An Interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter

http://tal.forum2.org/hofstadter_interview

by msg • 18 years ago

41 36 18 years ago

tal.forum2.org

jsomers• 18 years ago

I feel a special kind of levity whenever I read something Hofstadter's written, or when I listen to Feynman speak.

Is there anyone else who does that?

DaniFong• 18 years ago

Malcom Gladwell and Stephen Pinker are two writers to mold my mind recently.

anewaccountname• 18 years ago

Chomsky and Feynman for me... except with Chomsky it isn't exactly levity.

LPTS12• 18 years ago

Definitely.

Hofstadter, Jack Kornfeld, VS Ramachandran, Alan Watts (at times) (not to start political debate, but Barack Obama)

And for music (what the hell) Phillip Glass, Squarepusher, Tool, Bach, almost any sort of gamelan music, or music with uneven or additive rhythmic structures.

hugh3• 18 years ago

Just two days ago I decided to read one of Feynman's papers (the one on the Hellman-Feynman theorem). His style is amazingly readable and almost conversational, even in dense scientific work, and yet it's still sufficiently precise and formal to seem perfectly in place in a journal. I've been trying ever since to figure out how he does it.

lg• 18 years ago

Of philosophers, David Z. Albert and Ted Sider have written popular books that explain difficult problems in a pretty clear and funny way.

LPTS12• 18 years ago

What a crappy interviewer. The first question reveals the interviewer doesn't know Hofstadter from a hole in the ground.

Such a shame a great mind like Hofstadter is subjected to these awful questions. Here's an idea. If you haven't read Hofstadter's GEB and I Am a Strange Loop, don't try to interview him about it. Especially don't open with a question that reveals this in the first breath Hofstadter responds with.

I love Bill Moyers, don't get me wrong here, but this reminds me a little of Bill Moyers talking to Joseph Campbell. Campbell was so much more evolved in his understanding then Moyers, that Moyers (who is excellent) seemed like a dog trying to understand a card trick. The interviewer seems like that.

It's well worth reading anyway, because Hofstadter is so damn brilliant.

brfox2• 18 years ago

I've never read GEB or even heard of I Am a Strange Loop. I've heard that reading GEB takes quite a commitment... Can I cheat and just read I Am a Strange Loop? (The original post says that GEB is basically reviewed in the first part of this newer book).

LPTS12• 18 years ago

I recall reading that Hofstadter said (loosely) GEB was taken more as a collection of neat things, than the coherent thesis about identity.

I would personally recommend reading I Am A Strange Loop, and then GEB if intrigued. This way, you will interpret GEB according to Hofstader's more explicit formulations of his deeper ideas, instead of in the more shallow way GEB can be interpreted, without following the thread about identity.

I think I Am A Strange Loop is classic and cannot say too much about how great Hofstadter is. He gets consciousness. He gets it. And he has good ways of communicating it. One of the most brilliant minds I have read.

dill_day• 18 years ago

I say, if you're going to read Hofstadter, read GEB! It's not really a "commitment" if you're interested in what he's talking about. The dialogs in particular are just brilliant and fun to read.

Otherwise I also recommend his "Metamagical Themas" - a collection of all his essays from Scientific American. Here you can skip around, pick out things that sound interesting, and not have to embark on the ~750page journey that is GEB if you don't want to.

I Am A Strange Loop is good, but I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as some of his other work.

bkovitz2• 18 years ago

Commitment?? Who needs commitment? Start reading GEB. If you enjoy it, read on. If not, stop.

msg• 18 years ago

If you've done stuff with logic and theory of computation before, the opening of GEB is not terribly difficult, and it will pull you through to the next parts. If you haven't, you might consider it a fun introduction to the subjects that you would have to read more slowly.

The upside is definitely worth a few reading struggles. It's one of those once-in-a-lifetime books (by which I mean that you don't come across books this great often; I don't mean you should read it once and throw it on the fire).

I encourage you to give it a shot.

jackchristopher2• 18 years ago

Hofstadter is a usually great.

But he takes distasteful shots at AI researchers who disagree with him, here.

He embraces protecting animals and other semi-conscious beings, but doesn't extend that sympathy to AIs, or other potentially conscious beings. That's a bioelitist stance; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno-progressivism#Contrastin...

He even celebrates slow developments in computing, as a good thing.

LPTS12• 18 years ago

His critique of Kurzweil as exceptionally afraid of dying and that distorting his scientific validity is spot on. Kurzweil is rigid in exactly the same way as a religious person who believes his body literally will live forever. He just identifies his experiential body as information processes instead of flesh, and has a mythic-technical, instead of mythic-poetic, or mythic-conventional, approach to the details of his eternal life. He's a priest, not a scientist, at least when he speaks about singularity.

He needs to find a buddhist teacher and an LSD dealer to get over his fear of death. He's going to die, his body is going to rot and his greying, decayed, stinking flesh is going to be churned into worm poop, his memory and personality will dissolve, as the thing that observes all that (an is the same behind my eyes as yours, that you can see by considering your self image for a long time, and then asking "if I'm looking at me, what is doing the looking?") discards the used up vehicle and suits up for the next adventure as a different one of these trippy humans, which will have a different set of ultimately illusory relationships with this fact through waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep, all before the sun supernovas and destroys every single hint of anything he did with his life, all of which is not only going to happen, but already happening because time is an illusory construct perceived by an illusory ego. The sooner he spends 2 or 3 weeks in a psych word processing that after eating a quarter sheet of acid and screaming about it for twelve hours while burning his retinas out staring at the sun and directly perceiving it, the better off and closer to the truth his community will be.

This critique of AI was a highlight for me. People who think they can mimic consciousness on computers have more in common with magical thinking then with science because they have absolutely no deep understanding of consciousness.

coffeeaddicted• 18 years ago

On the other hand the dead but immortal No.1 LSD Dealer and life long consciousness pioneer Timothy Leary did switch to teachings similar to those of Kurzweil for example in is book "CHAOS & Cyber Culture" written in '94. So maybe you need to get past acid to understand that Kurzweil is a lot closer to the source of consciousness than any drug will ever get you.

rms• 18 years ago

>People who think they can mimic consciousness on computers have more in common with magical thinking then with science because they have absolutely no deep understanding of consciousness.

You had me until that line.

jackchristopher2• 18 years ago

LPTS, do you think Kurzweil and gang are hurtful, or just wrong?

Tichy3• 18 years ago

So let us hear your deep understanding of consciousness. I hope that finally somebody can give us a definition. You sound like you know what you are talking about - or do you???

Really, I am waiting eagerly.

As for Kurzweil, being afraid of death seems very rational to me. His escape plan might seem overly optimistic, but at least it is conceivable. More than you can say for your average religion.

queensnake2• 18 years ago

Yeah - here's a talk from 2007 where he slams Kurzweil (a bit unfairly imo).

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8832143373632003914

Particularly, where he says that there is no 'knee' of an exponential curve - well duh, where the slope hits 1. I get the impression that he's a bit lost to life since his wife died.

hugh3• 18 years ago

I was in the audience for that talk, it was brilliant. Hofstader gave the second talk (first was Kurzweil) at the Singularity Summit, and completely yet classily trashed Kurzweil's talk, including his apparent failure to understand basic mathematics (of course there's no "knee" in an exponential curve, you can just rescale the axes to put the "knee" somewhere else).

Bad, bad haircut though.

An Interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter

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