Douglas Hofstadter
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University Bloomington
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
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Douglas Hofstadter is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature at Indiana University Bloomington, and Director of the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. His pioneering 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Hofstadter’s work centers on how meaning, intelligence, and subjective selfhood emerge from formal systems. In I Am a Strange Loop (2007), he formalizes the concept of a “strange loop” as a self-referential feedback structure where upward causal mechanisms across neural hierarchies loop back downward, creating an invariant internal symbol, the “I”,that attributes causal efficacy to its internal states.
Under Hofstadter’s computational functionalism, consciousness is substrate-independent: any sufficiently complex hierarchical symbol-processing system that generates a recursive strange loop capable of modeling its own perceptual processes will instantiate genuine subjective experience.
Known for. Gödel, Escher, Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid (Pulitzer Prize 1979), Strange Loops, I Am a Strange Loop (2007), fluid analogies, analogical cognition
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Douglas Hofstadter is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.