Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American scientist, philosopher, and scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of Self in relation to the external world, consciousness, metacognition, artificial intelligence, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Graceful Loop won both the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and a National Book Award (at the time called the American Book Award) for Science. His 2007 book I I'm a Weird Loop won the Los Angeles Times Science and Technology Book Award.

Biographical information

Origins and early studies

The son of Robert Hofstadter, a physicist who received the Nobel Prize in 1961, Douglas Hofstadter graduated in mathematics from Stanford University and received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Oregon in 1975. He later joined the team at the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence from MIT, and is a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University. He was married to Carol Ann Brush, until she passed away, in Italy (January 26, 1951-December 22, 1993).In 2012 he married, for a second time, Baofen Lin.

Teaching positions

From 1988 he was a university professor of cognitive and computer sciences; He is an adjunct professor of the history and philosophy of science, of philosophy, of comparative literature, and of psychology at Indiana Bloomington University, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition.

Multilingualism and other interests

Hofstadter is a polyglot; In addition to English, his mother tongue, he speaks perfectly Italian, French and German; In descending order of fluency, she speaks Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Mandarin, Dutch, Polish, and Hindi. In the mid-sixties she spent a few years in Sweden, where she learned Swedish; also knowledge of German, French and Italian can be partly attributed to having spent a year of her youth in Geneva. She translated parts of the GEB into Russian, and published an English translation in verse of Eugene Onegin, by Aleksandr Pushkin. In Le Ton beau de Marot (which he wrote in memory of his wife Carol), he describes himself as a "pilingual" (understood in 3,14159... languages) and as an "oliglot" (speaker of "a few" languages). His interests include music, themes of the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation, and math games.

Most relevant posts

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an eternal and graceful loop

In 1979, he published Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Graceful Loop (also known as GEB), a voluminous book that became a surprise hit with sales where mathematical logic, biology, psychology, music and linguistics are tied around the phenomenon of self-referentiality.

I am a weird loop

In 2007, a continuation of GEB appeared, I am a strange loop, in which he applied the concept of a strange loop, which he had already presented in Gödel, Escher, Bach, to the concept of self and identity (see identity (philosophy) and identity (social sciences)) of the human being; In it he defends the thesis that the self (consciousness, soul) is a necessary illusion, a myth or an essential hallucination, the result of such a sophisticated perceptual complex, the activity of the human brain, which can contemplate itself. He attacks the Cartesian prejudice of the soul as a "caged bird" in a single brain:

(...) an adult brain houses not only the strange loop that constitutes the identity of the person associated with that brain, but many patterns in the form of strange loop that are low-resolution copies of the primary foreign loops that lodge in other brains (...)

Hofstadter (2008, chap. 18, “The diffuse brightness of human identity”)

Spanish version

Its translation into Spanish (Luis Enrique by Juan Vidales) appeared in Barcelona in November 2008 (Metatemas-Tusquets Editores Spain) as I am a strange loop.

In collaboration with Daniel Dennett

• The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (1981)
• Metamagical Themas (1985)

Hofstadter's Law

In Gödel, Escher, Bach: an eternal and graceful loop, in addition to using ambigrams and many other examples of recurrence and self-reference, he states a law that has gained some popularity in programming environments: the Hofstadter's law:

Doing something will take you longer than you think, even if you take into account Hofstadter's law.

Hofstadter Act