Making sense of complexity

When I was 28, I came down with a strange illness that took two months to diagnose. To distract myself from the awful possibilities – leukemia, lupus and other scary things – I immersed myself in a book, Gödel, Escher and Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

Wickedly brilliant and challenging, it kept my conscious mind conveniently engaged throughout the whole, frightening episode. (This summer, my son has been wrapped up in my now dilapidated copy. Happily, the state of his health had nothing to do with it.)

Coincidentally, astonishingly, Hofstadter was only 27 himself when he wrote this Pulizer Prize-winning book, one that appeared to examine patterns in mathematics, art and music. It seems, though, that his readers got it wrong. It was really about the way the mind works.

Years later, this general confusion inspired the author to write a follow-up, I Am a Strange Loop; a thought-provoking 400 pages, which I recently finished reading. This post isn’t about philosophy, however. It’s about communication.

Once again, Hofstadter writes about head-bangingly complex ideas – advanced number theory and its relationship to the illusion of human consciousness, for instance – in lucid and engaging prose.

As the person in my family nicknamed the Queen of Analogy, I was particularly delighted by this passage in the author’s introduction:

“I specialize in thinking about thinking…. And one of my firmest conclusions is that we always think by seeking and drawing parallels to things we know from our past, and that we therefore communicate best when we exploit examples, analogies, and metaphors galore, when we avoid abstract generalities, when we use very down-to-earth, concrete, and simple language, and when we talk directly about our own experiences.”

Bravo, Doug, if I may call you that after an acquaintance of several hundred pages. I’m still mulling over your concept of the “I” as the hallucination of an hallucination, and will continue to mull for some time. Meanwhile, I applaud the spirit and expression of your words above (though I might have punctuated them differently). Write on.