Book Review - Part 3

[thetatiana]

I finally found my Douglas Hofstadter book that I had lost a couple of months ago. My place was still marked so I picked it up and read it starting where I was. All the ideas he's exploring came right back to me, so I don't think I missed anything by reading it in two long-divided parts like this.

The book got especially interesting when he began talking about his wife's death, and struggling with trying to understand in what sense she still existed. It's obvious he feels strongly that she still lives, somehow, and that his worldview is not one that allows that possibility. So he's using his theory of self, his ideas about brains and intelligence, to explain to himself how it is that he feels she's still there. I think his worldview just needs to stretch a little bit, and he might understand that we're all software (which he does understand) and it's not important what hardware the software is running on (which he also understands). He seems to think, though, for lack of an objectively defined possibility for other hardware to exist, that people's "I" can run, at least in a coarse-grained lower fidelity way, inside their loved ones' brains. Not knowing where else his dead wife's self-program could be running, he feels sure it's running inside his brain. It's almost painful to watch him struggle with this question, he's so earnest and sincere.

I feel the answer is easily understood since our Heavenly Father maintains the computer we're all running on, i.e. the universe, that he has no difficulty providing other hardware for our spirit selves to run on, as well as some form of communication between us. This is what I assume Doug knows in a personal way, and why he feels so sure there's some existence still of his Carol.

I'm still only about three-quarters of the way through, but I had one more observation I wanted to make. This book really does just reiterate what was the main theme of Godel, Escher, Bach. Since I've read GEB so many times, this is all a bit of a rehash to me. I'm waiting for him to give us something more. However, I was disappointed in him for dismissing the kind of people who give a lot of attention to science fiction, and then going through again a good bit of territory that has been explored in depth in serious science fiction since the 1940s, and presenting it as if it were new. Like, he acts like SF is all on the level of Godzilla, and these ideas he's having about what it means for selves to be located in different places than their bodies hasn't all been examined already in great depth. Maybe if he actually read some science fiction instead of dismissing it, he'd be further along in his thought-experiments by now.

Anyway, he's still brilliant, honest, and a very cool guy, even if he has his blind spots like all of us. I'm still enjoying the book and engaging with his ideas in a fruitful way.