Wednesday, November 20, 2019

I am a strange loop by Douglas Hofstadter


It took a while to get through this one.  Hofstadter is disappointed that fans of his magnum opus GED did not grasp his main point about (his metaphysical belief) that machines can have souls and that the level of soul-size or  consciousness is a spectrum.  He then creates a bunch of thought experiments and analyses to convince us.  His metaphysics is terrible, as is his neurobiology.  His ideas on abstraction and strange-loops are not bad, though.  Not great, 2/5 stars -- not worth reading.  Read an explanation of the Gödel paper instead.

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