I Am a Strange Loop

By Douglas Hosfstadter

Hofstadter claims to have discovered the essence of the human soul in the book. And to his merit, he might be right.

I am A Strange Loop is a book every mathematician, computer scientist, philosopher and psychologist needs to read. It lies in the very intersection of all these disciplines and perhaps lays out what will be considered as the foundational question of 21st century philosophy. What is it that makes us human? This sounds like a question that’s been asked and answered before. But Hoftstadter’s ultimate aim is to ask it with the following one: And is it replicable? 

He argues that human soul is in essence is a Strange Loop. There are many properties to this phenomena. But the perhaps the most crucial one we must understand is that it is not unique to humans, nor only livings beings. Any sufficiently complex logical system constitutes a strange loop. So let’s start by explaining what a strange loop is.

A strange loop has two defining properties:

• It is self-referential

• Every self-reference creates another level of hierarchy in the loop such that if one was to follow these levels upward or downward, one would reach where one started. Hofstadter calls this a heterarchy.

He argues that axiomatic arithmetics, in other words mathematics we commonly know and study today, is in itself is a strange loop and Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem serves as the first proof. I’m not going to go into the details of the Incompleteness Theorem in here, partly because it’s been ages now since I finished this book and I absolutely have no clue how without re-reading at least a couple of the chapters, but it is a very convincing theory. If  for nothing, just as a mental exercise. It’s a very good read!