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106-492: Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American cognitive and computer scientist whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness , analogy-making, strange loops , artificial intelligence , and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and

212-560: A National Book Award (at that time called The American Book Award) for Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology. Hofstadter was born in New York City to future Nobel Prize -winning physicist Robert Hofstadter and Nancy Givan Hofstadter. He grew up on the campus of Stanford University , where his father was a professor, and attended

318-591: A cha-cha-cha class, and they married in Bloomington in September 2012. Hofstadter has composed pieces for piano and for piano and voice. He created an audio CD, DRH/JJ , of these compositions performed mostly by pianist Jane Jackson, with a few performed by Brian Jones, Dafna Barenboim, Gitanjali Mathur, and Hofstadter. The dedication for I Am A Strange Loop is: "To my sister Laura, who can understand, and to our sister Molly, who cannot." Hofstadter explains in

424-495: A Strange Loop , Hofstadter defines strange loops as follows: And yet when I say "strange loop", I have something else in mind — a less concrete, more elusive notion. What I mean by "strange loop" is — here goes a first stab, anyway — not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in an hierarchy, and yet somehow

530-454: A concept of consciousness. He does not use any single word or terminology that is clearly similar to the phenomenon or concept defined by John Locke . Victor Caston contends that Aristotle did have a concept more clearly similar to perception . Modern dictionary definitions of the word consciousness evolved over several centuries and reflect a range of seemingly related meanings, with some differences that have been controversial, such as

636-466: A course he has twice given at Indiana University, in which he took a "skeptical look at a number of highly touted AI projects and overall approaches". For example, upon the defeat of Garry Kasparov by Deep Blue , he commented: "It was a watershed event, but it doesn't have to do with computers becoming intelligent." In his book Metamagical Themas , he says that "in this day and age, how can anyone fascinated by creativity and beauty fail to see in computers

742-446: A curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked. Examples of the range of descriptions, definitions or explanations are: ordered distinction between self and environment, simple wakefulness , one's sense of selfhood or soul explored by " looking within "; being a metaphorical " stream " of contents, or being a mental state , mental event , or mental process of the brain. The words "conscious" and "consciousness" in

848-400: A distinct type of substance not governed by the laws of physics), and property dualism (which holds that the laws of physics are universally valid but cannot be used to explain the mind). The three main types of monism are physicalism (which holds that the mind consists of matter organized in a particular way), idealism (which holds that only thought or experience truly exists, and matter

954-436: A grasp of what consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of equating consciousness with self-consciousness —to be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it. Using 'awareness', however, as a definition or synonym of consciousness

1060-814: A label he has since dropped in favor of "cognitive science research"). In 1984, he moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was hired as a professor of psychology and was also appointed to the Walgreen Chair for the Study of Human Understanding. In 1988, Hofstadter returned to IU as College of Arts and Sciences Professor in cognitive science and computer science. He was also appointed adjunct professor of history and philosophy of science, philosophy, comparative literature, and psychology, but has said that his involvement with most of those departments

1166-452: A more specialized question is how to square the subjective notion that we are in control of our decisions (at least in some small measure) with the customary view of causality that subsequent events are caused by prior events. The topic of free will is the philosophical and scientific examination of this conundrum. Many philosophers consider experience to be the essence of consciousness, and believe that experience can only fully be known from

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1272-578: A radical change in technology and culture), Hofstadter has both organized and participated in several public discussions of the topic. At Indiana University in 1999 he organized such a symposium, and in April 2000, he organized a larger symposium titled "Spiritual Robots" at Stanford University, in which he moderated a panel consisting of Ray Kurzweil , Hans Moravec , Kevin Kelly , Ralph Merkle , Bill Joy , Frank Drake , John Holland and John Koza . Hofstadter

1378-477: A series of majority preferences may return to the original candidate, leaving no clear preference by the group. In this case, some candidate beats an opponent, who in turn beats another opponent, and so forth, until a candidate is reached who beats the original candidate. The liar paradox and Russell's paradox also involve strange loops, as does René Magritte 's painting The Treachery of Images . The mathematical phenomenon of polysemy has been observed to be

1484-591: A similar way a sound with seemingly ever increasing tempo can be constructed, as was demonstrated by Jean-Claude Risset . Visual illusions depicting strange loops include the Penrose stairs and the Barberpole illusion . A quine in software programming is a program that produces a new version of itself without any input from the outside. A similar concept is metamorphic code . Efron's dice are four dice that are intransitive under gambler's preference. I.e.,

1590-533: A strange loop is the self-referential structure at the core of Gödel's incompleteness theorems . Hofstadter's 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop carries his vision of consciousness considerably further, including the idea that each human "I" is distributed over numerous brains, rather than being limited to one. Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language is a long book devoted to language and translation, especially poetry translation, and one of its leitmotifs

1696-493: A strong intuition for the existence of what they refer to as consciousness, skeptics argue that this intuition is too narrow, either because the concept of consciousness is embedded in our intuitions, or because we all are illusions. Gilbert Ryle , for example, argued that traditional understanding of consciousness depends on a Cartesian dualist outlook that improperly distinguishes between mind and body, or between mind and world. He proposed that we speak not of minds, bodies, and

1802-400: A tapestry rich and complex enough to begin twisting back upon itself . According to this view, the psychological "I" is a narrative fiction, something created only from intake of symbolic data and the brain's ability to create stories about itself from that data. The consequence is that a self-perspective is a culmination of a unique pattern of symbolic activity in the brain, which suggests that

1908-607: Is "tangled" (Hofstadter refers to this as a " heterarchy "), in that there is no well defined highest or lowest level; moving through the levels, one eventually returns to the starting point, i.e., the original level. Examples of strange loops that Hofstadter offers include: many of the works of M. C. Escher , the Canon 5. a 2 from J.S. Bach's Musical Offering , the information flow network between DNA and enzymes through protein synthesis and DNA replication , and self-referential Gödelian statements in formal systems . In I Am

2014-421: Is a common synonym for all forms of awareness, or simply ' experience ', without differentiating between inner and outer, or between higher and lower types. With advances in brain research, "the presence or absence of experienced phenomena " of any kind underlies the work of those neuroscientists who seek "to analyze the precise relation of conscious phenomenology to its associated information processing" in

2120-418: Is a set of 88 translations of "Ma Mignonne", a highly constrained poem by 16th-century French poet Clément Marot . In this book, Hofstadter jokingly describes himself as " pilingual " (meaning that the sum total of the varying degrees of mastery of all the languages that he has studied comes to 3.14159 ...), as well as an "oligoglot" (someone who speaks "a few" languages). In 1999, the bicentennial year of

2226-450: Is access conscious; when we introspect , information about our thoughts is access conscious; when we remember , information about the past is access conscious, and so on. Although some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett , have disputed the validity of this distinction, others have broadly accepted it. David Chalmers has argued that A-consciousness can in principle be understood in mechanistic terms, but that understanding P-consciousness

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2332-616: Is also debate over whether or not A-consciousness and P-consciousness always coexist or if they can exist separately. Although P-consciousness without A-consciousness is more widely accepted, there have been some hypothetical examples of A without P. Block, for instance, suggests the case of a " zombie " that is computationally identical to a person but without any subjectivity. However, he remains somewhat skeptical concluding "I don't know whether there are any actual cases of A-consciousness without P-consciousness, but I hope I have illustrated their conceptual possibility". Sam Harris observes: "At

2438-480: Is another illustrative example of a strange loop. Named after Roger Shepard , it is a sound consisting of a superposition of tones separated by octaves . When played with the base pitch of the tone moving upwards or downwards, it is referred to as the Shepard scale . This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower. In

2544-681: Is central to the animal rights movement , because it includes the ability to experience pain and suffering. For many decades, consciousness as a research topic was avoided by the majority of mainstream scientists, because of a general feeling that a phenomenon defined in subjective terms could not properly be studied using objective experimental methods. In 1975 George Mandler published an influential psychological study which distinguished between slow, serial, and limited conscious processes and fast, parallel and extensive unconscious ones. The Science and Religion Forum 1984 annual conference, ' From Artificial Intelligence to Human Consciousness ' identified

2650-496: Is defined roughly like English "consciousness" in the 1753 volume of Diderot and d'Alembert 's Encyclopédie as "the opinion or internal feeling that we ourselves have from what we do". About forty meanings attributed to the term consciousness can be identified and categorized based on functions and experiences . The prospects for reaching any single, agreed-upon, theory-independent definition of consciousness appear remote. Scholars are divided as to whether Aristotle had

2756-678: Is far more intelligent and will become incomprehensible to us". When Martin Gardner retired from writing his " Mathematical Games " column for Scientific American magazine, Hofstadter succeeded him in 1981–83 with a column titled Metamagical Themas (an anagram of "Mathematical Games"). An idea he introduced in one of these columns was the concept of "Reviews of This Book", a book containing nothing but cross-referenced reviews of itself that has an online implementation. One of Hofstadter's columns in Scientific American concerned

2862-481: Is generally taken to be the first philosopher to use conscientia in a way less like the traditional meaning and more like the way modern English speakers would use "conscience", his meaning is nowhere defined. In Search after Truth ( Regulæ ad directionem ingenii ut et inquisitio veritatis per lumen naturale , Amsterdam 1701) he wrote the word with a gloss : conscientiâ, vel interno testimonio (translatable as "conscience, or internal testimony"). It might mean

2968-618: Is intrinsically incapable of explaining the holistic aspects of consciousness, but that quantum theory may provide the missing ingredients. Several theorists have therefore proposed quantum mind (QM) theories of consciousness. Notable theories falling into this category include the holonomic brain theory of Karl Pribram and David Bohm , and the Orch-OR theory formulated by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose . Some of these QM theories offer descriptions of phenomenal consciousness, as well as QM interpretations of access consciousness. None of

3074-470: Is linked to some kind of "selfhood", for example to certain pragmatic issues such as the feeling of agency and the effects of regret and action on experience of one's own body or social identity. Similarly Daniel Kahneman , who focused on systematic errors in perception, memory and decision-making, has differentiated between two kinds of mental processes, or cognitive "systems": the "fast" activities that are primary, automatic and "cannot be turned off", and

3180-454: Is merely an illusion), and neutral monism (which holds that both mind and matter are aspects of a distinct essence that is itself identical to neither of them). There are also, however, a large number of idiosyncratic theories that cannot cleanly be assigned to any of these schools of thought. Since the dawn of Newtonian science with its vision of simple mechanical principles governing the entire universe, some philosophers have been tempted by

3286-585: Is much more challenging: he calls this the hard problem of consciousness . Some philosophers believe that Block's two types of consciousness are not the end of the story. William Lycan , for example, argued in his book Consciousness and Experience that at least eight clearly distinct types of consciousness can be identified (organism consciousness; control consciousness; consciousness of ; state/event consciousness; reportability; introspective consciousness; subjective consciousness; self-consciousness)—and that even this list omits several more obscure forms. There

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3392-585: Is nominal. Since 1988, Hofstadter has been the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, which consists of himself and his graduate students, forming the "Fluid Analogies Research Group" (FARG). In 1988, he received the In Praise of Reason award,

3498-457: Is not a simple matter: If awareness of the environment . . . is the criterion of consciousness, then even the protozoans are conscious. If awareness of awareness is required, then it is doubtful whether the great apes and human infants are conscious. Many philosophers have argued that consciousness is a unitary concept that is understood by the majority of people despite the difficulty philosophers have had defining it. Max Velmans proposed that

3604-454: Is not necessary to explain what we observe. Some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett in a research paper titled "The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies", argue that people who give this explanation do not really understand what they are saying. More broadly, philosophers who do not accept the possibility of zombies generally believe that consciousness is reflected in behavior (including verbal behavior), and that we attribute consciousness on

3710-444: Is now the dominant position among contemporary philosophers of mind. For an overview of the field, approaches often include both historical perspectives (e.g., Descartes, Locke, Kant ) and organization by key issues in contemporary debates. An alternative is to focus primarily on current philosophical stances and empirical Philosophers differ from non-philosophers in their intuitions about what consciousness is. While most people have

3816-528: Is physically indistinguishable from a human being and behaves like a human being in every way but nevertheless lacks consciousness. Related issues have also been studied extensively by Greg Littmann of the University of Illinois, and by Colin Allen (a professor at the University of Pittsburgh) regarding the literature and research studying artificial intelligence in androids. The most commonly given answer

3922-445: Is raw experience: it is moving, colored forms, sounds, sensations, emotions and feelings with our bodies and responses at the center. These experiences, considered independently of any impact on behavior, are called qualia . A-consciousness, on the other hand, is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behavior. So, when we perceive , information about what we perceive

4028-428: Is that we attribute consciousness to other people because we see that they resemble us in appearance and behavior; we reason that if they look like us and act like us, they must be like us in other ways, including having experiences of the sort that we do. There are, however, a variety of problems with that explanation. For one thing, it seems to violate the principle of parsimony , by postulating an invisible entity that

4134-409: Is the fact that consciousness of some sort goes on. 'States of mind' succeed each other in him . [...] But everyone knows what the terms mean [only] in a rough way; [...] When I say every 'state' or 'thought' is part of a personal consciousness , 'personal consciousness' is one of the terms in question. Its meaning we know so long as no one asks us to define it, but to give an accurate account of it

4240-438: Is the most difficult of philosophic tasks. [...] The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I's and you's. Prior to the 20th century, philosophers treated the phenomenon of consciousness as the "inner world [of] one's own mind", and introspection was the mind "attending to" itself, an activity seemingly distinct from that of perceiving

4346-486: The unconscious processes of cognition such as perception , reactive awareness and attention , and automatic forms of learning , problem-solving , and decision-making . The cognitive science point of view—with an inter-disciplinary perspective involving fields such as psychology , linguistics and anthropology —requires no agreed definition of "consciousness" but studies the interaction of many processes besides perception. For some researchers, consciousness

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4452-704: The Journal of Consciousness Studies , along with regular conferences organized by groups such as the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and the Society for Consciousness Studies . Strange loop A tangled hierarchy is a hierarchical consciousness system in which a strange loop appears. A strange loop is a hierarchy of levels, each of which is linked to at least one other by some type of relationship. A strange loop hierarchy

4558-580: The Zhuangzi. This bird's name is Of a Flock ( peng 鵬 ), yet its back is countless thousands of miles across and its wings are like clouds arcing across the heavens. "Like Of a Flock, whose wings arc across the heavens, the wings of your consciousness span to the horizon. At the same time, the wings of every other being's consciousness span to the horizon. You are of a flock, one bird among kin." Mental processes (such as consciousness) and physical processes (such as brain events) seem to be correlated, however

4664-836: The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry 's highest honor. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and became a member of the American Philosophical Society . In 2010, he was elected a member of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala , Sweden. At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, Hofstadter and Melanie Mitchell coauthored a computational model of "high-level perception"— Copycat —and several other models of analogy-making and cognition , including

4770-641: The English language date to the 17th century, and the first recorded use of "conscious" as a simple adjective was applied figuratively to inanimate objects ( "the conscious Groves" , 1643). It derived from the Latin conscius ( con- "together" and scio "to know") which meant "knowing with" or "having joint or common knowledge with another", especially as in sharing a secret. Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) wrote: "Where two, or more men, know of one and

4876-686: The International School of Geneva in 1958–59. He graduated with distinction in mathematics from Stanford University in 1965, and received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Oregon in 1975, where his study of the energy levels of Bloch electrons in a magnetic field led to his discovery of the fractal known as Hofstadter's butterfly . Hofstadter was initially appointed to Indiana University's computer science department faculty in 1977, and at that time he launched his research program in computer modeling of mental processes (which he called "artificial intelligence research",

4982-423: The liar paradox as examples that illustrate the idea of strange loops, which is expressed fully in the proof of Gödel 's incompleteness theorem . The " chicken or the egg " paradox is perhaps the best-known strange loop problem. The " ouroboros ", which depicts a dragon eating its own tail, is perhaps one of the most ancient and universal symbolic representations of the reflexive loop concept. A Shepard tone

5088-619: The "contents of conscious experience by introspection and experiment ". Another popular metaphor was James's doctrine of the stream of consciousness , with continuity, fringes, and transitions. James discussed the difficulties of describing and studying psychological phenomena, recognizing that commonly-used terminology was a necessary and acceptable starting point towards more precise, scientifically justified language. Prime examples were phrases like inner experience and personal consciousness : The first and foremost concrete fact which every one will affirm to belong to his inner experience

5194-439: The "everyday understanding of consciousness" uncontroversially "refers to experience itself rather than any particular thing that we observe or experience" and he added that consciousness "is [therefore] exemplified by all the things that we observe or experience", whether thoughts, feelings, or perceptions. Velmans noted however, as of 2009, that there was a deep level of "confusion and internal division" among experts about

5300-485: The "slow", deliberate, effortful activities of a secondary system "often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration". Kahneman's two systems have been described as "roughly corresponding to unconscious and conscious processes". The two systems can interact, for example in sharing the control of attention. While System 1 can be impulsive, "System 2 is in charge of self-control", and "When we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2,

5406-464: The "structure" of the mind by analyzing its "elements". The abstract idea of states of consciousness mirrored the concept of states of matter . In 1892, William James noted that the "ambiguous word 'content' has been recently invented instead of 'object'" and that the metaphor of mind as a container seemed to minimize the dualistic problem of how "states of consciousness can know " things, or objects; by 1899 psychologists were busily studying

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5512-456: The 'outer world' and its physical phenomena. In 1892 William James noted the distinction along with doubts about the inward character of the mind: 'Things' have been doubted, but thoughts and feelings have never been doubted. The outer world, but never the inner world, has been denied. Everyone assumes that we have direct introspective acquaintance with our thinking activity as such, with our consciousness as something inward and contrasted with

5618-616: The Russian poet and writer Alexander Pushkin , Hofstadter published a verse translation of Pushkin's classic novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin . He has translated other poems and two novels: La Chamade ( That Mad Ache ) by Françoise Sagan , and La Scoperta dell'Alba ( The Discovery of Dawn ) by Walter Veltroni , the then-head of the Partito Democratico in Italy. The Discovery of Dawn was published in 2007, and That Mad Ache

5724-459: The Tabletop project, co-developed with Robert M. French . The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid). Other more recent models include Phaeaco (implemented by Harry Foundalis) and SeqSee (Abhijit Mahabal), which model high-level perception and analogy-making in

5830-448: The basis of behavior. A more straightforward way of saying this is that we attribute experiences to people because of what they can do , including the fact that they can tell us about their experiences. The term " qualia " was introduced in philosophical literature by C. I. Lewis . The word is derived from Latin and means "of what sort". It is basically a quantity or property of something as perceived or experienced by an individual, like

5936-591: The body surface" invites another criticism, that most consciousness research since the 1990s, perhaps because of bias, has focused on processes of external perception . From a history of psychology perspective, Julian Jaynes rejected popular but "superficial views of consciousness" especially those which equate it with "that vaguest of terms, experience ". In 1976 he insisted that if not for introspection , which for decades had been ignored or taken for granted rather than explained, there could be no "conception of what consciousness is" and in 1990, he reaffirmed

6042-503: The brain inevitably leads to the same kind of self-reference which Gödel proved was inherent in any sufficiently complex logical or arithmetical system (that allows for arithmetic by means of the Peano axioms ) in his incompleteness theorem . Gödel showed that mathematics and logic contain strange loops: propositions that not only refer to mathematical and logical truths , but also to the symbol systems expressing those truths. This leads to

6148-408: The brain. This neuroscientific goal is to find the "neural correlates of consciousness" (NCC). One criticism of this goal is that it begins with a theoretical commitment to the neurological origin of all "experienced phenomena" whether inner or outer. Also, the fact that the easiest 'content of consciousness' to be so analyzed is "the experienced three-dimensional world (the phenomenal world) beyond

6254-436: The brain. Many other neuroscientists, such as Christof Koch , have explored the neural basis of consciousness without attempting to frame all-encompassing global theories. At the same time, computer scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence have pursued the goal of creating digital computer programs that can simulate or embody consciousness . A few theoretical physicists have argued that classical physics

6360-469: The brain." In Gödel, Escher, Bach he draws an analogy between the social organization of a colony of ants and the mind seen as a coherent "colony" of neurons. In particular, Hofstadter claims that our sense of having (or being) an "I" comes from the abstract pattern he terms a " strange loop ", an abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena as audio and video feedback that Hofstadter has defined as "a level-crossing feedback loop". The prototypical example of

6466-691: The character "Dr. Chandra" as being caught in a "Hofstadter– Möbius loop". The movie uses the term "H. Möbius loop". On April 3, 1995, Hofstadter's book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought was the first book sold by Amazon.com . Michael R. Jackson 's musical A Strange Loop makes reference to Hofstadter's concept and the title of his 2007 book. The books published by Hofstadter are (the ISBNs refer to paperback editions, where available): Hofstadter has written forewords for or edited

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6572-441: The concept of superrationality (choosing to cooperate when the other party/adversary is assumed to be equally intelligent as oneself), and the self-modifying game of Nomic , based on the way the legal system modifies itself, and developed by philosopher Peter Suber . Hofstadter was married to Carol Ann Brush until her death. They met in Bloomington, and married in Ann Arbor in 1985. They had two children. Carol died in 1993 from

6678-637: The conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do". Some have argued that we should eliminate the concept from our understanding of the mind, a position known as consciousness semanticism. In medicine , a "level of consciousness" terminology is used to describe a patient's arousal and responsiveness, which can be seen as a continuum of states ranging from full alertness and comprehension , through disorientation, delirium , loss of meaningful communication, and finally loss of movement in response to painful stimuli . Issues of practical concern include how

6784-664: The correctness of the above quote by focusing on the sentence which "says about itself" that it is provable (also known as a Henkin-sentence, named after logician Leon Henkin ). It turns out that under suitable meta-mathematical choices (where the Hilbert-Bernays provability conditions do not obtain), one can construct formally undecidable (or even formally refutable) Henkin-sentences for the arithmetical system under investigation. This system might very well be Hofstadter's Typographical Number Theory used in Gödel, Escher, Bach or

6890-457: The damaging effects of sexist language, and two chapters of his book Metamagical Themas are devoted to that topic, one of which is a biting analogy-based satire, " A Person Paper on Purity in Language " (1985), in which the reader's presumed revulsion at racism and racist language is used as a lever to motivate an analogous revulsion at sexism and sexist language; Hofstadter published it under

6996-466: The dice are ordered A > B > C > D > A , where x > y means "a gambler prefers x to y ". Individual preferences are always transitive, excluding preferences when given explicit rules such as in Efron's dice or rock-paper-scissors ; however, aggregate preferences of a group may be intransitive. This can result in a Condorcet paradox wherein following a path from one candidate across

7102-513: The difference between the video-feedback loop and the brain's strange loops, is that while the former converts light to the same pattern on a screen, the latter categorizes a pattern and outputs its "essence", so that as the brain gets closer and closer to its "essence", it goes further down its strange loop. Hofstadter thinks that minds appear to determine the world by way of "downward causality ", which refers to effects being viewed in terms of their underlying causes. Hofstadter says this happens in

7208-422: The difficulty of producing a definition that does not involve circularity or fuzziness. In The Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology (1989 edition), Stuart Sutherland emphasized external awareness, and expressed a skeptical attitude more than a definition: Consciousness —The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings ; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without

7314-729: The distinction between inward awareness and perception of the physical world, or the distinction between conscious and unconscious , or the notion of a mental entity or mental activity that is not physical. The common-usage definitions of consciousness in Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1966) are as follows: The Cambridge English Dictionary defines consciousness as "the state of understanding and realizing something". The Oxford Living Dictionary defines consciousness as "[t]he state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings", "[a] person's awareness or perception of something", and "[t]he fact of awareness by

7420-450: The following books: Consciousness Consciousness , at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence . However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate by philosophers , scientists , and theologians . Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind , and at other times, an aspect of it. In

7526-471: The following example: It is difficult for modern Western man to grasp that the Greeks really had no concept of consciousness in that they did not class together phenomena as varied as problem solving, remembering, imagining, perceiving, feeling pain, dreaming, and acting on the grounds that all these are manifestations of being aware or being conscious. Many philosophers and scientists have been unhappy about

7632-581: The idea that consciousness could be explained in purely physical terms. The first influential writer to propose such an idea explicitly was Julien Offray de La Mettrie , in his book Man a Machine ( L'homme machine ). His arguments, however, were very abstract. The most influential modern physical theories of consciousness are based on psychology and neuroscience . Theories proposed by neuroscientists such as Gerald Edelman and Antonio Damasio , and by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, seek to explain consciousness in terms of neural events occurring within

7738-437: The inside, subjectively. The problem of other minds is a philosophical problem traditionally stated as the following epistemological question: Given that I can only observe the behavior of others, how can I know that others have minds? The problem of other minds is particularly acute for people who believe in the possibility of philosophical zombies , that is, people who think it is possible in principle to have an entity that

7844-595: The interaction between these two domains occurs inside the brain, perhaps in a small midline structure called the pineal gland . Although it is widely accepted that Descartes explained the problem cogently, few later philosophers have been happy with his solution, and his ideas about the pineal gland have especially been ridiculed. However, no alternative solution has gained general acceptance. Proposed solutions can be divided broadly into two categories: dualist solutions that maintain Descartes's rigid distinction between

7950-532: The knowledge of the value of one's own thoughts. The origin of the modern concept of consciousness is often attributed to John Locke who defined the word in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding , published in 1690, as "the perception of what passes in a man's own mind". The essay strongly influenced 18th-century British philosophy , and Locke's definition appeared in Samuel Johnson 's celebrated Dictionary (1755). The French term conscience

8056-480: The level of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill, comatose, or anesthetized people, and how to treat conditions in which consciousness is impaired or disrupted. The degree or level of consciousness is measured by standardized behavior observation scales such as the Glasgow Coma Scale . While historically philosophers have defended various views on consciousness, surveys indicate that physicalism

8162-460: The level of your experience, you are not a body of cells, organelles, and atoms; you are consciousness and its ever-changing contents". Seen in this way, consciousness is a subjectively experienced, ever-present field in which things (the contents of consciousness) come and go. Christopher Tricker argues that this field of consciousness is symbolized by the mythical bird that opens the Daoist classic

8268-453: The microdomains of Bongard problems and number sequences, respectively, as well as George (Francisco Lara-Dammer), which models the processes of perception and discovery in triangle geometry. Hofstadter's thesis about consciousness, first expressed in Gödel, Escher, Bach but also present in several of his later books, is that it is "an emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in

8374-532: The mind of itself and the world". Philosophers have attempted to clarify technical distinctions by using a jargon of their own. The corresponding entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998) reads: During the early 19th century, the emerging field of geology inspired a popular metaphor that the mind likewise had hidden layers "which recorded the past of the individual". By 1875, most psychologists believed that "consciousness

8480-415: The more familiar Peano Arithmetic or some other sufficiently rich formal arithmetic. Thus, there are examples of sentences "which say about themselves that they are provable", but they don't exhibit the sort of downward causal powers described in the displayed quote. Hofstadter points to Bach 's Canon per Tonos , M. C. Escher 's drawings Waterfall , Drawing Hands , Ascending and Descending , and

8586-498: The nature of consciousness as a matter for investigation; Donald Michie was a keynote speaker. Starting in the 1980s, an expanding community of neuroscientists and psychologists have associated themselves with a field called Consciousness Studies , giving rise to a stream of experimental work published in books, journals such as Consciousness and Cognition , Frontiers in Consciousness Research , Psyche , and

8692-406: The nerd culture that centers on computers". He admits that "a large fraction [of his audience] seems to be those who are fascinated by technology", but when it was suggested that his work "has inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence" he replied that he was pleased about that, but that he himself has "no interest in computers". In that interview he also mentioned

8798-409: The notion of quantum consciousness, an experiment about wave function collapse led by Catalina Curceanu in 2022 suggests that quantum consciousness, as suggested by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff , is highly implausible. Apart from the general question of the "hard problem" of consciousness (which is, roughly speaking, the question of how mental experience can arise from a physical basis ),

8904-414: The outer objects which it knows. Yet I must confess that for my part I cannot feel sure of this conclusion. [...] It seems as if consciousness as an inner activity were rather a postulate than a sensibly given fact... By the 1960s, for many philosophers and psychologists who talked about consciousness, the word no longer meant the 'inner world' but an indefinite, large category called awareness , as in

9010-399: The past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection , of private thought , imagination , and volition . Today, it often includes any kind of cognition , experience , feeling , or perception . It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, metacognition , or self-awareness , either continuously changing or not. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises

9116-410: The pattern of symbolic activity that makes identity, that constitutes subjectivity, can be replicated within the brains of others, and likely even in artificial brains . The "strangeness" of a strange loop comes from the brain's perception, because the brain categorizes its input in a small number of "symbols" (by which Hofstadter means groups of neurons standing for something in the outside world). So

9222-403: The phenomenon of consciousness, because researchers lacked "a sufficiently well-specified use of the term...to agree that they are investigating the same thing". He argued additionally that "pre-existing theoretical commitments" to competing explanations of consciousness might be a source of bias. Within the "modern consciousness studies" community the technical phrase 'phenomenal consciousness'

9328-405: The preface that his younger sister Molly never developed the ability to speak or understand language. As a consequence of his attitudes about consciousness and empathy, Hofstadter became a vegetarian in his teenage years, and has remained primarily so since that time. In the 1982 novel 2010: Odyssey Two , Arthur C. Clarke 's first sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey , HAL 9000 is described by

9434-455: The proof of Gödel 's incompleteness theorem : Merely from knowing the formula's meaning, one can infer its truth or falsity without any effort to derive it in the old-fashioned way, which requires one to trudge methodically "upwards" from the axioms. This is not just peculiar; it is astonishing. Normally, one cannot merely look at what a mathematical conjecture says and simply appeal to the content of that statement on its own to deduce whether

9540-590: The pseudonym William Satire, an allusion to William Safire . Another column reported on the discoveries made by University of Michigan professor Robert Axelrod in his computer tournament pitting many iterated prisoner's dilemma strategies against each other, and a follow-up column discussed a similar tournament that Hofstadter and his graduate student Marek Lugowski organized. The "Metamagical Themas" columns ranged over many themes, including patterns in Frédéric Chopin 's piano music (particularly his études ),

9646-409: The quantum mechanical theories have been confirmed by experiment. Recent publications by G. Guerreshi, J. Cia, S. Popescu, and H. Briegel could falsify proposals such as those of Hameroff, which rely on quantum entanglement in protein. At the present time many scientists and philosophers consider the arguments for an important role of quantum phenomena to be unconvincing. Empirical evidence is against

9752-411: The realm of consciousness and the realm of matter but give different answers for how the two realms relate to each other; and monist solutions that maintain that there is really only one realm of being, of which consciousness and matter are both aspects. Each of these categories itself contains numerous variants. The two main types of dualism are substance dualism (which holds that the mind is formed of

9858-458: The same fact, they are said to be Conscious of it one to another". There were also many occurrences in Latin writings of the phrase conscius sibi , which translates literally as "knowing with oneself", or in other words "sharing knowledge with oneself about something". This phrase has the figurative sense of "knowing that one knows", which is something like the modern English word "conscious", but it

9964-663: The scent of rose, the taste of wine, or the pain of a headache. They are difficult to articulate or describe. The philosopher and scientist Daniel Dennett describes them as "the way things seem to us", while philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers expanded on qualia as the " hard problem of consciousness " in the 1990s. When qualia is experienced, activity is simulated in the brain, and these processes are called neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs). Many scientific studies have been done to attempt to link particular brain regions with emotions or experiences. Species which experience qualia are said to have sentience , which

10070-418: The sort of paradoxes seen in statements such as " This statement is false ," wherein the sentence's basis of truth is found in referring to itself and its assertion, causing a logical paradox. Hofstadter argues that the psychological self arises out of a similar kind of paradox. The brain is not born with an "I" – the ego emerges only gradually as experience shapes the brain's dense web of active symbols into

10176-444: The specific nature of the connection is unknown. The first influential philosopher to discuss this question specifically was Descartes , and the answer he gave is known as mind–body dualism . Descartes proposed that consciousness resides within an immaterial domain he called res cogitans (the realm of thought), in contrast to the domain of material things, which he called res extensa (the realm of extension). He suggested that

10282-447: The statement is true or false. (pp. 169–170) Hofstadter claims a similar "flipping around of causality" appears to happen in minds possessing self-consciousness ; the mind perceives itself as the cause of certain feelings. The parallels between downward causality in formal systems and downward causality in brains are explored by Theodor Nenu in 2022, together with other aspects of Hofstadter's metaphysics of mind. Nenu also questions

10388-415: The successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one's sense of departing ever further from one's origin, one winds up, to one's shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop . (pp. 101–102) According to Hofstadter, strange loops take form in human consciousness as the complexity of active symbols in

10494-424: The sudden onset of a brain tumor, glioblastoma multiforme , when their children were young. The Carol Ann Brush Hofstadter Memorial Scholarship for Bologna-bound Indiana University students was established in 1996 in her name. Hofstadter's book Le Ton beau de Marot is dedicated to their two children and its dedication reads "To M. & D., living sparks of their Mommy's soul". In 2010, Hofstadter met Baofen Lin in

10600-407: The traditional idea of the phenomenon called 'consciousness', writing that "its denotative definition is, as it was for Descartes , Locke , and Hume , what is introspectable". Jaynes saw consciousness as an important but small part of human mentality, and he asserted: "there can be no progress in the science of consciousness until ... what is introspectable [is] sharply distinguished" from

10706-489: The ultimate tool for exploring their essence?" In 1988, Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos created a docudrama about Hofstadter and his ideas, Victim of the Brain , based on The Mind's I . It includes interviews with Hofstadter about his work. Provoked by predictions of a technological singularity (a hypothetical moment in the future of humanity when a self-reinforcing, runaway development of artificial intelligence causes

10812-488: The world, but of entities, or identities, acting in the world. Thus, by speaking of "consciousness" we end up leading ourselves by thinking that there is any sort of thing as consciousness separated from behavioral and linguistic understandings. Ned Block argued that discussions on consciousness often failed to properly distinguish phenomenal (P-consciousness) from access (A-consciousness), though these terms had been used before Block. P-consciousness, according to Block,

10918-502: Was also an invited panelist at the first Singularity Summit , held at Stanford in May 2006. Hofstadter expressed doubt that the singularity will occur in the foreseeable future. In 2023, Hofstadter said that rapid progress in AI made some of his "core beliefs" about the limitations of AI "collapse". Hinting at an AI takeover , he added that human beings may soon be eclipsed by "something else that

11024-440: Was but a small part of mental life", and this idea underlies the goal of Freudian therapy , to expose the unconscious layer of the mind. Other metaphors from various sciences inspired other analyses of the mind, for example: Johann Friedrich Herbart described ideas as being attracted and repulsed like magnets; John Stuart Mill developed the idea of "mental chemistry" and "mental compounds", and Edward B. Titchener sought

11130-519: Was published in 2009, bound together with Hofstadter's essay "Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation". Hofstadter's Law is "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." The law is stated in Gödel, Escher, Bach . Hofstadter's former Ph.D. students include (with dissertation title): Hofstadter has said that he feels "uncomfortable with

11236-537: Was rendered into English as "conscious to oneself" or "conscious unto oneself". For example, Archbishop Ussher wrote in 1613 of "being so conscious unto myself of my great weakness". The Latin conscientia , literally 'knowledge-with', first appears in Roman juridical texts by writers such as Cicero . It means a kind of shared knowledge with moral value, specifically what a witness knows of someone else's deeds. Although René Descartes (1596–1650), writing in Latin,

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