Hofstadter on Strange Loops, Beauty, Free Will, AI, God, Utopia and Gaza
Hofstadter sent me this “very nice pic of myself taken by my wife Baofen just after she gave me a haircut” in 2020.
HOBOKEN, JUNE 21, 2025. Did Douglas Hofstadter discover the strange loop? Or did he create it? Either way, the strange loop, which Hofstadter propounds in Gödel, Escher, Bach and I Am a Strange Loop, may be the deepest idea I’ve met. It fascinates me, as does Hofstadter. In 2016 I spent a day with him at his home in Bloomington, Indiana, after which I profiled him in my book Mind-Body Problems. Earlier this month, I saw Hofstadter again at an event in NYC where he got an award (given to him by his former student David Chalmers), and he agreed to answer questions via email. –John Horgan
Horgan: I’ve always had trouble labeling you. At the Choose Creativity event we recently attended, while receiving an award you said, as I recall, that you increasingly think of yourself as an artist. Why do you say that?
Hofstadter: I see myself more and more as an artist as I grow older because, for the past 30 years or so, most of my activity has involved the seeking of and the creation of beauty. For instance, my newest book, Ambigrammia: Between Creation and Discovery (“ABCD” for short) is all about a particular kind of visual art. Here’s an example:
Turn it over and you’ll see that it says the same thing. That’s what ambigrams are.
The sequel to ABCD, which will be called My Wild Grace Chase, is also all about visual art that I have created over the entirety of my life. I play piano every day, and have composed about 40 piano pieces (some with voice), which are among the creations I’m most proud of. About 27 years ago, I spent an entire year devoted to translating Alexander Pushkin’s amazing novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin into very precise rhyming and metrical verse in English. That was all about producing beauty in language. My book just before that, Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, was all about poetry translation. I’m doing a lot of salsa-dancing these days, at my very amateurish level — but it nonetheless counts 100 percent as a kind of pursuit of beauty. I could go on and describe other beauty-seeking activities that I’m engaged in (or have been engaged in in the past), but that gives the basic idea. My cognitive-science activity is only a small part of what I do these days. I might add that even when I got my Ph.D. in physics, what I discovered was a visual structure of great beauty that has since then become very well known in physics under the name “Hofstadter butterfly”, so even when I was my most scientific self, some 50 years ago, I was still immersed in and dominated by the pursuit of beauty.
Hofstadter Butterfly, from Wikipedia.
Horgan: I assume you believe beauty can guide us to truth. Can beauty also lead us astray?
Hofstadter: I don’t quite know what it means to say “beauty can guide us to truth”. Beauty is its own goal. Chopin mazurkas don’t lead us to truth, nor do ambigrams, nor does Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, nor does salsa-dancing. Beauty is the supreme goal in my life. Truth can be beautiful and it can be ugly. The current devastation of Gaza is one of the ugliest things I have ever known about, but it is true. The current collective insanity that has swept over half of America is a fact. These horrible things are true but they have nothing whatsoever to do with beauty.
Horgan: I tie myself in knots trying to tell someone, like a friend or student, what a strange loop is. Can you briefly explain the concept?
Hofstadter: I did my very best at explaining the concept in my 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop, and I’m not going to try to do so again here. The notion is summarized in Chapters 13 and 14 of that book, and that pair of chapters can be read as a stand-alone piece, although to understand them really clearly, one would have to have read the prior twelve chapters. Sorry to let you down here, John.
Horgan: No apology necessary. Do you think your strange-loop model “solves” the mind-body problem?
Hofstadter: I think my strange-loop idea, as explained in detail in IASL, explains quite clearly what “I” and consciousness are. If you want to call that “the mind-body problem”, then I guess I would say that I believe that that book, the result of decades of thought on “I” and related matters, contains the essence of its explanation or solution. It sounds pretentious to say that, but that was essentially my goal in writing that book.
Horgan: Noam Chomsky once said it is “quite possible — overwhelmingly probable, one might guess — that we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” Comment?
Hofstadter: I like the quote, though I tend to disagree with nearly everything else that Chomsky has ever said. But liking the quote doesn’t mean that I fully agree with it. I think psychology and cognitive science have taught us incredibly deep lessons about the human mind. Science and novels together provide deep insights into the human condition.
Horgan: Have any literary works inspired you?
Hofstadter: Of course. The two that most readily jump to my mind are Eugene Onegin and The Catcher in the Rye, but there are scores of novels that have inspired me. Right now I’m reading Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club for the second time (the second time in two weeks, mind you!), and on this go-round I’m writing up very careful summaries of each chapter (there are sixteen) and each major character (there are eight), because it is a very complex and subtle work. Doing this is my way of paying tribute to the greatness of the author and her work. A couple of years ago I read a dozen or so books by John Steinbeck, including The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, Travels with Charley, and so on. I had read some of them before that, but during that period I really got into a Steinbeck frame of mind. I think my favorite of this set was The Grapes of Wrath. I am also an enormous admirer of Vikram Seth’s amazing novel-in-verse The Golden Gate, which itself was inspired by an English translation of Eugene Onegin. I loved Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell when I read it many, many years ago — and believe it or not, these days I am dipping into A. A. Milne’s wonderful “Pooh” series with great pleasure and admiration. There are countless great works of literature that have inspired me. The above sampling is just the tip of the iceberg.
Horgan: I believe in free will, and it distresses me that you don’t. Can you give me one reason why I shouldn’t believe in free will?
Hofstadter: One does what one’s desires determine one to do. I, like everyone else, am filled with conflicting desires, and they fight it out inside my brain, and the fight’s winner determines what I will do. Last weekend, for instance, I was of two minds about whether or not to go to the “No Kings” demonstration here in Bloomington. Part of me wanted very much to be part of the collective action against all the forces of evil that have taken over this country, but another part of me wanted very much to work on a personal project that is super-important to me. These forces inside me battled, and in the end, the go-to-the-rally force just barely beat out the work-on-your-project force, and so I went (and I’m glad I did). I “decided” to do so in the sense that the two above-described intense desires battled it out inside of me, and the stronger of them won. There was no freedom there; it was just a battle to see which desire was stronger. (In case you want to read more on this, I spell these ideas out somewhat more fully in Chapter 23 of I Am a Strange Loop.)
Horgan: Why do you say consciousness is an “illusion”?
Hofstadter: This counterintuitive-sounding idea is explained in great detail in I Am a Strange Loop, particularly clearly in the final chapters, starting with Chapter 19 and going all the way through to the Epilogue. I’m not about to try to summarize those 80 pages or so in a few sentences here. I wrote that book because I wanted to articulate my ideas on the topic as clearly as I possibly could, and so that’s where I’d suggest you turn if you want to understand this idea of mine.
Horgan: In 2023 David Brooks of The New York Times quoted you saying that ChatGPT is “scaring the daylights out of me.” Do you still feel that way?
Hofstadter: Yes, although it’s not just ChatGPT but all of today’s AI, taken as a whole, and the unstoppable momentum that it seems to have. I think humanity is collectively playing with fire with AI. I am reminded of someone who is driving a car and hits a very heavy fog bank and, as the fog grows denser and denser, instead of slowing up, they push all the harder on the accelerator pedal, saying “Wheee! This is fun!” Yeah, great fun — until the fatal crash takes place, not far down the pike.
Horgan: Do you take seriously the notion that we’re approaching a Singularity, an explosion of intelligence that will change everything?
Hofstadter: To my mind, it’s very possible. I’m not sure, but humanity might eventually wind up being like cockroaches or amoebas, having designed and created its own evolutionary successors. I can’t give a time frame, but yes, I am very frightened. About 32 years ago (I think it was in 1993), I wrote an essay that I called “Who will be we, in 2493?” It was about whether our evolutionary successors — our “mindchildren”, as futurist roboticist Hans Moravec called them — would count as “us”, in the same way as our biological great-great-grandchildren (100 years in the future) would count as “us”. A few years later, I changed my essay’s title to “Who will be we, in 2093?” And now, in 2025, I am wondering if I shouldn’t change its title once again to “Who will be we, in 2033?” Very scary.
Horgan: Do you take the simulation hypothesis seriously?
Hofstadter: I don’t know what that is, exactly, but the mere phrase makes me shake my head. No.
Horgan: If there is a God, is it possible that She/He/They/It is a strange loop?
Hofstadter: Hmm… I’m sorry to say this, but I just can’t take the idea of “God” seriously. I understand that billions of people on this planet believe in one or another god, and I think that such a belief provides them with some sort of solace in the face of a terribly bewildering and terribly frightening world, but believing in a supreme being just doesn’t work for me, alas.
To me, your question is a little like asking, “If there were a real Easter Bunny, would it be made of zillions of cells with DNA and RNA and enzymes and so on inside them? Would it have roughly the same lifespan as other rabbits?” Or to put it another way, your question strikes me as a bit like asking a physicist whether magical, supernatural events in a children’s fairy tale would come out of the laws of physics. The hypothetical events in the story are just a fairy tale, not reality.
Horgan: Since quantum mechanics was invented a century ago, physicists and philosophers have debated what it “means.” Do you have any thoughts on this question?
Hofstadter: I don’t know what it would mean to say what quantum mechanics “means”. What does thermodynamics mean? What does hydrodynamics mean? They are just branches of physics. QM is deeply confusing, to be sure, but it doesn’t contain a hidden message. It is just the way the universe is.
Horgan: Do you take seriously the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, or any other multiverse models?
Hofstadter: Not really. I once (back in the early 1970s, so a very long time ago!) read Hugh Everett’s book on the many-worlds interpretation of QM, but it made little sense to me. I’m not saying this as a quantum-mechanics expert, but intuitively it just strikes me as extremely far-fetched.
Horgan: What are you working on now?
Hofstadter: I’m working on the second book of my art, My Wild Grace Chase, which I referred to above.
Horgan: What’s your utopia?
Hofstadter: I don’t know what that means, really. I wish the United Nations were far stronger than it is. That might help humanity survive in a far more peaceful way, but I fear that that hope of mine is pie in the sky. I wish that Israel would understand that the post-Holocaust rallying cry “Never again” means that no country should ever again try to destroy another people. But somehow Netanyahu keeps his iron grip on that country and has turned it into an evil killing machine. Would that he were toppled and the vile massacre stopped. I guess you could say that people ardently helping other people, independent of ideology or creed, is my idea of utopia. And it is perhaps the highest form of beauty that humanity as a whole can aspire to.
Further Reading:
Strange Loops All the Way Down (from Mind-Body Problems)