I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter

underlies, or gives rise to, what I have here been calling a “soul” or an “I”. I could just as well have spoken of “having a light on inside”, “possessing interiority”, or that old standby, “being conscious”.
    Philosophers of mind often use the terms “possessing intentionality” (which means having beliefs and desires and fears and so forth) or “having semantics” (which means the ability to genuinely think about things, as contrasted with the “mere” ability to juggle meaningless tokens in complicated patterns — a distinction that I raised in the dialogue between my versions of Socrates and Plato).
    Although each of these terms puts the focus on a slightly different aspect of the elusive abstraction that concerns us, they are all, from my perspective, pretty much interchangeable. And for all of these terms, I reiterate that they have to be understood as coming in degrees along a sliding scale, rather than as on/off, black/white, yes/no switches.

    Post Scriptum
    The first draft of this chapter was written two years ago, and although it discussed meat-eating and vegetarianism, it had far less on the topic than this final version does. Some months later, while I was “fleshing it out” by summarizing the short story “Pig”, I suddenly found myself questioning the dividing line that I had carefully drawn two decades earlier and had lived with ever since (although occasionally somewhat uneasily) — namely, the line between mammals and other animals.
    All at once, I started feeling distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of eating chicken and fish, even though I had done so for some twenty years, and so, catching myself by surprise, I stopped “cold turkey”. And by a remarkable coincidence, my two children independently came to similar conclusions at almost exactly the same time, so that over a period of just a couple of weeks our family’s diet was transmuted into a completely vegetarian one. I’ve returned to the same spot as I was in when I was twenty-one in Sardinia, and it’s the spot I plan to stay in.
    Writing this chapter thus gave rise to a totally unexpected boomerang effect on its author — and as we shall see in later chapters, such an unpredictable bouncing-back of choices one has just made, followed by the incorporation of their repercussions into one’s self-model, serves as an excellent example of the meaning of the motto “I am a strange loop.”

CHAPTER 2
    This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream

    What Is a “Brain Structure”?
    I HAVE often been asked, when people hear that my research amounts to a quest after the hidden machinery of human thought, “Oh, so that means that you study the brain?”
    One part of me wants to reply, “No, no — I think about thinking. I think about how concepts and words are related, what ‘thinking in French’ is, what underlies slips of the tongue and other types of errors, how one event effortlessly reminds us of another, how we recognize written letters and words, how we understand sloppily spoken, slurred, slangy speech, how we toss off untold numbers of utterly bland-seeming yet never-beforemade analogies and occasionally come up with sparklingly original ones, how each of our concepts grows in subtlety and fluidity over our lifetime, and so forth. I don’t think in the least about the brain — I leave the wet, messy, tangled web of the brain to the neurophysiologists.”
    Another part of me, however, wants to reply, “ Of course I think about the human brain. By definition, I think about the brain, since the human brain is precisely the machinery that carries out human thinking.”
    This amusing contradiction has forced me to ask myself, “What do I mean, and what do other people mean, by ‘brain research’?”, and this leads naturally to the question, “What are the structures in the brain that someone could in principle study?” Most neuroscientists, if they were asked such a question, would make a list that would