Douglas Hofstadter

By Wayne Brown
If we are to think seriously about the consciousness and he brain, we need to consider the work of Douglas Hofstadter, the preeminent modern thinker on the subject.

Hofstadter coined the term "neosphere" as the universe of memes, or ideas. In "I Am A Strange Loop", he explores what we mean when we say "I". Along the way, we learn to picture our mind in a completely new way, as a dynamic generator of memes, woven out of other memes and episodic memory.

What we experience as "I" is the "master meme", the name we give to the process of meme-weaving we experience at any moment. The "master meme" is self referential or "recursive", which means it includes itself as part of its "explanation" of what is going on. Our language requires an "experiencer" for every experience, and this experiencer is (recursively) called "I" as well. This is Hofstader's  "Strange Loop".

According to Hofstader, the process of "meme-weaving" proceeds chiefly by means of analogy, a rather simple-sounding calculation that turns out to be rich and powerful enough to encompass the phenomenon of "thinking" or "experience". For example, Hofstader would say that the meme of "you" is formed by analogy involving "I", resulting in the idea of "you" as someone who sees the world from a first-person perspective, like "I" do. "You" and "I" are examples of the category (meme) "human being", created at an early age by the calculating, analogy-forming brain of a child. The child learns to use the term "I", like all the words he uses, in context.

While he was still in diapers, my son said to me: "You are not the boss of me!!", indicating that he already grasped two of the most important memes he'd be using for the rest of his life.

Hofstader frees us from our preoccupation with what is true or not and turns our attention to the powerful way our minds create and use analogies, which are always a bit ad hoc and fuzzy around the edges. Sketchy as the process may be, it succeeds in creating the entire universe as imagined by the human mind.

Approaching many long-standing questions, Hofstader "cuts the Gordean knot". Is the "self" real or is it (as Zen would claim) an illusion? Well, it's a meme. An idea. Like all memes, it's fuzzy and ill-defined around the edges. But our entire experience of the world is built out of memes. This is the "Strange Loop". The "self" is as "real" as the Sun or the number 12. And then, "real" is a meme itself. There is no escaping the "Strange Loop".

Sources:

Goodel, Escher, Bach
The Mind's I
Surfaces and Essences
I_Am_a_Strange_Loop

Lots of great talks on youtube, such as

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDmMmHCM8Bc

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