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Synopsis

'What is self, and how can a self come out of inanimate matter?' Is the riddle that drove Douglas Hofstadter to write this extraordinary book. In order to impart his highly original and personal view on the core mystery of human existence - the intangible sensation of 'I'-ness - Hofstadter defines the playful yet seemingly paradoxical notion of 'strange loop', and explicates this idea using analogies from many disciplines.

The astonishing mathematical discoveries of Austrian logician Kurt Gödel form the starting point of the adventure, but Hofstadter proceeds to pull in ideas from biology, psychology, artificial intelligence, physics, music and visual art as well. In a brilliant counterpoint between down-to-earth chapters and fanciful Carrollian dialogues, whose form and content mirror eahc other in constantly surprising ways, Hofstadter makes even the most abstract of his ideas come to vivid life, using wordplay and brand-new types of verbal structures that imitate the intricate pattern of the music of J. S. Bach and the art of M. C. Escher.

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