This was kind of interesting, but not as much so as I expected, perhaps because it was basically an anthology of short essays and short fiction, rather than a book by Douglas R. Hofstadter, who was just one of the editors and wrote some of the comments on the essays and fiction.

I gave this 4 stars because of the eye-opening points of view that are offered to the reader.
The book helps us see outside of our limited perspective. It's like you are normally walking around your daily life zoomed into YOUR life, your problems, your existence, but then this book comes along and helps you zoom out. Seeing a broader picture of the world as well as your own existence.

It might deserve less stars because of some unnecessary circling it does.
On some topics towards the middle of the book spanning towards the end, there is quite a bit of repetition and common sense explained to an unnecessary degree. It was hard getting through this but then I'd again be rewarded with a thought experiment that provided me with a new view of the world I inhabit in my mind.

If you have delved largely into this subject, this book might not be for you because it largely takes from many other resources on the topic. It's a collection of other writings, with offered analyzes of the material by the authors and other credible sources.

The good parts of this books are the extracts from GEB. Maybe I'm late to read this and it would have been great 40 years ago.

Interesting selections from other authors on the mind/brain duality problem, commented upon by the two authors. Not as enjoyable as Gödel Escher Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid, but still a thought-provoking read, even after 40 years.

太精彩了。
最喜欢的是博尔赫斯那几篇。可能因为文学的理解路径比较多样，我读到的时候震惊了：《环形废墟》还能这样读？自我是真正存在的东西还是脑制造的虚构人物呢？“在某个层次上的自我，是由另一个层次上相对盲目而无所理解的各种活动融合而成的。”总之是完全刷新了我对博尔赫斯的理解。
斯穆里安的《上帝是道家吗？》也超棒，文字非常有趣非常好读，讲的道理又很厉害。
另外一段很喜欢的是侯世达对塞尔的批评。我读塞尔的时候隐隐约约觉得不对头，但是没法清晰表达出我的困惑。侯世达娓娓道来的批评写得好精彩，又生动又清晰，读到的时候真的是觉得被一盏明灯照亮，好像又变得聪明了一点。
最后一点让我很感慨的是，七十年代的人对AI真的是充满了好奇和美好的想象，对宇宙也是。万万没想到几十年过去了，AI都用来推送广告了。真是令人沮丧……
作为一个工作和AI沾点边的人，时常感到自己白天的工作在制造屎，同时我自己也是被手机里100个app的个性化推送困住的人。我常常感到困惑不知道自己还能做什么，所幸还有晚上读书的美好时光。

Marvelous and thought provoking as well as simply written. Certainly anyone interested in any kind of non-fiction would enjoy reading this and besides, as the book is a collection of excerpts and reflections, the citations and refernces themselves are mostly worth pursuing, too.

An interesting exploration of the intricacies of consciousness through the writings of many thinkers, it was a bit slow and heavy at time, but i guess that's to be expected of the topics at hand.

A collection of short stories, essays, thought experiments and dialogues by various authors that all have something to do with consciousness, selfhood and other facets of the philosophy of mind.

The book was written/compiled in the 80s, so there definitely has been progress in neuroscience since the time of this book, but we still haven't figured out what it really means to be conscious, how to explain consciousness, where it comes from, and what other beings or things might have some version of a conscious experience.

Some of the stories are whack, some are really interesting and thought provoking. Some are quite funny, others are dull. As an example there is a Borges story, Alan Turing's essay on the turing test, an extract from the selfish gene by Dawkins, and the essay "what is it like to be a bat?" by Nagel. I liked most of the stories and essays on offer although some of them are ridiculously oversimplified and reductionist.

The co-authors Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett also include a few of their own pieces. My favourite of those was probably an absurd dialogue between four characters which starts as a discussion about Fermat's last theorem and the music of Bach and ends up being a debate on whether an ant hill (Aunt Hillary) could be said to be conscious in the same way a brain is, comparing single ants to neurons. There are three similar dialogues by Hofstadter and the conversation is pretty stilted and pretentious in all of them but somehow I still enjoy the back and forth nature of the debates and how far they push the concepts of being and selfhood.

Every story or essay or whatever is followed by a short "reflections" section by either Hofstadter or Dennett. I found myself often not agreeing with their takes on the pieces they were reflecting on. Still, it's an interesting book which makes you think deeply on concepts that are hard to grasp.

This book was formative along with Godel Escher and Bach and much other nonfiction works in the nineties in the early days of AI speculation and neuropsychology in the 1990s. I was going back to college after a bout of madness and my recovery went towards the study of materialism, computationalism, and analytic (anglo-American) philosophy to develop an artificial cosmopolitan common sense so I would stop going on schizophrenic delusional goose chases. These forays into philosophy helped ground me to study physics and put forth a simulacrum of sanity. Good stuff.

A collection of essays and short stories from scientists, philosophers, and fiction authors, all dealing with concepts related to the self and self-consciousness. Each work is followed by commentary from either Dennett or Hofstadter.

I imagine this book is an absolutely fantastic introduction to these sorts of ideas and had I read it earlier in my life it'd probably have a 5 star rating. Still, the familiarity of the ideas discussed didn't lessen my enjoyment of the book, especially as the book progressed from standard speculative fiction/philosophical theorizing to much more complicated discussions of consciousness and the self.

The writings alone would be wonderful and thought provoking, but Dennett and Hofstadter's commentaries manage to add yet another dimension to the appreciation of all these works and provoke yet more thought about the ideas discussed.

It's also turned me on to a few authors who I may have never heard of otherwise, and whose writings I found to be extraordinary, which is a great bonus.

This collection of short works got me into philosophy of mind. It really changed the way I think about the brain and the future of civilization.

I cannot avoid a Borges reference anywhere