I am a strange loop

I am a strange loop
"...The self, in short, is a lifelong construction. Up to a point, it's amenable to deliberate (reflexive) self-molding. It's a unifying pattern that enables its subpatterns—our desires, beliefs, plans and actions—to cohere and to advance toward freely (that is, personally) chosen ends. Hofstadter stresses the reality, and even the necessity, of the self. Far from being an arbitrary pattern, it emerges naturally from our neural activity, much as the video image on the screen emerges from the physics of the self-looping video camera. And it's a pattern without which the person concerned simply couldn't exist, because for that self to exist at all just is for that pattern to be instantiated—a point to which I'll return.
The first half of the book adds little to what Hofstadter wrote 30 years ago, apart from some interesting personal memories about the writing and reception of Gödel, Escher, Bach. So, for instance, there are several chapters on Gödel's proof. Hofstadter argues that this proof shows how meaningful self-reference ("strange loops") can emerge out of so apparently unpromising a base as the dry—and semantically empty—logic of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. Why should we care about that? Because, he says, the particular way in which Gödel's proof went beyond Russellian logic is essentially the same as the way in which psychology goes beyond neuroscience, or mind beyond brain.
These "logical" chapters do, as Hofstadter hoped, clarify the central argument of Gödel, Escher, Bach. They provide some new explanatory metaphors, while avoiding the potentially distracting references to other areas that made the first book so richly exciting. But readers who are logic-phobic, or already persuaded (perhaps by Gödel, Escher, Bach itself) of this metamathematical point, may not be interested. They may decide to skip, or anyway to skim, them. What they shouldn't do, however, is to skip the rest of the book.
The second half of I Am a Strange Loop starts with an intensely personal account of the author's savage grief following the sudden death of his wife, the mother of their two infant children, in December 1993. To supplement his memories of that wretched time, and of the years of mourning—and the permanent sense of loss—that followed, Hofstadter includes lengthy extracts from an extended e-mail correspondence that he had in 1994 with his friend and colleague the philosopher Daniel Dennett.
Why is this account, emotionally gripping though it is, relevant here? What can a description of such suffering add to a volume inspired by Gödel's proof? Well, remember the antireductionist claim cited above: that the self is—repeat, is—an abstract pattern, which emerges from a feedback system of sufficient complexity—namely, the adult human brain. If the self, the mind or the soul—Hofstadter uses these three terms more or less interchangeably—is not the brain, it's not obvious that it must cease to exist when the (dead) person's brain-stuff is dispersed by flames or by decay. Certainly the self can no longer be instantiated by that very brain-stuff, because the relevant complexity, or organization, has disappeared. But perhaps it can be instantiated elsewhere—in the minds or selves of the survivors?
Hofstadter argues that it can. This is not merely a question of the survivors still having memories of the dead person, although that is indeed essential. Rather, it's a question of that person's self, her idiosyncratic "point of view," having entered into the selves of the survivors over past years. And this, in turn, is not a question of mere psychological influence, as when one spouse "catches" a love of opera from the other. Rather, each spouse interpenetrates the other's mental life and personal ideals over the years. In short, each spouse lives in the other, albeit at a much less fine-grained level (the same overall pattern, but represented by fewer personal pixels). And a spouse who dies continues to live after death in the bereaved partner and, to a lesser extent, children and close friends.
That phrase lives in is to be interpreted literally here. The self, even the consciousness, of the dead person still survives within the mind-patterns of the survivors. I spoke, above, of Hofstadter's "permanent loss." What's lost is not the whole person, however, but the rich details (the missing pixels, which had existed within that person's own self-pattern during her bodily life)—plus, of course, the instantiation in her body/brain of what would have been her future story. But that future story (again, in a less detailed way) can still be told, even experienced, thanks to the survivors. In a real sense, according to Hofstadter, his wife did live to see her children grow up...."
di Margaret A. Boden