I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [224]
Page xiv Hofstadter’s Law… This comes from Chapter V of [Hofstadter 1979].
Page xiv “What is it like to be a bat?”… See Chapter 24 in [Hofstadter and Dennett].
Page xv I have spent nearly thirty years… See, for instance, [Hofstadter and Moser], [Hofstadter and FARG], [Hofstadter 1997], and [Hofstadter 2001].
Page xviii virtually every thought in this book…is an analogy… See [Hofstadter 2001].
Page xviii not indulging in Pushkinian digressions… See James Falen’s sparkling anglicization of Pushkin’s classic novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin [Pushkin 1995], or see my own translation [Pushkin 1999]. There is no sublimer marriage of form to content than Eugene Onegin.
Page xviii typeset it down to the finest level of detail… In this book, one of my chief esthetic concerns has been where page breaks fall. A cardinal rule has been that no paragraph (or section) should ever break in such a way that only one line of it occurs at the top or bottom of a page. Another guiding principle has been that the interword spacing in each line should look pleasing, and, in particular, not too loose (which is a frequent and annoying eyesore in computer-set text). In order to avoid such blemishes, I have done touch-up rewriting, often quite extensive, of just about every paragraph in the book. Page xviii itself is a typical example of the end result. And of course the page you are right now reading (and that I am right now touching up so that it will please your eye) is another such example.
The foregoing esthetic constraints (along with a number of others that I won’t describe here) amount to random darts being thrown at every page in the book, with each dart saying to me, in effect, “Here — don’t you think you could rewrite this sentence so that it not only looks better but also makes its point even more clearly and elegantly?” Some authors might find this tiresome, but I freely confess that I love these random darts and the two-sided challenges that they offer me, and I have worked extremely hard to meet those challenges throughout. There is not a shadow of a doubt that form–content pressures — relentless, intense, and unpredictable — have greatly improved the quality of this book, not only visually but also intellectually.
For a more explicit spelling-out of my views on the magical power of form–content interplay, see [Hofstadter 1997], especially its Introduction and Chapter 5.
Page 5 no machine can know what words are, or mean… This ancient idea is the rallying cry of many philosophers, such as John Searle. See Chapter 20 of [Hofstadter and Dennett].
Page 5 the laws of whose operation are arithmetical… This is an allusion to the idea that a “Giant Electronic Brain”, whose very fiber is arithmetical, could act indistinguishably from a human or animal brain by modeling the arithmetical behavior of all of its neurons. This would give rise to a kind of artificial intelligence, but very different from models in which the basic entities are words or concepts governed by rules that reflect the abstract flow of ideas in a mind rather than the microscopic flow of currents and chemicals in biological hardware. Chapter XVII of [Hofstadter 1979], Chapter 26 of [Hofstadter and Dennett], and Chapter 26 of [Hofstadter 1985] all represent elaborations of this subtle distinction, which I was beginning to explore in my teens.
Page 10 I don’t know what effect it had on her feelings about the picture… With some trepidation, I recently read aloud this opening section of my book to my mother, who, at almost 87, can only move around her old Stanford house in a wheelchair, but who remains sharp as a tack and intensely interested in the world around her. She listened with care and then remarked, “I must have changed a lot since then, because now, those pictures mean everything to me. I couldn