LOOPY HOFSTADTER

Book Review by R.C.W. Ettinger

The book is I Am a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter, published 2007 by Basic Books.

Of those people interested in life extension and cryonics, very few have much interest in the theoretical underpinnings, much less the philosophical ramifications—most of the time. Still, kicking it around is fun for some, and some of the questions could be practical matters of life and death. So let’s hop on the latest Hofstadter.

Currently a professor at Indiana U., he is best known for his 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. The new book is more or less the same book, but with more mistakes, some of them very silly. It is also highly repetitious. But I’m not knocking it completely. He is still clever and entertaining, and after all, entertainment is what it’s all about.

(The cleverness is often counterproductive. For instance, he points out that in French the word conscience can mean either the English word "conscience" or the English word "consciousness"—never mind that the meanings are completely different.)

First, the requisite disclaimer, anybody slogging through these foggy swamps should admit right off that he could be off course—and indeed, almost certainly is, at least in some respects. We are simply too primitive and too ignorant to have much hope of reaching the unpromised land any time soon. All we can do is try to move forward a little, but that is something.

Next, let’s clear up the title a bit. The reference is to his hypothesized self-referential character of self or personhood or consciousness, all of which he sweeps into the same pile and then under the same rug.

His main error (in my opinion, to be sure) is to swallow whole, without proof or coherence, the notion that isomorphism is everything—in other words, that the map is the territory. Or—to oversimplify just a bit—that if it quacks like a duck, it must be a duck, whereas you and I (or I at least) know that it could be a decoy.

(I sometimes call people in his school the upmorphists, since adherence also implies that a simulation of you is you and that, in principle, you can be uploaded onto almost any kind of substrate, including an electronic digital computer.)

Well, he has a lot of highbrow company in this nonsense, maybe even a majority of scientists, but that shouldn’t faze cryonicists. We won’t allow other people, however eminent, to vote us into the grave, and we shouldn’t let them sell us other quackery either. I spelled out a lot of this in my 2005 draft of Youniverse, copies of which are still available from the Immortalist Society. I’ll try with extreme brevity to convey some of the essentials.

What is the essence of consciousness and personhood? I say it is qualia or subjective experiences. We don’t have qualia; we are our qualia. Oddly enough—and not true as far as I have gathered—Hofstadter says this is prevailing professional opinion. A quale is a physical or anatomical/physiological structure with extension in space and time. Successive qualia overlap in space and time, which allows us legitimately to identify (at least in part) with our past and future selves.

Upmorphist opinion varies greatly, but it tends, as with Hofstadter, to blur thinking and living, intelligence and feeling, and to boil everything down to manipulation of symbols. Hofstadter even says, right in your face, that consciousness is an illusion, that you are an illusion. I leave the blatant illogic of this to the reader—the notion that you don’t feel, but rather you only think you feel. Even Descartes, who made many mistakes, knew better than that. Even the skunk knows better than that. Stinko ergo sum.

This is probably too long for John Bull already, but I can’t leave it without a word on zombies. Can there be systems which outwardly act and speak exactly like people—even like a particular person--but have no inner life, no feeling, no consciousness? Upmorphists, including Hofstadter, generally say no.

But a sufficiently clever program will fool most of the people most of the time, and it has happened. A program might be able to describe a person and his actions in perfect detail—an emulation. But a description of a thing is (usually) not the thing. If I paint your portrait, or sculpt you, no matter how carefully and thoroughly and knowingly, it isn’t you, or indeed a person at all.