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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Who am We?

This . . . This is . . . This is not . . . This is this this is not . . . this is . . . is this . . . not . . . is this?

How you read or interpret “this” depends on how you read it: start slowly, stop, pause and continue. Try it . Marcel Duchamp came up with this. (No, not this, this!)

Sound loopy? I agree, and, may I recommend:

� Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop
� The drawings and prints of M. C. Escher
� Kurt Godel’s On Formally Undecidable Propositions
� Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable
� A good collection of Zen Koans

Smell a rose or two today and see (be). In the words of Gertrude Stein: “A rose is a rose is a rose.” If all else fails, and no amount of roses or words avail, then just laugh, yell, think, scream, and then laugh some more and take a peek in a nearby mirror.

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In his newest book, Douglas Hofstader attempts to define the difficult-to-define, self-aware mind, the “I.” The entire volume comprises his attempt. Not that being difficult-to-define is all bad. Its being difficult-to-define has made possible exclamations like the Firesign Theater’s Radio Theater’s: Who am us, anyway?

At the close of chapter 6 Hofstadter writes:

The depth and complexity of human memory is staggeringly rich. Little wonder, then, that when a human being, possessed of such a rich armamentarium of concepts and memories with which to work, turns its attention to itself, as it inevitably must, it produces a self-model that is extraordinarily deep and tangled. That deep and tangled self-model is what “I”-ness is all about.

Douglas Hofstadter
I Am a Strange Loop

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D. T. Susuki wrote that he considered the Flower Garland Sutra — the Avatamsaka Sutra — to be the most cosmic, grand vision of reality in any scripture ever written or recorded. The massive, three-volume sutra is not a quick read — I was at it for years.

In Thomas Cleary’s forward to his translation of the final volume of his 3 volume edition of the Avatamsaka Sutra, the Gandavyuha or “Entry into the Realm of Reality” volume, he writes:

The book [Gandavyuha] begins with a symbolic description of manifestations of enlightened awareness, explaining that those who are within a fixed system have not the slightest inkling of the scope of consciousness that lies beyond the bounds of their perceptions as conditioned by their training and development. It suggests that all views that are conditioned by cultural and personal history are by definition limiting, and there is a potential awareness that cuts through the boundaries imposed by conventional description based on accumulated mental habit. According to the scripture, it is the perennial task of certain people, by virtue of their own development, to assist others in overcoming arbitrary restrictions of consciousness so as to awaken to the full potential of mind.

That aim or effect alone would be enough of a reason to study the Avatamsaka Sutra. But there is so much more, so many more reasons; the cosmic, sensual, sense-based imagery is breathtaking — if synapses can be overloaded by image and thought, this scripture will do just that — sometimes your mind can only take in a page or two at a time . Description can””t do it justice. Look for quotes — forthcoming.

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