Those of you who suspect that cognitive science isn’t particularly cognitive or scientific; Hofstadter’s 2007 book will confirm your suspicions. This rambling and often incoherent work is located on the “science” shelves, but would be better placed in “memoirs.”
The title made me think I’d be getting current insights into consciousness, but after he started the book with a dialog he wrote as a teen and followed it up with an account of his conversion to vegetarianism, I began to think he wasn’t going to address the subject.
Then when he blasts John Searle for a review of Hofstadter’s earlier work, The Mind’s I,
the warning lights really went off. The review was concise and clear and didn’t warrant offhand dismissal. Perhaps Hofstadter’s admitted friendship with artificial intelligence guru Marvin Minsky had something to do with the hostile attitude.
Oddly enough, there are areas of agreement between Searle and Hofstadter, such as a rejection of Cartesian dualism and thinking machines: on page 190 he agrees that Deep Blue, when beating Kasparov at chess, wasn’t really thinking.
I found his premise that the “I,” that self-consciousness we all experience, is a loop running in the brain. However, he doesn’t really dig deeply into what that means in terms of mental states and brain activity. He does go on about symbols in the brain, but that is totally unclear. It sounded to me like little name tags stuck to synapses.
He also failed to address a major issue surrounding the “I,” the obvious evolutionary forces that made self-consciousness necessary. We are social animals, and to be such we must read the goals, moods and actions of our group, and then make inferences about projected group behavior. Doing this would, naturally, be pointless if we couldn’t also read the same things in ourselves in order to decide if we were with the group, following them, deciding to lead them in another direction or deciding we were in the wrong group.
It is impossible to be a social animal without self reference.
Another puzzling part of the book is the amount of space he spends praising mathematician Kurt Gödel. He devotes one full chapter and a big part of at least two others in what appears to be blatant hero worship. He even dwells on the fact that Gödel’s name includes the letters “god.” As part of this hero worship, he reduces the work of Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead to nothing more than a springboard for Gödel’s 1931 work. The most confusing part of these Gödel pages is that Hofstadter takes a convoluted route to make a connection between Gödel and the premise of his book. I finally had to skip over sections where Gödel’s name appeared. That Hofstadter is an admitted failed mathematician might have something to do with this apparent obsession.
Hofstadter’s notion that an imperfect copy of one person’s mind can be incorporated into another, say a loved one, ignores the fact that the physical experiences, not just mental ones, shape the content of the mind, thus forever leaving each mind virtually isolated. He seems to verge on the “New Age” with these notions.
At times Hofstadter attempts to be literary, but he seems to try too hard, overdoing the extended metaphors to the point where the reader thinks, “just get on with it.”
Finally, in this 360 page book, any valuable points he makes about consciousness and self-consciousness can be found in John Searle’s 161 page, Mind, Language and Society.
However, Searle is perfectly clear, while Hofstadter leaves the reader confused.
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