All About Me

I recently read Douglas' Hofstadter's new book, "I am a strange loop". He is the author of the very famous, "Godel, Escher and Bach", and also Meta Magical Themas" and my personal favorite, "The Mind's I" which was a compilation that he put together with the philosopher Daniel Dennett.

Whereas 'The Mind's I' was more of a series of musings and reflections that raised questions on the nature of the self through several voices (Richard Dawkins, Raymond Smullyan et al), this current effort is a much more singularly focused, head-on attempt to tacke the puzzle of the 'I' or the 'I-ness' as it were, that all of us experience.

The book does include a dollop of academic infighting that I have noticed in most books on philosophy. (In essence John Searle calls Hofstadter a fool and Hofstadter thinks Searle is a charlatan. In a separate set of books, Dawkins thinks Stephen Jay Gould is deluded and Gould thinks Dawkins is myopic. And so on). But no matter - it is all in a good cause. It is perhaps good to have a fight - it is edifying. It makes positions clearer.

If I were to summarize (inadequately, of course) all of this new book, "I am a strange loop" its insight into a single aphorism, it would be something like this: "I am really an illusion caused by my perceiving self, evolving in a self-referential infinite loop, consciously existing in the macro-scopic plane" If that sounds clunky, well what do you expect? I was trying to condense the gentleman's 400 page tome into one sentence!

One has to admire the author's sincere gusto as he tackles the subject of I-ness. His writing style is extremely personal and personable. There is a generous serving of humor, witticisms and flair that we have come to expect from him.

As to my own personal take on this subject, which I have been following, I am increasingly convinced that a generalist, multi-disciplinary approach to this question suits my tastes better. I believe that the specialists of various fields, and being genius' at that, have tackled the question of the human self from various angles in their areas of expertise. But a general theory does not exist.

Here is a representative list of topics (and authors) who have been tackling such mysteries.

I. Organic: There is a whole body of work around the biological and social aspect of our lives that lead to a deeper set of inquiries into the nature of our selves and our existence.
a. Genetics and DNA - Gene machines. The well written works of Richard Dawkins, Francis Cricks etc

b. Cloning - what does this mean for the human self? Who is I in this scenario? Although a novel, "Never let me go" is a fascinating rumination on this topic.

c. Biology and neuroscience - John Searle, David Linden. Consciousness emerges from the biological nature of our brains.

d. Psychology - all the works on identity and how it is gained or lost

e. Social - all the studies of social behaviors and what it means for the self (E.O. Wilson)

f. Educationists - what it means to learn, how we learn and how that is connected to identity.

II. Inorganic: This set of inquiry thinks of biology as one of several phenomena in the universe and therefore tackles the question of existence from an inorganic point of view

g. Artificial Intelligence - Douglas Hofstadter and others who argue that the self emerges from complex systems and does not have to be connected to biology (that it happens to be so is one possibility that we know of)

h. Engineering and Technology - all the work on robotics, especially the ones these days of robots playing soccer matches in teams. Very tough and a practical way of attempting to understand nature of self

i. Physics - my favorite of the hard sciences (perhaps due to my Dad's influence). All those readings of Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein essays are so fascinating, yet foundationally credible (this is a bias of mine of course)

III. Abstract: And then there is a third domain that withdraws from material inquiry, animate or inanimate

j. Mathematics - here is a branch of inquiry that is neither organic nor inorganic, but at the same time is powerfully associated with helping us understand the nature of existence. The whole notion of infinity, the mobius strip, singularities, complex numbers are entertaining and revealing all at the same time.

k. Philosophy - While I personally love Hume and Wittgenstein, one cannot dismiss Descarte, Spinoza, Sartre and Schopenhauer just like that!

l. Poetry (and art in general) - my absolute favorite genre. Can cut through all complicated talk and get you to relate to an essence in a few choice, gloriously alive words (strokes). Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Frost. This universe is vast.

m. Mystics - having followed the recorded histories of several mystics, I realize that this tends to really be the world of 'wordless experience'. Anything one says about what the mystic experiences is wrong. Because it is singular and non-translatable. So one has to leave it at that.

So the challenge it seems to me is to find out what is unifying about 'I', 'I-ness' and the mystery of our existence across all these fields.


(An interesting review of the book is also available on Scientific American:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-new-journey-into-hofsta )