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Gödel, Escher, Bach Summary & Review: See How Minds Emerge From Loops
Gödel, Escher, Bach summary: Hofstadter’s Pulitzer-winning tour of how meaning and minds emerge from self-referential loops — plus a 7-day plan you…
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Douglas Hofstadter
"Cognitive scientist · Strange loops, analogy, and the making of an I"
Cognitive scientist and Pulitzer-winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach. He argues that a self is a strange loop — a system that models itself — and that analogy is the core of thinking.
1 book·Minds, Meaning & Self-Reference
Books by Douglas Hofstadter
Our in-depth summaries and reviews of his work
Key Ideas & Recurring Themes
Strange loops
Climb the levels of a system and you arrive back inside it. That fold is where an I can live.
Meaning is not in the token
Marks have no meaning until a mapping and a reader are in play. The symphony is not in the groove.
Step outside the formal game
Some goals cannot be produced by legal moves. The why lives one level up, as in the MU-puzzle.
Notable Quotes
"Gödel, Escher, Bach is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter."— Gödel, Escher, Bach, preface
Related Authors
Book Author Douglas Hofstadter
Gödel, Escher, Bach Summary & Review: See How Minds Emerge From Loops
Gödel, Escher, Bach summary: Hofstadter’s Pulitzer-winning tour of how meaning and minds emerge from self-referential loops — plus a 7-day plan you can run this week.