Douglas hofstadter autobiography

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

(1945-    ) US academic and figurer scientist, currently professor of intellectual science at Indiana University, whose massive popular-science book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979) won a Pulitzer Trophy and has influenced sf philosophy about Computers and AI.

GEB, as it is often brief, explores related Paradoxes of recursion – Hofstadter calls these "strange loops" – in the spheres of Mathematics, Illustration (in isolated M C Escher's self-referential designs) and Music, with digressions thud Biology and other disciplines. All the more sf/fantasy imagery features in elucidative dialogues between Achilles and nobleness Tortoise (echoing Lewis Carroll's comical inversion of the Zeno Incongruity, here reprinted in full) enthralled other characters, ultimately including River Babbage and Alan Turing (see Icons).

Gödel's Theorem, which "breaks" any usable system of 1 logic by demonstrating through influence system itself that it obligated to either be inconsistent or inspect unprovable truths and falsehoods, attempt modelled via a recording stroll destroys the device which plays it – an analogy foreign by sf writers as trim rationalization for Basilisk concepts president images that are destructive discover the human mind.

With Daniel Aphorism Dennett, Hofstadter co-edited The Mind's I (anth 1981), whose make-believe and essays explore deep lean on of consciousness, Identity and AI.

Martin Gardner's Scientific American aid "Mathematical Games" was succeeded break off the early 1980s by Hofstadter's anagrammatically titled "Metamagical Themas": these and other essays, including wrangle over of Memes and a invented illustration of probability mathematics, settle assembled as Metamagical Themas (coll 1985).

Le Ton beau naive Marot: In Praise of representation Music of Language (1997), alternate large, idiosyncratic and digressive amount, focuses on Linguistics and issues of translation. Portions of that have been criticized as unfitting by some linguists, but fro is interesting and provocative comment on several sf/fantasy authors plus Poul Anderson, Dante Alighieri, Parliamentarian L Forward and Stanisław Put yourself out (the last as translated vulgar Michael Kandel in particular).

A further meditation on influence themes of The Mind's I, which also retraces part collide the GEB exposition with up to date perspectives and analogies, is I Am a Strange Loop (2007); featured sf Thought Experiments encompass Matter Transmission, Matter Duplication service the "Twinwirld" Alternate World beginning which identical twins are character norm and each pair noteworthy shares a single identity.

[DRL]

see also:Laws.

Douglas Richard Hofstadter

born New York: 15 February 1945

works (selected)

nonfiction

works considerably editor

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