I am a Strange Loop {ReadingNotes}

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter - ISBN 9780465030781 - Basic Books 2007

note that this was finished much earlier but without recall, recall starts a month before the current date to already start with very spaced recalls

Motivation

Rewrite of the classic GEB (Godel, Escher, Bach) by the author years after.

Pre-reading model

Draw a schema (using PmGraphViz or another solution) of the situation of the area in the studied domain before having read the book.

Reading

• 1 Introduction to Template by Author
  • "interesting quote." (p1)
  • note
• Chapter 3 The Causal Potency Of Patterns
  • Neurons and Dominos (p40)
    • see Wikipedia:Domino computer

Related experiences (first person)

• Paola's making me fly with her webcam accross her flat
• Lea putting her new webcam in front of a mirror to make me "see myself" since I didn't have a camera
  • a weird philosophical experience
  • Chapter 18th about "telepresence" (p.262), "the sensation of feeling that you are somewhere far from both your body and your brain, thanks to the ultra rapid transmission of data" (Gunkel and then Minsky around 1980)
  • see ch.18th, "Ollie's doggy-cam" imaginary tied up along with a microphone on it's head and giving, after some hours of watching, the sensation of being the dog itself (p.261)

See also

• Wikipedia:I Am a Strange Loop
• An Interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter, following I am a Strange Loop by by Tal Cohen and Yarden Nir-Buchbinder, Tal Cohen's Bookshelf 2008
• my watching notes on Godel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey
• I Am a Strange Loop: Consciousness Continuum, The New Skeptic 2007
• 
• Consciousness Redux: When Does Consciousness Arise? by Christof Koch, Scientific American Mind September / October 2009
• Horizon, 2009-2010, The Secret You with Marcus du Sautoy, BBC October 2009
  • neuroscience and brain imaging to study consciousness
  • critics of Descartes misleading dualism and the link with religion
  • discussion about conscisouness as an epiphenomum
  • experiment using head-mounted camera and touch to fool the percetion-action loop
    • at Karolinska Institutet in the Ehrsson's lab, Brain, Body & Self Laboratory
    • see enaction in Cognition.Cognition
  • Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience (BCCN) Berlin
    • John-Dylan Haynes's page
  • see also Cookbook.Cognition#WikiBrainMapping
• xkcd Two Mirrors by Randall Munroe
  • "If you actually do this, what really happens is Douglas Hofstadter appears and talks to you for eight hours about strange loops."
• Healing Ecology: A 'New' Spiritual Perspective by David Loy, Vanderbilt University 2008
  • Buddhism sense of self
• The Crucible of Consciousness : An Integrated Theory of Mind and Brain by Zoltan Torey, The MIT Press 2009
• http://www.wikisummaries.org/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
• mentioned in my answer http://www.quora.com/Brain-Computer-Interfaces/Would-it-be-possible-to-transfer-or-extend-your-consciousness-to-an-avatar

Overall remarks and questions

• offered to Paola

Synthesis

So in the end, it was about X and was based on Y.

Critics

Point A, B and C are debatable because of e, f and j.

Vocabulary

(:new_vocabulary_start:) new_word (:new_vocabulary_end:)

Post-reading model

Draw a schema (using PmGraphViz or another solution) of the situation of the area in the studied domain after having read the book. Link it to the pre-reading model and align the two to help easy comparison.

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Categories

• Psychology

Other read books linking to the I am a Strange Loop page :

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