Hofstadter had previously expressed disappointment with how
Gödel, Escher, Bach, which won the 1980
Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, was received. In the preface to its 20th anniversary edition, he laments that the book was perceived as a hodgepodge of neat things with no central theme. He writes: "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?" Hofstadter seeks to remedy this problem in
I Am a Strange Loop by focusing on and expounding the central message of
Gödel, Escher, Bach. He demonstrates how the properties of
self-referential systems, demonstrated most famously in
Gödel's incompleteness theorems, can be used to describe the unique properties of
minds. As an exploration of the sense of "I", Hofstadter explores his own life and those to whom he has been close. The book received favorable reviews. The
Wall Street Journal called it "fascinating", "original", and "thought-provoking". == See also ==