I am a strange loop

I've just finished reading Douglas Hofstadter's book I am a Strange Loop. It's been a lot of fun: he seems to share my love of puns and wordplay and his little illustrative stories and scenarios are replete with them. I commend the book if you are looking for a well-explained (some who are more familiar with the ideas might just find it laborious at times) primer for the intelligent general reader that explores how human consciousness might just be an emergent property of human brains and not a non-physial dualistic sort of thing. It's very suggestive too, the picture that emerges (!) and I tend to think it persuasive.

What he does well, I think is to help the reader to make a transition from our instinctive dualism (which is driven by our perceptual and hermeneutical groundedness) to seeing how a holistic view holds together and makes sense of our experience and of the things that we are beginning to know from science.

It stops short, naturally, of thinking about the implications as picked up by the likes of John Polkinghorne for an account of human existence beyond biological death, but it lays a good foundation for understanding why Polkinghorne would want to reframe the Christian account as he does. That is to say; in non-dualistic terms consonant with what we know about how material reality is structured.

The eponymous strange loop is a usage of Godel's discovery which unpicked Whitehead and Russel's great work Principia Mathematica and came up with the incompleteness theorem (along the way making the maths somewhat clearer to this non-mathematician) and showing that the awkward and untidy self-referentiality they had tried to remove from logical principles was never going to go away. Hofstadter then goes on to show that the self-referential structures are in the maths because they are in the world and he postulates and evidences the idea that they are the basis for emergence and in particular the emergence of consciousness.

I don't think that there is anything here to worry a Christian reader -unless that Christian was wedded to a particular kind of stance in which dualism is non-negotiable and the results of scientific endeavour were regarded with disfavour or fear. I would of course argue that such a stance is not consistent with some important strands of biblically-informed thinking ...

For me the interest is that the account of human consciousness emerging, gives a glimmer of a possible mechanism for the emergence of corporisations which was a major reason for me looking at the book in the first place.