# Book Review: I Am a Strange Loop


> In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little
> miracles of self-reference. ... Our very nature is such as to prevent us from
> fully understanding its very nature. -- Douglas R. Hofstadter

![](https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2025/12/17/Book-Review-I-Am-a-Strange-Loop/book_cover.jpg)

Most people know of Douglas Hofstadter for his masterpiece _Gödel, Escher, Bach_
(“GEB”). I quite enjoyed GEB, but one of his lesser known books -- _I Am a
Strange Loop_ -- has stuck with me in a more profound way than GEB. In looking
at other reviews of _Strange Loop_, I saw the common criticism that it’s the
“easier, more approachable” version of GEB. Admittedly, GEB is a doorstop to
read through; it has sections written in dialogs, makes heavy use of metaphor,
and so on. GEB is a triumph of conveying a certain set of ideas: Gödel
incompleteness, Turing completeness, and self-referential systems, among others.
But _Strange Loop_ stands on its own as an excellent philosophical book.

_I Am a Strange Loop_ goes much deeper into one of the topics that is discussed
in a cursory way in GEB: what are “souls”, what is “I”, and how do we get
meaning from meaningless physical constituents. If this sounds like metaphysics,
that’s intentional. _Strange Loop_ discusses in depth philosophy of mind, the
ontological status of the “self”, and “downward causality”.

## 1. Strange Loops

Hofstadter coins the term “Strange Loop” to point to a particular phenomena that
occurs within certain hierarchical systems. Two famous examples of strange loops
are M.C. Escher's _Drawing Hands_, in which two hands appear to be drawing each
other, and Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, which use self-reference to
prove that, loosely, formal mathematical systems of sufficient power cannot be
both complete and consistent.

![](https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2025/12/17/Book-Review-I-Am-a-Strange-Loop/drawing_hands.jpg)

A “strange loop” occurs when a hierarchical system has no clear top or bottom --
rather, the hierarchy appears to loop back on itself into a cycle. In Escher’s
hands, there is no “top hand” drawing the “bottom hand”, and yet there still is
the hierarchical relationship of hand one draws hand two, which draws hand one,
which draws hand two, and so on. Hofstadter refers to this quality as a “tangled
hierarchy”.

Not all tangled hierarchies are strange loops in Hofstadter's sense, though. The
“strangeness” of a “strange loop” comes from when a system is able to perform
self-reference. That is, a system that can point to itself in statements it
makes. This is where you get fun paradoxes like the Liar’s Paradox: “This
statement is false”. Self-reference also forms the basis for Gödel’s
incompleteness theorems. I will not try to explain Gödel incompleteness here
(though I’d highly suggest either GEB or
[Gödel’s Proof](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12247620-godel-s-proof)),
but the rough shape is encoding something like a Liar’s paradox within a
mathematical proof using a special form of number theory.

Hofstadter goes on to argue that the concept of “I” and consciousness itself are
strange loops.

## 2. The “I” Symbol

Where is the strange loop in the brain? Hofstadter begins with the physical: a
brain is a system of neurons that supports representations of a system of
symbols. A symbol, in its simplest form, is just a pattern. These symbols often
correspond to things out in the world -- “dog”, “hot”, “table”. Simple creatures
only need a small set of symbols; more complex creatures evolve the use and
representation of a greater number and complexity of symbols. The strange loop
arises when the system begins to have a symbol for itself -- the “I” symbol.

> Among the untold thousands of symbols in the repertoire of a normal human
> being, there are some that are far more frequent and dominant than others, and
> one of them is given, somewhat arbitrarily, the name 'I'

Similar to how the symbol for “dog” or “hot” or “table” is created through some
mixture of perception reinforcement and innate genetic programming, so too is
the symbol for “I”. Self-reference is a quite useful symbol to have. It allows
you to reason about your state within your environment in a rich way. Hofstadter
continues that, though useful, the “I” symbol is still _just_ a symbol:

> Because of the locking-in of the 'I'-symbol that inevitably takes place over
> years and years in the feedback loop of human self-perception, causality gets
> turned around and 'I' seems to be in the driver’s seat.

The strong reinforcement of the “I”, particularly through interpersonal
relationships and culture, results in the “I” symbol being locked in to a
seemingly privileged position of appearing primary to other symbols. There is
this perception that there is an “I” driving the body around, it is the “I”
perceiving things from the seat of the brain, and it is the “I” symbol itself
that is making decisions. _Strange Loop_ argues that this is not a true
reflection of reality, but is instead a “hallucination”:

> My claim that an 'I' is a hallucination perceived by a hallucination is
> somewhat like the heliocentric viewpoint... The basic idea is that the dance
> of symbols in a brain is itself perceived by symbols, and that step extends
> the dance, and so round and round it goes.

The “I” symbol is notable because it is both conceived of as observer and
observed. Many thought patterns have this self-referential mode: I can think the
thought “I am thinking this thought”. But this loops back on itself in strange
loop fashion -- the “I” observing the thought and the “I” referenced in the
thought itself are akin to Escher’s self-drawing hands.

This is why Hofstadter calls this a “hallucination perceived by a
hallucination”. Hofstadter compares this shift to the Copernican revolution,
changing from an Earth-centric geocentric model to the Sun-centric heliocentric
model -- which is a more "accurate" model of physical reality. The analogically
geocentric model of thought is the conventional model: “I am a self, I think
thoughts”. The analogically heliocentric model is: the brain is a symbol
processing machine, of which “I” is a particularly powerful symbol. However, “I”
is not ontologically distinct from any other symbol in the brain; it does not
exist in a “prior” or privileged position. The “I” symbol is real, but it does
not imply the causal structure that we intuitively feel -- that the “I” is what
is choosing to act, or is what is perceiving.

The obvious followup question to this is, if the “I” doesn’t have causal power
over what we decide to do, then what _is_ making decisions? Hofstadter’s answer
is what he refers to as “downward causality”.

## 3. Downward Causality

_Strange Loop_ distinguishes two types of causality: “upward causality”, and
“downward causality”.

Upward causality is what we conventional think of as reductionist causality:
reducing a problem to its simplest parts helps us understand causal
relationships. Diseases are best understood in terms of the bacteria or viruses
that cause them; in turn, those bacteria are best understood via their genetic
components; genetic interactions are mediated by specific proteins; proteins
have a particular chemical structure that are affected by various atomic-scale
forces; these atomic forces are carried by force-carrying particles... and so
on. The causal forces push upward: the atomic forces influence the proteins,
influence the bacteria, influence the disease progression.

Downward causality is the reverse of this: the “top down” reasons for an
occurrence have just as much causal power. A disease spreads because of improper
public health facilities, or poor social acceptance of hand washing. Failing to
wash one's hands does have causally explanatory power over getting a disease or
not, just as the makeup of a bacteria has causally explanatory power of how a
human can be infected by that bacteria.

> Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very
> large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the
> understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time
> intervals.

It would be, in some sense, an easier task to understand the world if all we had
to do was reduce everything to the smallest microscopic objects, and build
causality up from there. Hofstadter argues that view is mistaken.

Returning to “I”, this same causality flip is what makes it seem like the “I” is
doing some causally important work:

> Since we perceive not particles interacting but macroscopic patterns in which
> certain things push other things around with a blurry causality, and since the
> Grand Pusher in and of our bodies is our “I”, and since our bodies push the
> rest of the world around, we are left with no choice but to conclude that the
> “I” is where the causality buck stops. The “I” seems to each of us to be the
> root of all our actions, all our decisions.

So where does this leave us? The “I” has causal power, but not in the way we
intuitively think. If I stand up to get a glass of water, it may not be my
internal “I” symbol making the decision, but the causality still runs through
the high level pattern of “I”-ness. “I am thirsty” has explanatory power over my
decision.

## 4. “Will” and “Free Will”

Which then brings us to the hobby horse of any philosophy of mind discussion:
free will. Hofstadter plainly argues that “free will is an illusion”, similar to
how the “I” concept is a hallucination. However, Hofstadter claims that not much
is actually lost in this resignation over free will:

> I am pleased to have a will, or at least I’m pleased to have one when it is
> not too terribly frustrated by the hedge maze I am constrained by, but I don’t
> know what it would feel like if my will were free. What on earth would that
> mean? That I didn’t follow my will sometimes? ... I guess that if I wanted to
> frustrate myself, I might make such a choice — but then it would be because I
> wanted to frustrate myself... in either case, my non-free will would win out
> and I’d follow the dominant desire in my brain.

One of the best litmus tests for discussion of free will that I’ve collected is
the notion that a free will “could have chosen otherwise” -- that is, were you
in the same position, it is conceivable that a different decision would have
been made. Hofstadter argues that this notion of “could have chosen otherwise”
is part of the illusion of the “I”. The “I” allows us to _feel_ like we’re a
party to our decisions, but that is merely a feeling:

> Our will, quite the opposite of being free, is steady and stable, like an
> inner gyroscope, and it is the stability and constancy of our non-free will
> that makes me me and you you, and that also keeps me me and you you.

I find this to be a rather tidy resolution of the question of free will. While
this discussion is admittedly still in the abstract, it does appear that this
explanation would give a way to ground the “feeling” of free will with a
symbolic and computational model of cognition. This reconciles a fundamentally
materialist view of cognition with the feeling of “spooky ability to chose
otherwise”.

## 5. Distributed Selves

I would be remiss if I didn’t get in a mention to two of the most emotionally
impacting chapters of _Strange Loop_, wherein Hofstadter discusses the death of
his wife. One of the interesting implications of _Strange Loop_’s symbolic
interpretation of consciousness is that these symbols can be transmitted --
imperfectly, but partially transmitted nonetheless. This has implications for
how we interact with others, as our interactions result in corresponding symbols
of their “I” or “Self” being transferred:

> One day, as I gazed at a photograph of Carol taken a couple of months before
> her death, I looked at her face and I looked so deeply that I felt I was
> behind her eyes, and all at once, I found myself saying, as tears flowed,
> 'That’s me! That’s me!' ... I realized then that although Carol had died, that
> core piece of her had not died at all, but that it lived on very determinedly
> in my brain.
>
> We live inside such people, and they live inside us... someone that close to
> us is represented on our screen by a second infinite corridor, in addition to
> our own infinite corridor. We can peer all the way down — their strange loop,
> their personal gemma, is incorporated inside us.

Dispassionately, I’m not sure how much credence to give to this notion, but it
is a beautiful idea. It does seem more than reasonable that we represent others
with increasingly rich inner symbols the longer we’ve known them, and it seems
evident that those systems can, and indeed do, persist after the death of the
symbol’s person.

## 6. Conclusion

I first read _Strange Loop_ several years ago, during a time of significant
personal change. Many of the ideas it expounds have become surprisingly
load-bearing over the subsequent years. _Strange Loop_ gave me an intellectually
satisfying “in” to exploring my own mental landscape with both curiosity and
humility, made me much more uncertain and curious about what is going on inside
LLMs, and left me with a great appreciation for Hofstadter as both a thinker and
a writer. If any of the ideas above resonated, I’d highly recommend _I Am a
Strange Loop_.