Douglas Hofstadter

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https://github.com/davepinch/pinchy.cc/blob/master/content/topics/people/d/douglas-hofstadter/douglas-hofstadter.md

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Spinoza would reject the idea that people “contain a fragment of God” because it implies God is divisible, which contradicts his view of God as an infinite, indivisible substance (Deus sive Natura—“God or Nature”). Instead, he would argue that all things, including people, are modes or expressions of God’s essence in finite ways. Rather than containing a piece of God, we exist within God as manifestations of divine substance, each expressing its nature according to necessity.

strange loop

Hofstadter claims that our sense of having (or being) an “I” comes from the abstract pattern he terms a “strange loop”, an abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena as audio and video feedback that Hofstadter has defined as “a level-crossing feedback loop”. The prototypical example of a strange loop is the self-referential structure at the core of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.

tags

computer scientist
writer
human being

Wikidata

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q319308

Wikipedia

Douglas Hofstadter (Wikipedia) Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American cognitive and computer scientist whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, strange loops, artificial intelligence, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and a National Book Award (at that time called The American Book Award) for Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.

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