Me & Doug go way back.(He just doesn't know it yet.)

I found this in some random guy's comment on Douglas Hofstadter's MySpace page, and it won't stop freaking my beak. I see it behind my eyelids when I lie down to go to sleep. I finished his book, I Am a Strange Loop, the other day and it was a really fascinating read, as I expected, if a little limited in its scope. He has an interesting and by some standards radical theory on how a physicalist view of the world can be reconciled with the experience of consciousness, but as he's from an academic background, I find he stresses cognition too much, at the expense of the really interesting pre-cognitive environment, which is where I would locate the "soul". I kept nodding along with him, waiting to see what he was going to say about that stuff, but the only real references he made to it were some cheap shots, based on misunderstandings, at the "Tao and Zen people".

I'd really like to see someone who's writing about this kind of stuff from a scientific/American philosophical viewpoint find a way to allow some room for spirituality or even a little mysticism, without tipping over into the totally kooked out camp. I guess there's a general and justified fear of organized religion among academics these days. Still, I'm trying to figure out a way to land Hofstadter as one of my MySpace friends, so I can try out my Motivated Book Exchange (see this blog post) idea on him. Got some borderline New Age literature I think would really open up some new territory for him. Plus it'd be super cool to see what he would think I need to read. I think he'd be a perfect celebrity endorsement to get in on the ground floor of what I still believe will be a huge phenomenon.

- Andrew