Metamagical Themas by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Vintage - First Edition - 1985

Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

by

Douglas R. Hofstadter {Feb 15, 1945–}

”In this scholarly, entertaining, and provocative book named after his recent column in Scientific American, Douglas Hofstadter has collected 33 essays and woven them together with elaborate postscripts.  All “Metamagical Themas” columns are included, as well as seven other pieces.  Despite its wide range of topics, Metamagical Themas possesses a strong sense fo unity, thanks to the author’s painstaking efforts, in the postscripts, to spell out connections, cross-references, and implicit ideas.

The primary concern, permeating virtually every page, is how people perceive and think.  Hofstadter explores the fluidity of human analogically thought and perception, along with strategies for making machines that perceive, create, and feel.  His essays range from self-describing sentences in French to sexist language in Chinese; from a sober condemnation of public “innumeracy” to an enthusiastic soliloquy on the infinite richness of the alphabet; from genetic evolution to its software counterpart, “memetic” evolution; from experiments with the Prisoner’s Dilemma to the beautiful mathematical shapes known as “strange attractors”; from quantum-mechanical quarks to Rubik’s-cubical quarks.  Hofstadter asks how musical and visual patterns can stir our emotions; how we manage to sift the true from the false, the relevant from the irrelevant, the meaningful from the meaningless.

A second concern that at first simply weaves its way in and out but that in the end becomes a vital focus of the book is humanity’s increasingly weird flirtation with self-extinction, and the stunning degree of apathy toward this situation that most thoughtful people exhibit. Hofstadter grapples with this disturbing paradox of the human condition: creativity at the individual level vying with self-destructivity at the group level.  Repeatedly, he shows us how mathematics, physics, and biology are rife with metaphors that can help us to make sense of the complex and confusing world we live in, and to choose saner courses of action.

Balanced between art and science, magic and logic, humor and rigor, Metamagical Themas represents one person’s earnest search for a graceful merging of intellect and spirit.

DOUGLAS R. HOFSTADTER, best known as the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: an eternal Golden Braid, (Basic Books, 1979) also co-edited The Mind’s I (Basic Books, 1981) with philosopher Daniel C. Sennett, and for two and a half years wrote a monthly column (“Metamagical Themas”) for Scientific American.  Having spent the last several years in the Computer Science Department of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, he has recently joined the faculty of the Psychology Department of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he occupies the Walgreen Chair in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.  His current research projects in AI (artificial intelligence) are called Seek-Whence, Letter Spirit, Copycat, and Jumbo.  His focus is on stochastic parallel models of analogical thought.”