I don't need to go into why this book is bad as plenty of other readers have done so marvellously. Link, link, link and link. But if you do end up reading it, treat it not like a book, rather a long monologue turning into background buzz that might trigger you to some of your own ideas. ( )

This book was one of my favorites many years ago, and I wanted to reread it from my very different perspective a few decades later. It is kind of a "little sister" to Hofstadter's more famous "Gödel, Escher, Bach", which I definitely plan on reading but have never gotten through previously. At first I was somewhat frustrated by the pace of this book. It seemed to spend far too little time on actual ideas and overdid it with analogies. I felt it was too verbose and repetitive and seemed to contain a lot of "filler". My conclusion was that it would benefit from an editor, as the tidbits of new (to me) ideas were overwhelmed by explanation. I wondered who his audience was intended to be, the tone seemed to fluctuate, sometimes aimed at those with no math or science background whatsoever, and sometimes appealing to the more "logical" among us. However, when I got to his chapter on his wife's passing, my opinion changed. I noticed that another reviewer on this site found that this part negated part or all of his theory of consciousness because it introduced bias. However I was deeply moved by it and it brought me to tears at one point. In my mind his "theory of consciousness" has at its heart a "theory of empathy" which resonates with me deeply. I believe that empathy is a key part of consciousness, and Hofstadter's theory resolves some of the issues I had squaring this view with a scientific viewpoint. A distributed "I" is more intuitive to me than an isolated one, and I found his explanation of thought and understanding being a manipulation of symbols regardless of substrate to be compelling.

I also softened on my views on the earlier part of the book. His over-explanation was not filler, but his insistence on making sure his ideas were truly and deeply understood by the reader, as they were crucial to not only the rest of the theory, but to him personally. I also over-explain sometimes and unfortunately have seen eyes glaze over as I go into more and more detail. "Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood." After this part, the pace and the balance was a bit more palatable to me and new ideas came more frequently with explanations and analogies that were not so painful. As I reached its conclusion, not only did I feel that I deeply understood his view of consciousness, but I agreed. That was his goal after all. It also occurred to me that the audience was possibly his wife, or rather the echo of her consciousness that continued in himself.

I am subtracting half a star because of one opinion of his that I find distasteful, the idea that there is a spectrum of the "size" of souls (using his reinterpretation of the word soul that rejects dualism). I think this is a slippery slope to racism, even though that may not have been his intention. Also, his views on musical taste at the end were pretty gatekeep-y, and while I get what he was going for, I've tried to eliminate these kind of thoughts in myself because such things are so subjective. OK, some people don't "get" Bach the way you do, but maybe their understanding of Kendrick Lamar's lyrics are on a level you will never quite grok. Side note: as a computer science-y person my brain kept returning to machine learning and AI, which is touched upon abstractly but not directly. My question is, what happens when GPT-3 (or another large language model) "perceives" itself? There has to be some kind of feedback loop and recursion going on; is the result similar to the strange loop he describes? This book definitely whet my appetite for Gödel, Escher, Bach, and I can't wait to read that one and contrast it to this one. ( )

Not as dense or rich as [b:Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid|24113|Gödel, Escher, Bach An Eternal Golden Braid|Douglas R. Hofstadter|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1314739489s/24113.jpg|850076] and more focused on the "scientific" side of things without all the wonderful digressions (you have to read GEB to understand). Still Hofstadter plays enough mind games to make the going entertaining and challenging.
Basically an argument for the nature of consciousness that all but proves Descartes' proposition. But Hofstadter presents a pretty convincing argument for his theories on why I think I am I.

The one place where he goes out on thin ice is the persistence of "selves" after death via the symbols in other peoples' minds. It seems a bit of wishful thinking on Hofstadter's part as he ruminates on his wife's sudden death. Since he doesn't believe in a persistent "soul" he yearns for some sort of lifelike afterimage of the departed. It doesn't hold water.

My sorry little review gives no idea of the depth or richness of this book. Suffice it to say that I think Hofstadter is on to the nature of consciousness and he presents it in a lively yet challenging way.

Anyway, I am a self-referent loop that talks about itself. You gotta read it. ( )

This is Pop, painless to read but mostly nonsense. Hofstadter tells a fairy tale about how minds are made, and I cannot recall a single claim from the text that is testable. The work is unserious. Science is bold and serious philosophers would like to pick a fight with your beliefs. This book challenges the reader to a pillow fight. ( )

I liked the idea of distributed consciousness. It reminds me of the idea of electron's position being a probability cloud where even though there's a small area where it's likely to be technically the probability is stretched out thinly to everywhere. Even though we are mostly in our brain there we are thinly stretched out to everything and everyone we have interacted with. ( )