Chapter Two

By the time I flew to Indiana to meet Douglas Hofstadter, I was so steeped in his writings that I found myself thinking like him, or like I like to think he thinks. I thought, I’m looking out the plane at a plain, which is also a plane. In my notebook I jotted, Indiana, the Blank State. But the landscape wasn’t blank. It was an Escher print, a recursive geometric puzzle receding to a blurred horizon, a metaphor for infinity.

My feeble punning efforts made me appreciate punny-man Hofstadter all the more. For him, the world is a cosmic, multidimensional pun seething with meanings. His writings, especially his first book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, dwell on deep isomorphisms, or resemblances, between patterns in nature and in mathematics, art, music.

Gödel, Escher and Bach, the mathematician, artist and musician, are isomorphs of each other and projections of a deeper structure. An image at the beginning of the book illustrates this idea. An odd geometric object, a three-dimensional rune, hovers in a cube. Light shining through it casts shadows on the walls of the cube: G, E, B. What is the object? Hofstadter’s book? His mind? His God? Hofstadter calls Gödel, Escher, Bach “a statement of my religion.”

He is obsessed with self-reference and recursion, with things that do things to themselves, repeatedly. These concepts are embedded in what he calls the “strange loop.” This is Hofstadter’s big idea, which winds through and binds all his work. A strange loop is something that does something to itself, that defines, reflects, restricts, contradicts, plays with and creates itself. Like Gödel’s theorem about the limits of theorems. Escher’s drawing of hands drawing each other. Bach’s fugues, which curl back upon themselves like Mobius strips. Language, which consists of words defined by other words, is a gigantic strange loop, and so are music, art, mathematics, science and all of human culture. Human minds are the strangest, loopiest loops of all.

Gödel, Escher, Bach is a strange loop too. It has a fugue-like structure, with recurrent themes and motifs, and it constantly talks about itself. Every other chapter is a Lewis Carroll-esque dialogue between Tortoise and Achilles, as well as other mythical and real characters, about what Hofstadter just talked about. Hofstadter joins Tortoise and Achilles in the final dialogue, along with Charles Babbage and Alan Turing.

Martin Gardner, the mathematics columnist for Scientific American (whom Hofstadter replaced after Gardner retired), said of Gödel, Escher, Bach: “Every few decades an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event. [This] is such a work.” Only re-reading it before flying to Indiana did I appreciate that Gödel, Escher, Bach is a 777-page assault on the mind-body problem. Strange loops serve, for Hofstadter, as a general principle of cognition, whatever form it takes. Intelligent machines, if we ever build them, and aliens, if we ever encounter them, must have loopy minds, as we do.

Hofstadter explains, in painstaking detail, how purely physical processes generate minds and meaning. His answer is that loops at the level of particles, of electrons and quarks, give rise to loops at the level of biology, genes and neurons, and eventually at the level of symbols, concepts and meaning. Our minds are symbol-processing strange loops that are generated by and exert influence over matter. Weave all these loops together and you get the “eternal golden braid” of existence.

Gödel, Escher, Bach is at once highly technical—with detailed digressions on physics, mathematical logic, computer languages and DNA transcription—and trippy. Psychedelics, at their best, reveal reality as an endless play of forms, a joyous dance that transcends bad and good, that is simply beautiful, so beautiful your brain melts and leaks out your ears, as an acid head might put it. Hofstadter is one of those rare souls who dwells permanently in that sublime, magical realm. Or so I imagined when I first encountered his work long ago, before I became a science writer. He is also blessed with the talent to give us glimpses of his world.

Hofstadter’s detractors dismiss him as “clever.” That is grossly unfair, but I know what they mean. His playfulness can be relentless, exhausting. You can’t just read Gödel, Escher, Bach, you have to study it. Hofstadter assigns exercises, which he assures you will be lots of fun. “Try it!” he orders. At times, he resembles a too-enthusiastic camp counselor exhorting you to play a super cool game. If you skip his exercises (as I usually do), you feel lazy and guilty, and start to resent the counselor.

There is something chilly, almost inhuman, about Gödel, Escher, Bach. It delves so deeply into the machine code of meaning that it leaves ordinary human meaning behind. Hofstadter also feared after writing the book that many readers missed its central point. He had solved the mind-body problem, the mystery of who we really are. Hofstadter wrote I Am a Strange Loop, published in 2007, to spell out this theme more clearly, to explain “what an ‘I’ is.” He writes, “I hope this book will make you reflect in fresh ways on what being human is all about—in fact, on what just-plain being is all about.”

Strange Loop is warmer than Gödel, Escher, Bach. It is not just a book about meaning, it is a meaningful book, because it grapples with grief. Hofstadter says as much in the preface. Referring to himself, as he often does, in the third person, he notes that the author of Strange Loop “has known considerably more suffering, sadness and soul-searching” than the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach.

In 1993, Hofstader’s wife Carol died “very suddenly, essentially without warning, of a brain tumor.” Not all deaths are tragic. This one was. Carol was 42, and she left her husband with two children, two and five years old. How do you make sense of such a death if you don’t believe in God? Souls? Heaven? Hofstadter couldn’t make sense of it, but he tried.

One chapter of Strange Loop consists of email exchanges between Hofstadter and his friend Daniel Dennett, in which Hofstadter vents his grief. Although his wife’s body is gone, Hofstadter writes, her “consciousness, her interiority, remains on this planet.” Just as the Sun is ringed by a radiant solar corona, still visible even when it is eclipsed, so do we, when eclipsed by death, endure in the minds of those who knew and loved us. We live on as “soular coronas.”

I resist envy, as a matter of principle, but it was hard not to envy Hofstadter. From the perspective of my dim, halting self, he seemed blessed with the ideal scientific-artistic-mystical mind, a marvelous, frictionless machine for generating epiphanies. Yes, he has endured tribulations, like all mortals, but his intellect helped him see existence as sublime, in spite of everything. Again, so I imagined. I also owed Hofstadter a debt. Reading Gödel, Escher, Bach and “Metamagical Themas,” his column for Scientific American, in the early 1980s made me want to become a science journalist.

I was mulling all this over as I flew south over the flatlands of Indiana. I scanned my sheet of questions. How Hofstadter became interested in music, mathematics, the mind-body problem. How he was affected by the death of his wife, and the disability of a sister. The famous lines popped into my head: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.” This could be Hofstadter’s motto. At the top of my question s