Doug Hofstadter of “Godel, Escher, Bach” fame has a new book about consciousness. I’ve not read it, I’m just referencing this review of it, which was rather low on actual detail. I found the mention of the death by brain tumor of Hofstadter’s love touching - it’s interesting how grief magnifies and shapes the consideration of the question of consciousness.

Scientific American review of “I AM A STRANGE LOOP”, the new book on consciousness by Douglas R. Hofstadter

“Think of your eyes as that video camera, but with a significant upgrade: a mechanism, the brain, that not only registers images but abstracts them, arranging and constantly rearranging the data into mental structures–symbols, Hofstadter calls them–that stand as proxies for the exterior world. Along with your models of things and places are symbols for each of your friends, family members and colleagues, some so rich that the people almost live in your head.

Among this library of simulations there is naturally one of yourself, and that is where the strangeness begins.
“You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated ‘you’ makes more decisions, and so forth, round and round,” Hofstadter writes. What blossoms from the Gödelian vortex–this symbol system with the power to represent itself–is the “anatomically invisible, terribly murky thing called I.” A self, or, to use the name he favors, a soul.

It need know nothing of neurons. Sealed off from the biological substrate, the actors in the internal drama are not things like “serotonin” or “synapse” or even “cerebrum,” “hippocampus” or “cerebellum” but abstractions with names like “love,” “jealousy,” “hope” and “regret.”

And that is what leads to the grand illusion. “In the soft, ethereal, neurology-free world of these players,” the author writes, “the typical human brain perceives its very own ‘I’ as a pusher and a mover, never entertaining for a moment the idea that its star player might merely be a useful shorthand standing for a myriad infinitesimal entities and the invisible chemical transactions taking place among them.”

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