Chistoph Adami writes the review in the May 25 issue of Science Magazine. Interesting comparison to Koch’s recent book, The Quest for Consciousness.
The money quote:
In fact, Hofstadter’s book and Koch’s recent The Quest for Consciousness (3) make for an interesting juxtaposition. Each addresses the same problem but entirely on different levels. Yet both authors reach some of the same conclusions, sometimes using precisely the same metaphor (as when they compare the activity of “making up one’s mind” in terms of a voting process). In the end, both authors could have profited from peeking at each other’s arsenal: Hofstadter would probably be delighted to see some of the putative neural underpinnings of consciousness, to peer underneath the strange loop as it were, at the inordinately complex firework and the neuroanatomy that supports it. For his part, Koch would no doubt appreciate the computational trick that Gödel incompleteness plays on us, as well as the developmental aspect of consciousness that Hofstadter advocates.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 