I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [234]
Page 321 with a nine-planet solar system… I’m not about to enter into the raging debate over poor Pluto’s possible planethood (is Disney’s Pluto a dog?), although I think the question is a fascinating one from the point of view of cognitive science, since it opens up deep questions about the nature of categories and analogies in the human mind.
Page 322 Z-people… laugh exactly the same as …Q-people… See “Planet without Laughter” in [Smullyan 1980], a wonderful tale about vacuously laughing zombies.
Page 324 Dan Dennett’s criticism of such philosophers hits the nail on the head… See especially “The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies” in [Dennett 1998] and “The Zombic Hunch” in [Dennett 2005] for marvelous Dennettian arguments.
Page 325 you can quote me on that… Actually, the image is Bill Frucht’s, so you can quote Bill on that. I had originally written something about a Flash Gordon–style hood ornament, and Bill, probably correctly seeing this 1950’s image as too passé, perhaps even camp, pulled me single-handedly into the twenty-first century.
Page 326 What is this nutty Capitalized Essence all about? I concocted the phrase “Capitalized Essences” when I wrote the dialogue “Three-Part Invention” in [Hofstadter 1979].
Page 333 for all you know, what I am experiencing as redness… The most penetrating discussion of the inverted-spectrum riddle that I have read is that in [Dennett 1991].
Page 333 Bleu Blanc Rouge… The colors of the French flag are red, white, and blue, but the French always recite them in the order “blue, white, red”. This makes for a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that their color experiences are “just like ours, but flipped”.
Page 339 the so-called problem of “free will”… There had to be some arena in which Dan Dennett and I do not quite see eye to eye, and at this late point in my book we have finally hit it. It is the question of free will. I agree with most of Dan’s arguments in [Dennett 1984], and yet I can’t go along with him that we have free will, of any sort. One day, Dan and I will thrash this out between ourselves.
Page 340 the analogy to our electoral process is such a blatant elephant… This idea of “votes” in the brain is discussed in Chapter 33 of [Hofstadter 1985], as well as in the Careenium dialogue, which is Chapter 25 of the same book.
Page 345 gentle people such as…César Chávez… In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, deeply depressed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, I worked intensely for the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (later known as the “United Farm Workers of America”) for a couple of years, first as a frequent volunteer and then for several months as a boycott organizer (first for grapes, then for lettuce). In this capacity I had the chance to meet with César Chávez a few times, although to my great regret I never truly got to know him as a person.
Page 346 As far as I can peer back… The translation is my own.
Page 347 This was an abhorrent proposal… The translation is my own.
Page 347 a book entitled ‘Le Cerveau et la conscience’… This was [Chauchard].
Page 351 Many performers have been performing… The translation is my own.
Page 361 Riposte: A Soft Poem… There is a method to my madness in this section. In particular, both paragraphs were written to an ancient kind of meter called “paeonic”. What this means is that three syllables go by without a stress, but on the fourth a stress is placed, without its seeming (so I hope) to have been forced: “And yet to you, my faithful reader who has plowed