I just finished reading I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. With thinkers like Hofstadter making clear what it is to be alive and human, I believe we need less and less to resist the apparent truth that consciousness is constituted of forces, things, and processes wholly physical in nature. (I say physical instead of material because the physical includes energy fields and virtual particles of the quantum realm, entities not usual referred to as material.) I can do no better right now to convey some of Hofstadter’s thoughts on the subject than to share a couple of quotes from the final few pages of the book’s “Epilogue.”

Just as we might shrivel up and die if we could truly grasp how minuscule we are in comparison to the vast universe we live in, so we might also explode in fear and shock if we were privy to the unimaginably frantic goings-on inside our bodies. We live in state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our own creation � categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers.

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems � vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful. (Hofstadter, 363-364)

I’m following Strange Loop with David Papineau’s Thinking About Consciousness. From the intro it seems that, in addition to his original thoughts and insights on the case for consciousness being wholly physical, I will also be treated to an overview of the major positions, terminology, and arguments comprising philosophy of mind.

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