I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
In I am a strange loop Douglas Hofstader asks the question, who am “I”; what is the self?
Consistent with his position as a non-jargonist, Hofstader refuses to accept domain limits on his question. Thus, Hofstader ends up at an impasse with the terms he uses (self, substance, pattern) as these terms “pull in” the domain limits that he refuses to recognize. Rather than allowing his inquiry to asymptotically approach a correct calibration to highlight the cut that outlines selfhood, (which would require that he float his terms into a new mapping), instead Hofstader insists on the reality of his non-jargon words and implicitly runs us into a kind of Kantian paradox in which on the one hand, we have an “I” of personal experience and on the other, we have only the endless repetition of patterns..
By insisting on a lack of limit in his questioning and forcing the terms he wants to apply to every context of inquiry, ironically, Hofstader’s method recreates the very answer he finds ridiculous: “Soul regression”, i.e., “inside me there is a little man who runs me; inside him there is a little man who runs him… ad infinitum”. By insisting on finding a narcissistic trace of selfhood at each level, his inquiry would have us, at every level, produce a trace of self from each domain to its sub-domain and so on.
Is this not an example of how an inquiry through its formal presentation reproduces the structure of the answer they seek? Hofstader rejects the ridiculous implications of soul regression yet he seems willing to only accept an answer that would structurally be its equivalent.
His discard of jargon in an attempt to be more “real” (good ole American pragmatism) ignores the primary fact that not-all queries can be sensible in only some domains. Looking for the self in physics is narcissistic. It’s like looking for ingredients that make a good breakfast in building code. Incidentally, this reminds me of how Kantian scholars look to critique of pure reason as a book about subjectivity, ignoring the fact that Kant’s main focus is about “pure” reason alone. Subjectivity is just another example of a transcendental chimera. Yet, I digress…
Overall, Hofstader’s book is interesting, and well written, as he explains complex ideas without the use of very technical terms. There is another way to debunk Hofstader’s reasoning however, and that’s to note what he takes for granted conceptually and what he questions. It’s of interesting to note that in many examples, Hofstader replaces nonsense terms for the very objects he questions. When questioning the veracity of mental phenomenon, he does this often. His move is to show that a lack of difference (physically) is no difference. This is silly ludicrous as he is basically transposing one term with a specific context into another domain and then demonstrating through the equivalence of nonsense terms that this object doesn’t hook into anything. This makes Hofstader a bad philosophy though, because in essence he is begging the question.
I think the main critique of this book is that if there is ever a point at which we need jargon, it’s to recognize the complex agency of those fields. Jargon words exist to express relationships that are otherwise difficult to apprehend without those jargonistic contexts. Yes, an unfortunate side effect of jargon is elitism, but that’s often the case with people who want to differentiate themselves for the purposes of status through any means necessary, so we will always have elitism, even without jargon. By removing the jargon and consideration of other kinds of logics, Hofstader limits his inquiry to a single domain, one which he recognizes as being overwhelmingly valid. This creates the same problem as mentioned before: he is looking for an answer in the wrong area. It’s like someone insisting that we find a definition for “life” in terms of building code, or trying to find a hadron in terms of biology — and upon not finding this concept expressible in the domain of their choice, concluding that this concept must be bunk all along.
I am not stating that another domain has the answer, or even a coherent answer. I am simply stating that Hofstader ties his own hands together and then through a series of very clever but limited inquiries begs the question over and over to conclude that the self does not really exist because he can’t find it present in all domains equally. What a narcissistic endeavor he has undertaken.
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