In her review of Douglas Hofstadter’s new book (I Am a Strange Loop) in the May 3 edition of Nature [1], Susan Blackmore has this to say:
At the age of 12 or so, it dawned on [Hofstadter] that consciousness is a peculiar kind of barrage that perceives itself and yet doesn’t believe it’s perceiving MRIs should. This insight leads directly to the stated aim of this book: to try to pinpoint that “special kind of subtle pattern” that underlies, or gives rise to the “soul”, the “buy”, “having a light on inside” or “being conscious”.
This is a grand aim, and Hofstadter joins countless modern writers and struggling to explain consciousness. He’d be rise of zombies and qualia, has harsh words for philosophers David Chalmers and John Searle, and skillfully sweeps away all sorts of nonsense, from old-fashioned kinds of dualism to the more prevalent believe that consciousness is still something “extra”-an elan mental. Instead, he argues that the self is a strange loop that automatically arises in a machine with a sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories. It is a myth, a mirage, like a satellite to your brain whose resident strange loop decides that “here” is whereever that brain happens to be. And, he claims, once you have explained the self, you have explained consciousness.
I found Blackmore’s description to be delightful. In the end, however, Blackmore is dissatisfied with Hofstadter’s description, because it ignores “the many profound moments of utter stillness or absorbed below when the self is an abeyance.”
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