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Comment by mav88 | Hacker News Reader

The central thesis of GEB is this: what is a self? From the preface of the 20th anniversary edition:

"GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?"

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It is interesting to me that the author would start at the materialist assumption. Most people take it as a “given”, but I have softened to the idea that maybe it is not a correct or complete way of viewing things.

The author's favorite topic, as described by him in the final Dialogue, is 'indirect self-reference'. This has a double meaning. Indirect self-reference can mean what it says such as Godel numbering which is a method of referring to a self indirectly but it can also mean that the whole book is an indirect way of referring to the question of 'what is a self?' He is approaching the topic of consciousness indirectly.

I disagree that most people would take materialism as a given (I think most people in the world are at least slightly religious or spiritual), nor do I think it's necessarily a correct reading to say that Hofstadter actually assumes materialism must be true (though I believe he does), rather Hofstadter starts from the premise that it is and then tries to see if that premise can be logically consistant.

Someday—when we have all this figured out—someone should write What Is Self? as the sequel to Schrödinger’s What Is Life?

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