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I Am a Strange Loop
Contributors
Formats and Prices
- On Sale
- Jul 8, 2008
- Page Count
- 436 pages
- Publisher
- Basic Books
- ISBN-13
- 9780465030798
Price
$21.99Price
$28.99 CADFormat
Format:
- Trade Paperback $21.99 $28.99 CAD
- ebook $15.99 $20.99 CAD
- Audiobook Download (Unabridged)
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“I Am a Strange Loop is a work of rigorous thinking, but it’s also an extraordinary tribute to the memory of romantic love: The Year of Magical Thinking for mathematicians.” ―Time
Deep down, your brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles. On a higher level it is a jungle of neurons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call “symbols.” The most central and complex symbol is the one you call “I.” An “I” is a strange loop where the brain’s symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down so that symbols seem to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.
To each human being, this “I” is the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real? Is our “I” merely a convenient fiction? Does “I” exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics?
These are among the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter’s first book-length journey into philosophy since his Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach. It is a tale crisply told, rife with anecdotes, analogies, and metaphors – cutting-edge philosophy that any strange loop can understand.
Genre:
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"[F]ascinating... original and thought-provoking.... [T]here are many pleasures in I Am a Strange Loop."Wall Street Journal
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"I Am a Strange Loop is thoughtful, amusing and infectiously enthusiastic."Bloomberg news
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"I Am a Strange Loop scales some lofty conceptual heights, but it remains very personal, and it's deeply colored by the facts of Hofstadter's later life. In 1993 Hofstadter's wife Carol died suddenly of a brain tumor at only 42, leaving him with two young children to care for.... I Am a Strange Loop is a work of rigorous thinking, but it's also an extraordinary tribute to the memory of romantic love: The Year of Magical Thinking for mathematicians."Time
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"I Am a Strange Loop is vintage Hofstadter: earnest, deep, overflowing with ideas, building its argument into the experience of reading it-for if our souls can incorporate those of others, then I Am a Strange Loopcan transmit Hofstadter's into ours. And indeed, it is impossible to come away from this book without having introduced elements of his point of view into our own. It may not make us kinder or more compassionate, but we will never look at the world, inside or out, in the same way again."Los Angeles Times Book Review
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"Nearly thirty years after his best-selling book Gödel, Escher, Bach, cognitive scientist and polymath Douglas Hofstadter has returned to his extraordinary theory of self."New Scientist
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"His new book, as brilliant and provocative as earlier ones, is a colorful mix of speculations with passages of autobiography."Martin Gardiner
