The patterns of life

• Margaret A. Boden reviews Douglas Hofstadter's new book I Am A Strange Loop at American Scientist Online.

I got into Hofstadter after reading his 1997 book Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, and his new one is apparently finally out, after having been delayed repeatedly from its initial release date of August 2006. Like the rest of his stuff, it certainly looks like a lot to chew on, but worth the effort.

Boden's review is mixed -- like many others in her field, she's very enamoured with Hofstadter's most famed work, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, and therefore views everything that's come since as falling short of that particular benchmark. I honestly can't say whether this is a valid viewpoint or just sloppy criticism; I loved Le Ton beau de Marot, but GEB requires a pretty extensive knowledge of mathematics and cognitive science to fully appreciate, and thus I found it pretty much impenetrable.

Still, I look forward to the challenge -- and the experience of seeing Hofstadter's intimidating intelligence appearing in its full (printed) glory once again.

The core intellectual claim, then, is much the same as that of Gödel, Escher, Bach: namely, that a proper understanding of Gödel's proof helps us to see that life, mind and self are all constituted not by biochemistry but by the higher-level patterns that biochemistry makes possible. In particular, human selves are abstract self-referential (reflexively looping) patterns that arise spontaneously out of the meaningless base of neural activity.

These patterns are real, albeit abstract. And they have real causal power, even though they are epiphenomena generated by the brain. They affect other patterns within the mind-complex, and they loop back into the brain itself. Unlike the complex patterns generated when a video camera is focused on a television screen showing its own output (an analogy repeatedly used to demystify the notion of strange loops), the human-self patterns can determine changes within the system's hardware. But this mind-brain causation is nothing "spooky" or supernatural. It's an emergent consequence of the physical complexity of human brains.

Electrical signals and neurochemicals, or the porridge-like matter inside the skull, seem distinctly unpromising as origins of mind or meaning. Indeed, Hofstadter scorns John Searle's suggestion that neuroprotein constitutes "the right stuff" for intentionality and consciousness, whereas silicon or old beer cans obviously do not. What's important is not the stuff in itself, but the looping patterns of activity that emerge from it—whatever its chemistry happens to be. So whereas many philosophers despair of there being any scientific, naturalistic explanation of meaning, Hofstadter does not. But he doesn't accept the currently popular neuroscientific reductionism either. In his view, neuroscience can never capture the essence of mind. Indeed, the neuroscientific details are in an important sense irrelevant—even though they are, at base, what makes mind possible.

Departing for the stars

• Stanislaw Lem, 1921-2006.

Solaris is a masterful piece of writing -- science fiction at its best, one that wrestles not with lightsabers and aliens but something far more dangerous: ideas.

In 1981 the philosophers Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. [D]ennett included three extracts from Lem’s fiction in their important annotated anthology The Mind’s I. Paying tribute to Lem’s regular translator Michael Karlen for his “ingenious conversions of sparkling Polish wordplay into sparkling English wordplay”, Hofstadter commented that Lem’s “literary and intuitive approach . . . does a better job of convincing readers of his views than any hard-nosed scientific article . . . might do”.

This was taking Lem at the level at which he ought to be taken. There are few dissenters from such a high estimate of his reputation, and no one who usually eschews science fiction need be put off Lem. He was a fully fledged writer who chose — in part because he had to in the circumstances of Soviet domination of Poland — the science-fiction form.

Groupthink, dormroom favorites and that pest Darwin

• Michael Young tackles the problem of public intellectuals at Reason.

Despite the needlessly highfalutin’ sound of the phrase “intellectual power cadre,” there’s still something enormously appealing about the idea of a bunch of brainy maniacs getting together, bouncing ideas around and goading each other into great things. A creative comfort zone that’s generated by your peers is incredibly rewarding; I’ve always found it fascinating to trace friendships and relationships between artists, if only to practice armchair psychology in tracing influences and trends.

Granted, groups like this inevitably burn themselves out, or turn against one another, or simply grow apart. But there’s nothing like watching a group of similarly-minded artists getting together and producing great things because of (or, perhaps, in spite of) their influence on one another.

Another excellent piece in this vein is Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece “Group Think”, which examines the clubhouse atmosphere of Saturday Night Live’s heyday in the context of similar group-driven movements throughout history, and comes up with some interesting points along the way:

We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they do not need the social reinforcement the rest of us crave. But that's not how it works, whether it's television comedy or, for that matter, the more exalted realms of art and politics and ideas. In his book "The Sociology of Philosophies," Randall Collins finds in all of known history only three major thinkers who appeared on the scene by themselves: the first-century Taoist metaphysician Wang Ch'ung, the fourteenth-century Zen mystic Bassui Tokusho, and the fourteenth-century Arabic philosopher Ibn Khaldun. Everyone else who mattered was part of a movement, a school, a band of followers and disciples and mentors and rivals and friends who saw each other all the time and had long arguments over coffee and slept with one another's spouses.

• Famous people talk about books they loved in college at Slate.

So I’m not famous, but anyway, a book I really loved in college was Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas Hofstadter. It’s one of those books that’s next to impossible to summarize, because it covers so many different bases; Hofstadter is a lot like Arthur Koestler in his restless examination of practically anything that crosses his radar. Ostensibly it’s about the process of translating a poem by French writer Clement Marot into simple Yankspeak, but Hofstadter spins this narrative thread off into a thousand different directions; even when he’s totally lost you, you still marvel at the sheer wealth of ideas and the associative web that he weaves.

David Fincher once noted that language was invented so that people could lie to one another; Hofstadter’s ebullient examination of art, language and ideas (and, most movingly, love) strikes far deeper than you ever expect it to, and really gives you a reason to believe. Back in my dormroom days, Thoreau’s Walden provided me a few weeks worth of great head-in-the-clouds idealism, but Le Ton beau de Marot is the one I still find myself sneaking back to.

• D. T. Max places Austen and Darwin in the same sphere at the New York Times Magazine.

Science and art would seem to be strange bedfellows and yet the great artists -- the ones whose work endures -- set out to capture nature’s patterns in their work, most particularly our own. A comment from Christopher Hitchens in the aforementioned Slate piece, regarding George Eliot’s talent “in guessing at the real springs of human motive and in describing the mammalian underlay of social forces,” ties in nicely with this piece, which examines Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the context of evolutionary behavior.

Yeah, it’s probably because there’s a new movie of it out, but still, there are plenty of interesting bits along the way:

It is useful to know a bit about current literary criticism to understand how different the Darwinist approach to literature is. Current literary theory tends to look at a text as the product of particular social conditions or, less often, as a network of references to other texts. (Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, famously observed that there was "nothing outside the text.") It often focuses on how the writer's and the reader's identities - straight, gay, female, male, black, white, colonizer or colonized - shape a particular narrative or its interpretation. Theorists sometimes regard science as simply another form of language or suspect that when scientists claim to speak for nature, they are disguising their own assertion of power. Literary Darwinism breaks with these tendencies. First, its goal is to study literature through biology - not politics or semiotics. Second, it takes as a given not that literature possesses its own truth or many truths but that it derives its truth from laws of nature.