hyman, Karen Horney, Mikhail Bongard, Alan Turing, Gregory Chaitin, Stanislaw Ulam, Leslie A. Hart, Roger Sperry, Jacques Monod, Raj Reddy, Victor Lesser, Marvin Minsky, Margaret Boden, Terry Winograd, Donald Norman, Eliot Hearst, Daniel Dennett, Stanislaw Lem, Richard Dawkins, Allen Wheelis, John Holland, Robert Axelrod, Gilles Fauconnier, Paolo Bozzi, Giuseppe Longo, Valentino Braitenberg, Derek Parfit, Daniel Kahneman, Anne Treisman, Mark Turner, and Jean Aitchison. Books and articles by many of these authors are cited in the bibliography. Over the years, I have come to know quite a few of these individuals, and I count the friendships thus formed among the great joys of my life.

On a more local level, I have been influenced over a lifetime by thousands of intense conversations, phone calls, letters, and emails with family members, friends, students, and colleagues. Once again, listed in some rough semblance of chronological order, these people would include: Nancy Hofstadter, Robert Hofstadter, Laura Hofstadter, Peter Jones, Robert Boeninger, Charles Brenner, Larry Tesler, Michael Goldhaber, David Policansky, Peter S. Smith, Inga Karliner, Francisco Claro, Peter Rimbey, Paul Csonka, P. David Jennings, David Justman, J. Scott Buresh, Sydney Arkowitz, Robert Wolf, Philip Taylor, Scott Kim, Pentti Kanerva, William Gosper, Donald Byrd, J. Michael Dunn, Daniel Friedman, Marsha Meredith, Gray Clossman, Ann Trail, Susan Wunder, David Moser, Carol Brush Hofstadter, Leonard Shar, Paul Smolensky, David Leake, Peter Suber, Greg Huber, Bernard Greenberg, Marek Lugowski, Joe Becker, Melanie Mitchell, Robert French, David Rogers, Benedetto Scimemi, Daniel Defays, William Cavnar, Michael Gasser, Robert Goldstone, David Chalmers, Gary McGraw, John Rehling, James Marshall, Wang Pei, Achille Varzi, Oliviero Stock, Harry Foundalis, Hamid Ekbia, Marilyn Stone, Kellie Gutman, James Muller, Alexandre Linhares, Christoph Weidemann, Nathaniel Shar, Jeremy Shar, Alberto Parmeggiani, Alex Passi, Francesco Bianchini, Francisco Lara-Dammer, Damien Sullivan, Abhijit Mahabal, Caroline Strobbe, Emmanuel Sander, Glen Worthey — and of course Carol’s and my two children, Danny and Monica Hofstadter.

I feel deep gratitude to Indiana University for having so generously supported me personally and my group of researchers (the Fluid Analogies Research Group, affectionately known as “FARG”) for such a long time. Some of the key people at IU who have kept the FARGonauts afloat over the past twenty years are Helga Keller, Mortimer Lowengrub, Thomas Ehrlich, Kenneth Gros Louis, Kumble Subbaswamy, Robert Goldstone, Richard Shiffrin, J. Michael Dunn, and Andrew Hanson. All of them have been intellectual companions and staunch supporters, some for decades, and I am lucky to be able to count them among my colleagues.

I have long felt part of the family at Basic Books, and am grateful for the support of many people there for nearly thirty years. In the past few years I have worked closely with William Frucht, and I truly appreciate his open-mindedness, his excellent advice, and his unflagging enthusiasm.

A few people have helped me enormously on this book. Ken Williford and Uriah Kriegel launched it; Kellie Gutman, Scott Buresh, Bill Frucht, David Moser, and Laura Hofstadter all read chunks of it and gave superb critical advice; and Helga Keller chased permissions far and wide. I thank them all for going “way ABCD” — way above and beyond the call of duty.