(courtesy of Professor Hofstadter)
This evening we have an interview, by e-mail, with Professor Douglas Hofstadter, College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University (Bloomington), the author of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning classic Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Check out the Wikipedia link about him above: there is just too much to say about him, in this limited space about his fascinating, world-famous attempts, in books and otherwise (music, etc.) to understand human (and machine...) consciousness. Hofstadter has edited many books as well, e.g., The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul. (Note the punniness and the focus on consciousness in that book title: pure Hofstadter!)
(much more below)
Anyway, "GEB" has graced college and other bookshelves for decades and exploded minds everywhere like a grade-A can opener popping off the top of the cerebrum. How might some of those sorts of golden insights (whether about Bach's "Crab Canon", or Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, or what-have-you) apply to our current-day political scene, though?
(courtesy of Gibson's Books)
My questions follow, with his answers in blockquotes:
- What do you think of Barack Obama as a presidential candidate? --Or are you more interested in what he thinks of you as a philosopher/scientist?
1. I think Barack Obama is a great candidate and will make a great president. I am sorry that during the campaign he has not been able to really say what his plans are as president, since there are so many words that seem to set off the American public and that will lose you the election in no time flat. One has to learn to control one's speech extremely carefully if one wants to be elected to any major office, sad to say. Genuine, open honesty is not the best policy. What a horrible thing! However, after Obama takes office (presuming he wins the election, about which I am still rather nervous, despite his current reasonably comfortable lead) I think he will do all sorts of things that will help turn this sad nation around. I truly think this could be -- will be -- a major turning point in our nation's history. If Obama is elected, I will be terribly, terribly proud of my nation (for the first time in a very long time!). I also like and admire Joe Biden, so I think we have a great team in those two.
As for John McCain, well, I think he has done some okay things, and I respect his five-year-long imprisonment in Viet Nam and the fact that he is a voracious reader of history and that in some ways he has indeed been a political maverick, but basically he is a right-wing conservative and I don't like his politics. And I think he showed a horrendous lack of judgment and lack of responsibility -- even hypocrisy (given his catch-phrase "Country First") -- in picking Sarah Palin as his running mate. Incredible. As for Palin herself, well, words fail me. God help us if that duo is elected. It would be a nightmare and a profound disaster not only for our country but for the entire world.
- As for reflexivity, loops, and other themes that your work touches: Obama seems to emphasize the mantra to his supporters, "We are the change we've been waiting for." Is this coherent, e.g., who's "we", and are we all therefore Barack Obama, a la "I am Spartacus" from the Kirk Douglas film "Spartacus"? Is this mass democracy, mass schizophrenia, mass inspiration, Massachusetts, or what?
(Cf. also Obama's new book "Change We Can Believe In", p. 152,
"...Bring Americans Back into Their Government.
Barack Obama will bring democracy and policymaking directly to the people by requiring his Cabinet officials to have periodic national broadband townhall meetings...."
; and also the well-known massive and groundbreaking use of electronic communication technologies and social networks by the Obama campaign...)
2. "We are the change we've been waiting for." -- Hmm... That does sound pretty silly. It's just a slogan, of course. I don't take very many slogans seriously. I really have come to despise sound bites (and the phrase "sound bite" itself is a kind of sound bite, when you come down to it).
- As for "Who is Barack Obama", a meme (or a not-me, i.e., "he's not like us") which John McCain is pushing hard lately: have you any interesting observations in the style of your "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid", e.g., using or riffing off of themes/verbiage like
"Amabo, Obama", or
"Lui Luo" (French/Kenyan, with reference to "Louie Louie" by The Kingsmen), or
"Barack Who's Sane Obama", or
a "Barackcarab Canon", or
"Obama" as a rhyme with "Osama" but with one consonant changed...or even
"Barack [rhymes with "Bach"] and the Art of Well-Tempered Campaign Maintenance", riffing off the work of Robert Pirsig??
, or any of your own invention, which would probably be better than mine.
(Cf. also the ontology of the name of "Black Eyed Peas" musician will.i.am--reminiscent of the title of your book "The Mind's I"--who produced the song "Yes We Can", and the issue of my.barackobama.com: is he really "MY" Barack Obama? or just some Baudrillardian simulacrum?
And is Obama one of the highest points of national self-awareness and self-consciousness rising out of the somewhat random mental flux of American citizens' thoughts, or is the movement just like a "Barack Borg", re the Star Trek "Borg", assimilating people's energies to support some Chicago politician?)
3. I really like your little find "Barack Who's Sane Obama". Beautiful! It is so right! Also, I took Latin when I was in high school, and perhaps I remember wrongly, but I think "amabo" means "I will love". (Just checked with the almighty Google, and indeed that seems to be right.) So "Amabo Obama" -- "I will love Obama" -- is a very nice palindrome indeed. What to stick right in the middle to lengthen it and make it an even better palindrome? Dunno. Somebody surely will find something very clever to stick in there one of these days.
- Zeno had the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise: but today's xeno-phobes pose us the difficulty and dilemma of whether we can outrun the terrible racist shadow of our American past and go on to a higher and more decent plateau. Do you think we can reach so high, or is motion an illusion here, just as some Greeks thought that physical motion was an illusion??
(Cf. Faulkner on "the past is not even past", and M.C. Escher's etchings/drawings of conflict/synthesis between/among black and white figures)
4. Excellent concluding Zeno-ic question about whether we, as a people, can "outrun" the terrible racist shadow of our American past and go on to a higher and more decent plateau.
I think that over the past few decades, we have collectively made some remarkable progress in becoming a less racist society, and electing Obama as our president would be the most stunning piece of progress by far -- in fact, it would be one of the most remarkable events that ever took place in this country. I don't know why, but I credit Bill Cosby for a good deal of the progress that has been made in our land, because he is someone who made whites see that blacks were really very similar to them, and he had (and has) great values.
Of course I also profoundly admire Martin Luther King and all the people who did such amazingly courageous things during the Civil Rights Era. Things are slowly changing in this strange land of ours, and I have high hopes. However, my hopes will be dashed if McCain and Palin win this election. My fingers are crossed.
One last thing -- I think we have to slowly stop talking about people as "black" and "white" as if this were a black-and-white (no pun intended) distinction. Barack Obama is a perfect example. Why is he any more black than he is white? It's just a convention. When you see him in that photo sitting between his mother's parents when he was a student at Columbia, you can see that he has as much whiteness in him as he has blackness. The "venerable" old tradition, or convention, of labeling a person "black" if they have even the slightest trace of African "blood" in them is an absurdity that comes straight out of slavery, and we should just drop it. Why is Tiger Woods called "black" rather than "Thai"? We have a lot of collective growing-up to do in our society in this regard. A very powerful book I read in which this idea was a central theme was Richard Powers' novel "The Time of Our Singing".
(Courtesy of Saint Mary's University Astronomy & Physics Society)
Addendum: not too long after the interview, I received from Hofstadter what he described as "a new Palin-drome, sent to me by my friend Glen Worthey out at Stanford":
The source of the VP-hopeful's extensive domestic policy experience:
"Wasilla's all I saw."
And that was our interview, unless it turns out to be a mysterious loop in reality and the real one is coming later. Thank you Douglas Hofstadter for your reflections of the past, in the present, and about the future!