An interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter

What led you to write the book? (I Am a Strange Loop)

. . . two philosophers [Ken Williford and Uriah Kriegel] asked me if I would write about my thoughts about what an "I" is. They said that they had appreciated what I had said of these ideas in Gödel, Escher, Bach many years ago, but that they knew that I felt that my message had not really been absorbed—that Gödel, Escher, Bach had become popular but that the driving force behind the book had not really been perceived by most readers, let alone absorbed by a large number of people, and I was frustrated with this. I felt I had reached people, but not exactly as I had hoped. I had greater success with the book than I'd ever expected, but I didn't have the exact type of success that I wanted. . .

I thought, "This is a good opportunity to at least address the world of philosophers of mind. It's a narrow world, but if I can say it well, at least they'll know what I intended to do in my book GEB almost 30 years ago."