I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter

Read the full post at - I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter is possibly one of the best science books I’ve ever read — even though I’m not entirely sure I understood half of it. That’s not a knock on the book. It’s actually the most honest recommendation I can give for a subject this deep. What the Book Is About The book sits in an interesting gap. On one end, you have neuroscience — the hard biology of how the brain physically works. Robert Sapolsky’s Behave is probably the best book I’ve read on that side of things. On the other end, you have psychology — how we build mental models and categories to make sense of the world around us. I Am a Strange Loop lives in the middle. It’s about consciousness itself: how a physical brain generates a subjective experience of being you. Hofstadter uses the mathematics of self-referential systems — specifically Gödel’s incompleteness theorems — to explain how consciousness emerges. The basic idea is…