Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Allow me to rant a bit- this involves issues I feel most keenly about (or, you can skip ahead to the final paragraph for a summary). I read this book in the early 90's, after reading glowing reviews. I pored over it, pondered it; some things didn't add up (which I attributed to my own intellectual deficiencies- I was then an undergraduate, likely in WAY over my head), but I ultimately concluded that its central theses were that wholes can be greater than the sum of their parts, that systems are not really "closed", only appear to be, and that strange loops seem to defy the normal laws of physics in some quantum sense. Hofstadter's avowed intent to analyze the world and the mind in the spirit of Lewis Carroll (whom I'd read and delighted in), his celebration of the genius of three men who infused their work with their spirituality, his koan-like meditations, and multiple levels of analysis seemed to me a valentine to the complexities and irreducibility of the universe and human consciousness, implying that human thought, "the mind" could exceed the confines of the human brain, just as Escher's paintings and Godelian knots escaped being defined or constrained by dimensional space. The phenomena described so poetically by Hofstadter seemed to me to suggest the possibility of ever widening spheres of analysis, of perception, of consciousness. Or so I thought. In any case, I was tremendously inspired by it. In my naivete, I thought he embodied perspectives simultaneously scientific and spiritual, as did the book's namesakes, in varying degrees. (Note that this is from memory, which cannot be other than selective- I donated the book years ago. These are the impressions that have stuck with me.) In succeeding years I read his next two books, although I have little memory of those. It wasn't until a few years later, after I'd read World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence by Stephen Pepper (must reading for anyone seeking to understand how knowledge is organized and "truth" derived), as well as At Home in the Universe by John Archibald Wheeler, The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics by John von Neumann, works by Ilya Prigogine, Hermann Lotze, William James, and others (as part of advanced study in cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, and the philosophy of science), books that directly addressed the issues hinted at, or at least suggested to me by Hofstadter, that I went back and re-read GEB. I had an epiphany, muddied by a sense of betrayal at being utterly duped, that, in fact, not only did Hoffstadter not mean what I thought he had (MY bad), but the book actually said very little and proved nothing. Just prior to revisiting it I'd read an article by Hofstadter asserting that GEB was actually about mind/consciousness as a mere epiphenomenon that arises as an emergent property of individual neurons, themselves non-conscious (his ant analogy). This was not even then a new idea, and he didn't provide proof of it, indeed, seemed to contradict it. More egregiously, it's a mechanistic notion, yet he cited Godel, a non-mechanistic theorist, whose theorem, according to Godel himself, demonstrates that symbolic thought can NOT arise from inanimate matter, due to the necessity of recursion in logical thought. Moreover, Godel thought it proof, along with other axioms he'd developed, of God's existence (btw, his bff Albert Einstein thought so too). Dirty pool indeed, to subvert, misrepresent and try to twist a mathematical proof to fit, to subserve one's own incompatible and biased agenda, WITHOUT owning up to what you're doing- intellectually dishonest in the extreme (if he's not a passive-aggressive, I'll eat my hat, though that's hardly pertinent). In any event, he was unsuccessful, but that fact seems to have escaped nearly everyone's notice. Cognitive psychology is rife with intriguing mysteries to be solved. Neurons seem to have a mind of their own, changing their receptor sites at the flick of an eye, firing, responding or not responding to stimuli by mechanisms we've yet to discover. And they respond not only to electrical signals, but to chemical/magnetic changes and a vast array of neurotransmitters and hormones. Cells in the immune system also sport rapidly morphing receptor sites, making the situation even more complex. In one study, a neuron was transplanted from a grasshopper's brain to its belly. The neuron grew into the surrounding tissue, but to the surprise of researchers, grew one, abnormally long dendrite [for receiving neural signals] directly back to the exact spot from which it had been excised, presumably so that it could keep abreast of developments in its old stomping grounds. The question of course is, how did it know from whence it came? There's a long-standing debate amongst cognitivists and philosophers about the seeming irreconcilability of symbolic thought processes and observations of actual neuronal processes (a focus of Godel's work). Hofstadter's likening of neurons to ants did nothing to reconcile the two perspectives, nor did stories of tortoises or hares, though he seemed to suggest otherwise, without ever actually explaining how they did. In fact, Hofstadter's book, though lyrical, shed no new light on ANY of the pressing issues in cognitive science. As I remember, the entire book boils down to this (though I had to look long and hard to find it): strange loops exist in nature. Since we know there's no divine or organizing principle extant in nature, they must occur by natural means. Period. No actual proof is provided. No experiments are conducted. It's not science- it's a faith assumption. GEB leads us down myriad garden paths that go nowhere. It's smoke and mirrors, an elaborate exercise in obfuscation and intellectual masturbation, AND full of errant premises- Pulitzer Prize, zen-master-like countenance and assured, authoritative tone not withstanding. I'd have no beef with Hofstadter if he'd presented his musings in a less duplicitous fashion, if he'd said "These are musings, part prose, part metaphysical speculation, draw from them what you will, but they're offered as proof of nothing." Or, he could have laid bare the real issues involved, presenting both sides of the materialism VS idealism debate, for example (he didn't, of course, because he actually had nothing new to add). It's the inherent DISHONESTY, the cloaking of the real issues involved, that irks me so. SPIT IT OUT- what do you believe, what evidence do you have in support of your contentions, what dilemmas still remain for you, how might these be studied/resolved? If you want to read works simultaneously scientific, substantive, inspiring, achingly poetic, and USEFUL, curl up with anything by French neuroscientist/philosopher Gaston Bachelard, or Jerome Bruner. If you want to be challenged by perplexities both tantalizing and profound, try the inimitable Chuang Tzu (by either Burton Watson or A.C. Graham), World Hypotheses by Stephen Pepper, or the WAY out there A Course In Miracles by psychologist and Columbia University Medical School Professor Helen Schucman. As supplemental reading for my own students I've recommended Oliver Sacks, Roger Penrose, Howard Gardner, and Jerome Bruner, among others- Hofstadter not included, obviously. It's fitting that Hofstadter succeeded Martin Gardner as mathematical columnist for Scientific American, who opined in the preface of his The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, also supposedly in "tribute" to Lewis Carroll, that: "The last level of metaphor in Alice is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity. We all live slapstick lives, under an inexplicable sentence of death." Metaphysical assumptions aside, just look at the nihilistic bent of the words employed. Grotesque? Mad? Absurd? These terms are not only value-ridden (i.e., suggestive of mechanistic bias), but one could argue, in stark contrast to the spirit of those chosen by Lewis Carroll, particularly in the poems which preface and conclude his beloved Alice's adventures. Carroll was a devoutly religious man, a clergyman who saw the mind of God as the substrate for the material world, and I think we can safely say that he had no such metaphor in mind when he put pen to paper. Indeed, I'm sure it would horrify him (as would the fact that Gardner made hefty royalties highjacking and subverting his labors of love). While still not cricket where Carroll is concerned, at least Gardner made no attempt to obscure his mechanistic (er, atheistic) agenda. Perhaps the issues I raise here are now old hat in philosophical circles, I haven't kept up with this aspect of the field (my career took an applied, clinical turn, years ago). Recently I happened upon a brief synopsis of Hofstadter's 2007 book, and my sense of outrage at his devious sleight of hand and hucksterism came flooding back, thus, this review. So as not to obscure my own bias, I admit I think it more likely than not that essence precedes existence, that the material world is a projection of mind or minds, the result of conscious intentionality, as Blaise Pascal, and John von Neumann ultimately concluded (and the latter thought he'd demonstrated mathematically). Other scientists, brilliant and rigorous, have arrived at the same conclusion (Irwin Schrodinger, Roger Sperry, many more). It is possible, as philosopher George Howison contended (circa 1902), that: "It is not simply that there are many minds behind the scenes, but that these minds are OURS- our GENUINE selves." And: "The real past is a flowing whole, and we are forever pouring the future into the flood, through the gate of the present. Our past is really always changing, and it is we who initiate the change, and so the past, though no part can be re-called, is perpetually being re-created and transformed, now for the worse, now for the better, as the whole goes on unfolding." This last assertion was later echoed by physicist John Wheeler, in his theory of the participatory universe. But I digress. I should give Hofstadter some credit- had I not misconstrued his gobbledygook, not sought to reconcile contradictions, not attended closely to Godel's theorizing and its implications, in particular, investigating further, I would not have gained knowledge and convictions that would later inform and enrich my personal and professional life. Thanks in part to Hofstadter, I think for myself and am more discerning and critical minded than I would likely have been otherwise, it has served me (and most importantly, my patients) well. And, his enthusiasm (along with brilliant Michael Mahoney's) spurred me to pursue cognitive neuropsychology in the first place. However, in retrospect, I would also quibble about the fact that Hofstadter teaches at a publicly-funded university, and that our tax dollars paid for him to write his flippant, irrelevent clap-trap, dross that may well lead other promising young minds ASTRAY, rather than encouraging them to seek real solutions to the egregious psychological/neurological ills that plague our society and resound for other more socially responsible cognitive scientists (cognitive science being, after all, an outgrowth of psychology and an applied discipline). Douglas Hofstadter is instead a huge distraction, a dilettante, the Kim Kardashian of the Neuroscientific community (sorry, Kim). What a waste of brilliance. In a nutshell, with GEB I think Hofstadter perpetrated some measure of fraud on the scientific community. We should have been more discerning. He had one seminal idea, that Godel's theorem, Escher's drawings, and Bach's fugues had something in common, were "strange loops". This he could have been presented in a 10 page paper in a peer-reviewed professional journal, but instead, he swaddled it in hundreds of pages of self-indulgent, pretentious, masturbatory ramblings and rehashed, arcane mathematical computations (that he perhaps knew few would scrutinize, and which have little to do with his prose). In the final analysis, very little of it is germaine, valid, or useful, scientifically. But gosh, it sounds so good, seems so...profound. For me it's sort of the literary equivalent of Terence Malick's The Tree of Life- a lot to take in, flash and style galore, but ultimately little of substance, nothing remotely explanatory or USEFUL. THIS is the main reason I find Hoftadter so contemptible, along with his deceitful methods, not the fact that his metaphysical faith assumptions differ from mine. It's NOT the fact that he's mechanistic, atheistic (there are plenty of mechanists I esteem greatly, e.g., Stephen Jay Gould, Loren Eiseley, Milton Erickson, Steven C. Hayes)- it's the fact that he obscured his ideology and agenda, and worst of all, cited and twisted the work of noble men who believed the polar opposite, without owning up to it- having a sly, slithery laugh at their (and our) expense, to the detriment of us all. Disgusting.