[helene_t]

Another book about consciousness. The author muses about the phenomena of self-awareness as a special case of some more general patterns that arise in self-referential systems. Or something like that. I found it very difficult to get his point. His analogies are easy to understand except that I found it difficult to see what they are analogous to.

Any opinions? Are there people here who understood the book better than I did?

[Al_U_Card]

Probably THE most important part of our existance in this plane of reality.......

The ego is the ultimate self-referential system. Along with the reactive memory and the intellect, it spends all of your time cross-checking all of the values of every measurable quantity that it encounters. Cognitive recognition is a survival trait that was necessary and continues to be useful but it does have its limits.....and those limits are right in the here and now.

The evolution of consciousness is coming to its inflection point and the new age is dawning....time to wake up.

[markleon]

I have this book and it is near the top of my "soon-to-read" list (which is admittedly such a long list that "soon" may have lost all meaning). But, "Godel, Escher, Bach" by the same author was a book that I read in college which continues to have an influence on the way that I think about and perceive the world today. I hope to be able to respond to you about my impression of the book shortly.

[sceptic]

I think you should start reading nuts and loaded, it requires less thinking

[barmar]

I read "I Am a Strange Loop" a few months ago, and agree that parts of it are tough to understand. And his idea that "self" is not really self-contained, and exists to an extent in all the people who know you (i.e. all the stuff he went on and on about his dead wife), is kind of mind-blowing (it's reminiscent of Dawkins's concept of the "extended phenotype" -- everything is really part of the whole system that is nature, and the things we call bodies and minds are fuzzy boundaries).

It's no GEB, but what is?

[irdoz]

I loved Godel, Escher, Bach. This however left me somewhat bewildered and annoyed - I thought a lot of it repetitive and pompous - and somewhat inaccessible. Some of it I found sort of interesting and sad (Carol) but left with the feeling that there was a much better book there somewhere.

[barmar]

I'm not sure that a better book is possible at this time. Even the best experts in the field only have a vague notion of what consciousness is -- it's generally considered one of the hardest questions in science, and some believe that it may be totally beyond our ken. There are only a tiny number of authors with the technical understanding to make any sense of it and also the ability to write a popular book for the layman. Daniel Dennett may be a better technical expert, but his books are harder to read.

It does seem like more and more science writers are lacing their books with personal stories these days. Other books I've recently read that are like this are In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, which is practically an autobiography of the Nobel prize winner Eric R. Kandel, and How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space, which jumps back and forth between the science and Janna Levin's diary of her relationship with her musician boyfriend. At first I thought it would be off-putting, but once I got used to it it put the discoveries into perspective.