-
I Am a Strange Loop
- Narrated by: Greg Baglia
- Length: 16 hrs and 47 mins
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy for $29.65
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Surfaces and Essences
- Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking
- By: Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 33 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Analogy is the core of all thinking. This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over 30 years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making complex ideas vivid, he has partnered with Sander to put forth a highly novel perspective on cognition.
-
-
An analogy to describe this 33-hour book
- By George C. on 11-08-19
By: Douglas Hofstadter, and others
-
When Einstein Walked with Gödel
- Excursions to the Edge of Thought
- By: Jim Holt
- Narrated by: David Stifel
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Does time exist? What is infinity? Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down? In this scintillating collection, Holt explores the human mind, the cosmos, and the thinkers who’ve tried to encompass the latter with the former. With his trademark clarity and humor, Holt probes the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the quest for the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of logic and truth. Along the way, he offers intimate biographical sketches of celebrated and neglected thinkers, from the physicist Emmy Noether to the computing pioneer Alan Turing and the discoverer of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot.
-
-
A good overview of scientific theory
- By Kindle Customer on 09-11-18
By: Jim Holt
-
Being You
- A New Science of Consciousness
- By: Anil Seth
- Narrated by: Anil Seth
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What does it mean to “be you” - that is, to have a specific, conscious experience of the world around you and yourself within it? There may be no more elusive or fascinating question. Historically, humanity has considered the nature of consciousness to be a primarily spiritual or philosophical inquiry, but scientific research is now mapping out compelling biological theories and explanations for consciousness and selfhood.
-
-
Not engaging, nothing new
- By Tristan on 11-22-21
By: Anil Seth
-
The Order of Time
- By: Carlo Rovelli
- Narrated by: Benedict Cumberbatch
- Length: 4 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike. For most listeners, this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it appears. We think of it as uniform and universal, moving steadily from past to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one by one, revealing a strange universe where, at the most fundamental level, time disappears.
-
-
Rovelli is a Genius
- By Mike on 05-11-18
By: Carlo Rovelli
-
Artificial Intelligence
- A Guide for Thinking Humans
- By: Melanie Mitchell
- Narrated by: Abby Craden, Melanie Mitchell, Tony Wolf
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Artificial Intelligence, Mitchell turns to the most urgent questions concerning AI today: How intelligent - really - are the best AI programs? How do they work? What can they actually do, and when do they fail? How humanlike do we expect them to become, and how soon do we need to worry about them surpassing us? Along the way, she introduces the dominant methods of modern AI and machine learning, describing cutting-edge AI programs, their human inventors, and the historical lines of thought that led to recent achievements.
-
-
Start understanding AI right here!
- By Chad M. on 01-26-20
By: Melanie Mitchell
-
Reality+
- Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy
- By: David J. Chalmers
- Narrated by: Grant Cartwright
- Length: 17 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Virtual reality is genuine reality; that’s the central thesis of Reality+. In a highly original work of “technophilosophy,” David J. Chalmers gives a compelling analysis of our technological future. He argues that virtual worlds are not second-class worlds, and that we can live a meaningful life in virtual reality. We may even be in a virtual world already.
-
-
A book that could have been an email
- By Peter C. on 04-15-22
-
Surfaces and Essences
- Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking
- By: Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 33 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Analogy is the core of all thinking. This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over 30 years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making complex ideas vivid, he has partnered with Sander to put forth a highly novel perspective on cognition.
-
-
An analogy to describe this 33-hour book
- By George C. on 11-08-19
By: Douglas Hofstadter, and others
-
When Einstein Walked with Gödel
- Excursions to the Edge of Thought
- By: Jim Holt
- Narrated by: David Stifel
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Does time exist? What is infinity? Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down? In this scintillating collection, Holt explores the human mind, the cosmos, and the thinkers who’ve tried to encompass the latter with the former. With his trademark clarity and humor, Holt probes the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the quest for the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of logic and truth. Along the way, he offers intimate biographical sketches of celebrated and neglected thinkers, from the physicist Emmy Noether to the computing pioneer Alan Turing and the discoverer of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot.
-
-
A good overview of scientific theory
- By Kindle Customer on 09-11-18
By: Jim Holt
-
Being You
- A New Science of Consciousness
- By: Anil Seth
- Narrated by: Anil Seth
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What does it mean to “be you” - that is, to have a specific, conscious experience of the world around you and yourself within it? There may be no more elusive or fascinating question. Historically, humanity has considered the nature of consciousness to be a primarily spiritual or philosophical inquiry, but scientific research is now mapping out compelling biological theories and explanations for consciousness and selfhood.
-
-
Not engaging, nothing new
- By Tristan on 11-22-21
By: Anil Seth
-
The Order of Time
- By: Carlo Rovelli
- Narrated by: Benedict Cumberbatch
- Length: 4 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike. For most listeners, this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it appears. We think of it as uniform and universal, moving steadily from past to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one by one, revealing a strange universe where, at the most fundamental level, time disappears.
-
-
Rovelli is a Genius
- By Mike on 05-11-18
By: Carlo Rovelli
-
Artificial Intelligence
- A Guide for Thinking Humans
- By: Melanie Mitchell
- Narrated by: Abby Craden, Melanie Mitchell, Tony Wolf
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Artificial Intelligence, Mitchell turns to the most urgent questions concerning AI today: How intelligent - really - are the best AI programs? How do they work? What can they actually do, and when do they fail? How humanlike do we expect them to become, and how soon do we need to worry about them surpassing us? Along the way, she introduces the dominant methods of modern AI and machine learning, describing cutting-edge AI programs, their human inventors, and the historical lines of thought that led to recent achievements.
-
-
Start understanding AI right here!
- By Chad M. on 01-26-20
By: Melanie Mitchell
-
Reality+
- Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy
- By: David J. Chalmers
- Narrated by: Grant Cartwright
- Length: 17 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Virtual reality is genuine reality; that’s the central thesis of Reality+. In a highly original work of “technophilosophy,” David J. Chalmers gives a compelling analysis of our technological future. He argues that virtual worlds are not second-class worlds, and that we can live a meaningful life in virtual reality. We may even be in a virtual world already.
-
-
A book that could have been an email
- By Peter C. on 04-15-22
-
Consciousness Explained
- By: Daniel C. Dennett
- Narrated by: Paul Mantell
- Length: 21 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The national bestseller chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 1991 is now available as an audiobook. The author of Brainstorms, Daniel C. Dennett replaces our traditional vision of consciousness with a new model based on a wealth of fact and theory from the latest scientific research.
-
-
Best analysis of consciousness in modern history
- By Tim on 02-12-14
-
The Information
- A History, a Theory, a Flood
- By: James Gleick
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 16 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: A revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality - the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world. The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born.
-
-
Made me nostalgic
- By Amazon Customer on 05-07-11
By: James Gleick
-
From Bacteria to Bach and Back
- The Evolution of Minds
- By: Daniel C. Dennett
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 15 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What is human consciousness, and how is it possible? This question fascinates thinking people from poets and painters to physicists, psychologists, and philosophers. From Bacteria to Bach and Back is Daniel C. Dennett's brilliant answer, extending perspectives from his earlier work in surprising directions, exploring the deep interactions of evolution, brains, and human culture.
-
-
Classic Dennett; maybe not for beginners!
- By Caroline Smith on 02-13-18
-
The Beginning of Infinity
- Explanations That Transform the World
- By: David Deutsch
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 20 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A bold and all-embracing exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge from one of today's great thinkers. Throughout history, mankind has struggled to understand life's mysteries, from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous. In this important new book, David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe.
-
-
Worthwhile if you have the patience
- By Scott Feuless on 08-12-19
By: David Deutsch
-
Journey to the Edge of Reason
- The Life of Kurt Gödel
- By: Stephen Budiansky
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nearly a hundred years after its publication, Kurt Gödel's famous proof that every mathematical system must contain propositions that are true - yet never provable - continues to unsettle mathematics, philosophy, and computer science. Yet unlike Einstein, with whom he formed a warm and abiding friendship, Gödel has long escaped all but the most casual scrutiny of his life.
-
-
Highly recommended
- By J.A.MANOHARAN on 10-25-21
-
Galileo's Error
- Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness
- By: Philip Goff
- Narrated by: Maxwell Caulfield
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Understanding how brains produce consciousness is one of the great scientific challenges of our age. Some philosophers argue that consciousness is something "extra", beyond the physical workings of the brain. Others think that if we persist in our standard scientific methods, our questions about consciousness will eventually be answered. And some suggest that the mystery is so deep, it will never be solved.
-
-
Good but basic
- By ginger on 01-23-20
By: Philip Goff
-
Incompleteness
- The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel
- By: Rebecca Goldstein
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Probing the life and work of Kurt Gödel, Incompleteness indelibly portrays the tortured genius whose vision rocked the stability of mathematical reasoning—and brought him to the edge of madness.
-
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
- By: Daniel C. Dennett
- Narrated by: Jeff Crawford
- Length: 13 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking offers seventy-seven of Dennett’s most successful “imagination-extenders and focus-holders” meant to guide you through some of life’s most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will.
-
-
Loved it, but some philosophy background needed.
- By LongerILiveLessIKnow on 11-14-13
-
The Stuff of Thought
- Language as a Window into Human Nature
- By: Steven Pinker
- Narrated by: Dean Olsher
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter.
-
-
Pinker is truly a brilliant and lucid explainer...
- By Rudi on 06-17-09
By: Steven Pinker
-
The Fabric of Reality
- The Science of Parallel Universes - and Its Implications
- By: David Deutsch
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 14 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Author of the New York Times best seller The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch, explores the four most fundamental strands of human knowledge: quantum physics, and the theories of knowledge, computation, and evolution - and their unexpected connections. Taken together, these four strands reveal a deeply integrated, rational, and optimistic worldview. It describes a unified fabric of reality that is objective and comprehensible, in which human action and thought are central.
-
-
Such a disappointment
- By Philip Cziao on 01-27-19
By: David Deutsch
-
What Is Life?
- With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches
- By: Erwin Schrödinger, Roger Penrose - foreword
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the 20th century. A distinguished physicist's exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology, it was written for the layman but proved one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of the structure of DNA. It appears here together with "Mind and Matter", his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times.
-
-
An extraordinary look at life by a Physicist
- By Philomath on 01-25-19
By: Erwin Schrödinger, and others
-
Time Travel
- A History
- By: James Gleick
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
James Gleick's story begins at the turn of the 20th century, with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation: The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological - the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizations, and the perfection of clocks.
-
-
unique and well done
- By john on 01-05-17
By: James Gleick
Publisher's Summary
One of our greatest philosophers and scientists of the mind asks where the self comes from - and how our selves can exist in the minds of others.
Can thought arise out of matter? Can self, soul, consciousness, "I" arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here?
I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the "strange loop" - a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. The most central and complex symbol in your brain is the one called "I". The "I" is the nexus in our brain, one of many symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.
How can a mysterious abstraction be real - or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the laws of physics?
These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since Gödel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively listenable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is a moving and profound inquiry into the nature of mind.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
Critic Reviews
"I Am a Strange Loop is vintage Hofstadter: earnest, deep, overflowing with ideas, building its argument into the experience of reading it - for if our souls can incorporate those of others, then I Am a Strange Loop can transmit Hofstadter's into ours. And indeed, it is impossible to come away from this book without having introduced elements of his point of view into our own. It may not make us kinder or more compassionate, but we will never look at the world, inside or out, in the same way again." (Los Angeles Times Book Review)
"Nearly thirty years after his best-selling book Gödel, Escher, Bach, cognitive scientist and polymath Douglas Hofstadter has returned to his extraordinary theory of self." (New Scientist)
"I Am a Strange Loop scales some lofty conceptual heights, but it remains very personal, and it's deeply colored by the facts of Hofstadter's later life. In 1993 Hofstadter's wife Carol died suddenly of a brain tumor at only 42, leaving him with two young children to care for.... I Am a Strange Loop is a work of rigorous thinking, but it's also an extraordinary tribute to the memory of romantic love: The Year of Magical Thinking for mathematicians." (Time)
More from the same
What listeners say about I Am a Strange Loop
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- SelfishWizard
- 01-09-19
The Self That Wasn't There
Douglas Hofstadter is a distinguished academic, author and the son of a nobel prize winning particle physicist. In “I am a Strange Loop,” he has produced a strangely whimsical and unfocused collection of anecdotes, thought experiments, allegories, personal recollections and fictional stories in an effort to make sense of the concept of the self and the human soul.
The book suffers from the weight of so many distracting digressions, personal asides and cutesy hypothetical dialogues that the thread of Hofstadter’s ideas is often lost in all the fluff and made up nonsense words. One wishes that Hofstadter would make his points more with consistency and rigor than with poetic anecdotes and discussions of his vegetarian dietary habits. To invent a Hofstadterian-like term, the book is “rigorless."
Hofstadter’s thesis is that the self is a self-referential illusion that imagines its own existence. In effect, the self is a hallucination that hallucinates its own existence. This strange solution to the often debated question of what the concepts of consciousness and the self are, what they mean and where they come from does little to advance our understanding of the philosophy of mind.
To tell readers that we are just imagining ourselves is ultimately lacking in much information content and shows an author bogged down in the age old debate around discarded ideas about dualism and the mind body problem.
There is, of course, a simple solution to these ephemeral philosophical debates, namely that as humans we are unitary integrated beings. We don’t have a separate entity inside ourselves like a soul, a self or a homunculus that directs the traffic inside our head. Rather our self is our whole integrated being and inseparable from the person that we are.
But Hofstadter takes a more poetic path to his Daniel Dennett inspired philosophy of mind. Hofstadter has been a longtime friend of Dennett’s and adopts his crypto behaviorist stance that consciousness is essentially an illusion. To get there Hofstadter drags out science fiction stories, anecdotes, teleportation, the reversal of both color perception and concepts and the old bugaboo of philosophical zombies, none of which does very much to establish his thesis that the self is an epiphenomenal self-referencing and self-regarding loop that does not do anything.
Hofstadter also adopts his friend Daniel Dennett’s determinist and crypto behaviorist position on "Free Will,” suggesting that while we may make some everyday life choices, underneath it all, everything we do and want is governed by the cause and effect of particle physics. This sterile determinist position fails to recognize that being able to do whatever we like is the very essence and meaning of free will. We may have parameters and constraints on what we want, which, as with every organism, arise from the nature of our being as human animals. But if we can do what we like that is exactly what free will means. Hofstadter, of course believes that free will is just another illusion like the selves that exercise it.
Strangely, Hofstadter spends a great deal of time discussing how lives can become intertwined so that many selves can inhabit one’s own brain. The author explores this peculiar idea in a chapter in which he shares personal recollections of the loss of his wife Carol who passed away at a time when their children were quite young. His romantic notion that Carol inhabited a portion of his mind, makes a strange contrast with Hofstadter’s Dennett-like
ideas about the self.
In conclusion, one keeps trying to cut through the fluff that fills “I am a strange Loop” but one finds only more self-referential fluff underneath. The essence of the book seems a bit like Hofstadter’s concept of the self, an illusion that keeps discussing itself, and not always to the reader’s benefit.
At the end of the day, as people used to say about Los Angeles, there is not much there there.
22 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Wing J. Flanagan
- 11-15-18
Mostly recycled, but a great introduction
Most of I am a Strange Loop is recycled from Douglas Hofstadter's previous books, especially Goedel Escher Bach (or GEB, to its friends). But this is not necessarily a bad thing - this actually makes it a good first book for the uninitiated. And there is some new material, prompted by the untimely death of Hofstadter's beloved wife in 1993.
It is this material, rather late in the book, that I found most poignant and fascinating. Hofstadter contends that his wife lives on in the form of imperfect, low resolution copies in the minds of those who knew her best. The same goes for all of us, living or dead, who have close ties with family and friends. It's a fascinating idea; worth the listen.
Greg Baglia's reading is OK, but his affect is fairly flat. He does an excellent job differentiating the characters in Hofstadter's faux-Socratic dialogs, but elsewhere his performance is a bit dry, which makes the more academic passages a little tough to get through. Fortunately Hofstadter's writing, while quite dense and digressive, is also pretty lively, being aimed mostly at the intelligent layperson.
Just a quibble, but Baglia's pronunciation of foreign names and languages is spotty, too. Sometimes it's near-perfect, but most of the time he has a jarring North American accent. Like I said, a quibble, really. It's definitely clear enough (or so I should think; my own native language is standard American English).
In all I would recommend this, but only to people who either have not read Hofstadter before, or who don't mind a refresher of GEB (and perhaps passaged of his excellent Metamagical Themas, as well).
22 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Rafael Polidoro
- 05-22-19
not for audible
it's not suited for audible. Too long phrases and rational to hold. but it's very interesting. I'll get a hard copy. cheers
6 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Michael
- 11-03-18
Indeed a Strange Loop
I really enjoyed GEB but this book did not work for me. It was repetitive, a bit shallow, jumped around, and did not have the heart of GEB.
I already agreed with Hofstadter's main point, that consciousness is a repeating and evolving self referencing pattern (what he calls a strange loop) thus his repeated arguments about this quickly became boring to me. I also didn't like referring to it as a STRANGE loop...using the word strange when trying to clarify something seems, well, strange. He did not not quite explain what is strange about it.
His idea that his brain contains some of his dead wife's soul was not very convincing.
His criticisms of others ideas seemed to use strawman arguments. I agree with Hofstadter that these other ideas are faulty, but I think Hofstadter's take-downs were not strong.
The most enjoyable parts were his discussion of music.
The PDF included is only useful to understand a joke near the beginning of the book along with with Escher drawings and similar images.
The bibliography (not on audible but viewable elsewhere) was very interesting.
I can't really recommend this book. I do recommend several of the books referenced in this book including GEB and The Minds I (which were both great).
The narration was clear and pleasant.
17 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Amazon Customer
- 11-14-20
18 hours you won't get back
if you want the self delusion of arguing that you aren't real, by all means dig in. wrap yourself in high sounding scientific and philosophic nonsense like a politician in the flag and feel smug in your intellectual superiority.
to be fair I was looking for more Gödel and less Doug..
what was most worth reading was Doug's raw account of the death of a loved one and the way it shook his faith in his perspective- that I found most admirable and hopelessly sad
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Amazon Customer
- 10-27-20
Some good points, but goes off the rails in spots
Needs more justification for his main thesis, rather than just contrasting it with conventional views.
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Kahlo
- 11-19-18
Must reading for thinking persons
Highly rewarding ( even on second reading with 3 year interval) for motivated learner and thinkers.
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Jack Frasier
- 07-17-20
pedestrian and immoral.
good philosophy builds one's knowledge and morals. this guy doesn't eat animals, but rationalizes abortion of himans who could be his own children. mental complexity is the issue, and he actually advocates for the opposite of morality even having processed this understanding. he chooses evil knowingly.
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Daniel Hjelm
- 06-04-20
Enlightning even if you don't agree with it
It has been said that it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Despite having previously put aside Douglas Hofstadter's book "Gödel, Escher, Bach" and this book I finally reconsidered to take in was this book had to say. I was surely not disappointed. Hofstadter has a substantial mathematical, logical, and philosophical rigour with which he decomposes the perhaps most difficult subject matter that we know of. The very nature of subjectivity itself. What is this elusive I, that we build our world around and we can hardly think or speak without invoking it in one form or another. The very essense of who we think we are.
Hofstadter suggest that "self" referential structures are at the very core and uses Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem as the vehicle to explain it. The book does cover areas of logic and math that might seem a bit excessive in order to prove his point.
Although I still do not think that the mind, the self, and consciousness is best viewed as symbol manipulation, this was still an very enlightning book. Many of the though experiments holds equally well for people thinking that subsymbolic representation is a better approch to bring lights to this lacuna of ignorance that we still have concerning of who and what we in essence are.
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Riccardo Leggio
- 06-19-19
Loved it!
The very best kind of non-fiction book: intelligent and lively, but modest in its approach, despite its world-expanding argument; respectful of its subject and its reader. It makes a subtle and complex subject understandable and vastly engaging.
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance

- J Westwood
- 01-07-20
tedious
This book covers some interesting ground but is worded so verbosely as to be tedious; the points could be much more succinct. Listening to the long-winded narration is grinding me down. I'm at chapter 6 but I don't think I can take it any more.
6 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Bazza
- 08-26-19
Brilliant book on The Self
Having gone through a deeply winding and spiritual path, StrangeLoop has helped me to properly understand the essence of Nisargadatta.
4 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Adam
- 11-20-19
mind-blowing
honestly the best book I've ever read. really touches things other books don't, it puts the mind-matter subject and tries to interpret it via logic and math. love it.
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Sean Mooney
- 02-13-19
Dense in parts but worth it for the key insights
There is a fair bit of mathematics and logic which is hard to grasp when listened to, but the book is amusing in parts and I found the overall argument persuasive and insightful. The narrator is excellent.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Consumer_man
- 04-19-22
An endless loop
An insightful book but he goes on hashing the same points without more depth or illumination. Could be a third of the size and be a more potent book.
The narrator sounds like a nasally frat boy banging on about his gap year….
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- richard bolton
- 10-11-21
filled with forced and inconsistent metaphor
A sad book of denial, almost made me cry. I feel for Mr Hofstadter. The mechanics are correctly conjectured but the dichotomy presented is fallacious so it forms a false dialectic division. Very interesting and entertaining though.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Nigel Marshall
- 09-07-21
Mindblowing
literally mindblowing in its intellectual assault on our conceptions of consciousness and ourselves. The maths stuff went oveŕ my head but the gist of it could be grasped. Sometimes whimsical, always challenging, mostly entertaining. Worth the effort!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Spencer
- 03-21-21
unnecessarily verbose
Valuable thoughts which could have been explained in half the words, maybe even a quarter.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Silvia
- 01-11-21
Visionary book
I struggled to finish it but it was worthwhile
"our nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature".
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- os9000
- 08-22-19
spot on.
A perfectly delivered argument approached from numerous perspectives. highly entertaining and now my favourite book.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Paul
- 01-07-21
5 stars all the way.
Loved it. Will have to go again as I found it very involved and concise. Before this I never thought to match mathematics with the concept of the soul.