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Books

I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter

Scott O’Reilly loops the loop with Douglas Hofstadter.

“You would not find the boundaries of the soul no matter how many paths you traveled, so deep is its measure.”

Today, more than two thousand years after Heraclitus wrote those words, science has shrunk the boundaries of the soul considerably. A soul that can transcend space and time, survive death, and even possess others, is considered intellectually passé. In its place we have the brain – “a teetering bulb of dread and dream” as the poet Russell Edson described the grey matter which makes us who we are – which is the indispensible substrate of our personal identity and consciousness. As the brain goes, so goes the mind, they say.

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