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I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [1]

By Root 1739 0
Quine’s Analogy

The Trickiest Step

An Elephant in a Matchbox is Neither Fish Nor Fowl

Sluggo and the Morton Salt Girl

CHAPTER 11 - How Analogy Makes Meaning

The Double Aboutness of Formulas in PM

Extra Meanings Come for Free, Thanks to You, Analogy!

Exploiting the Analogies in Everyday Situations

The Latent Ambiguity of the Village Baker’s Remarks

Chantal and the Piggybacked Levels of Meaning

Pickets at the Posh Shop

Prince Hyppia: Math Dramatica

Analogy, Once Again, Does its Cagey Thing

How Can an “Unpennable” Line be Penned?

“Not” is Not the Source of Strangeness

Numbers as a Representational Medium

CHAPTER 12 - On Downward Causality

Bertrand Russell’s Worst Nightmare

A Strange Land where “Because” Coincides with “Although”

Incompleteness Derives from Strength

Bertrand Russell’s Second-worst Nightmare

An Endless Succession of Monsters

Consistency Condemns a Towering Peak to Unscalability

Downward Causality in Mathematics

Göru and the Futile Quest for a Truth Machine

The Upside-down Perceptions of Evolved Creatures

Stuck, for Better or Worse, with “I”

Proceeding Slowly Towards the Bottom Level

Of Hogs, Dogs, and Bogs

CHAPTER 13 - The Elusive Apple of My “I”

The Patterns that Constitute Experience

Reflected Communist Bachelors with Spin 1/2 are All Wet

Am I a Strange Marble?

A Pearl Necklace I Am Not

I Am My Brain’s Most Complex Symbol

Internalizing Our Weres, Our Wills, and Our Woulds

I Cannot Live without My Self

The Slow Buildup of a Self

Making Tosses, Internalizing Bounces

Smiling Like Hopalong Cassidy

The Lies in our I’s

The Locking-in of the “I” Loop

I Am Not a Video Feedback Loop

I Am Ineradicably Entrenched…

…But Am I Real?

The Size of the Strange Loop that Constitutes a Self

The Supposed Selves of Robot Vehicles

A Counterfactual Stanley

CHAPTER 14 - Strangeness in the “I” of the Beholder

The Inert Sponges inside our Heads

Squirting Chemicals

The Stately Dance of the Symbols

In which the Alfbert Visits Austranius

Brief Debriefing

Soaps in Sanskrit

Winding Up the Debriefing

Trapped at the High Level

First Key Ingredient of Strangeness

Second Key Ingredient of Strangeness

Sperry Redux

CHAPTER 15 - Entwinement

Multiple Strange Loops in One Brain

Content-free Feedback Loops

Baby Feedback Loops and Baby “I” ’s

Entwined Feedback Loops

One Privileged Loop inside our Skull

Shared Perception, Shared Control

A Twirlwind Trip to Twinwirld

Is One or Two Letters of the Alphabet?

Pairsonal Identity in Twinwirld

“Twe”-tweaking by Twinwirld-twiddling

Post Scriptum re Twinwirld

Soulmates and Matesouls

Children as Gluons

CHAPTER 16 - Grappling with the Deepest Mystery

A Random Event Changes Everything

Desperate Lark

Post Scriptum

CHAPTER 17 - How We Live in Each Other

Universal Machines

The Unexpectedness of Universality

Universal Beings

Being Visited

Chemistry and Its Lack

Copycat Planetoids Grow by Absorbing Melting Meteorites

How Much Can One Import of Another’s Interiority?

Double-clicking on the Icon for a Loved One’s Soul

Thinking with Another’s Brain

Mosaics of Different Grain Size

Transplantation of Patterns

CHAPTER 18 - The Blurry Glow of Human Identity

I Host and Am Hosted by Others

Feeling that One is Elsewhere

Telepresence versus “Real” Presence

Which Viewpoint is Really Mine?

Where Am I?

Varying Degrees of Being Another

The Naïve Viewpoint is Usually Good Enough

Where Does a Hammerhead Shark Think it is?

Sympathetic Vibrations

Am I No One Else or Am I Everyone Else?

Interpenetration of National Souls

Halos, Afterglows, Coronas

CHAPTER 19 - Consciousness = Thinking

So Where’s Consciousness in my Loopy Tale?

Enter the Skeptics

Symbols Trigger More Symbols

The Central Loop of Cognition

CHAPTER 20 - A Courteous Crossing of Words

CHAPTER 21 - A Brief Brush with Cartesian Egos

Well-told Stories Pluck Powerful Chords

What Pushovers We Are!

Teleportation of a Thought Experiment across the Atlantic

The Murky Whereabouts of Cartesian Egos

Am I on Venus, or Am I on Mars?

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