When the call to compile a reading list for new rationalists went out, contributor djcb responded by suggesting The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, a compilation of essays, fictions and excerpts "composed and arranged" by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett. Cut to me peering guiltily over my shoulder, my own copy sitting unread on the shelf, peering back.

The book presents Hofstadter and Dennett's co-curation of 27 pieces, some penned by the curators themselves, meant to "reveal" and "make vivid" a set of "perplexities," to wit: "What is the mind?" "Who am I?" "Can mere matter think or feel?" "Where is the soul?" Two immediate concerns arise. First, The Mind's I's 1981 publication date gives it access to the vast majority of what's been thought and said about these questions, but robs it of of any intellectual progress toward the answers made in the nearly three decades since. (This turns out not to be an issue, as most of the answers seem to have drawn no closer in the 1980s, 1990s or 2000s.) Second, those sound suspiciously similar to questions hazily articulated by college freshmen, less amenable to "rational inquiry" than to "dorm furniture and bad weed." They don't quite pass the "man test," an reversal of the fortune cookie "in bed" game: simply tack "man" onto the beginning of each question and see who laughs. "Man, who am I?" "Man, where is the soul?" "Man, can matter think or feel?"

Hofstadter and Dennett's fans know, however, that their analyses rise a cut above, engaged as they are in the admirable struggle to excise the navel-gazing from traditionally navel-gazey topics. The beauty is that they've always accomplished this, together and separately, not by making these issues less exciting but by making them more so. Their clear, stimulating exegeses, explorations and speculations brim with both the enthusiasm of the thrilled neophyte and the levelheadedness of the seasoned surveyor. They even do it humorously, Hofstadter with his zig-zaggy punniness and Dennett with his wit that somehow stays just north of goofy. Thus armed, they've taken on such potentially dangerous topics as whether words and thoughts follow rules, how the animate emerges from the inanimate (Hofstader's rightly celebrated Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid) and consciousness (most of Dennett's career), on the whole safely.

But obviously this is not a "pure" (whatever that might mean) Hofstadter-Dennett joint; rather, their editorial choices compose one half and their personal commentaries — "reflections," they banner them — on the fruits of those choices compose the other. Nearly every selection, whether a short story, article, novel segment or dialogue, leads into an original discussion and evaluation by, as they sign them, D.R.H. and/or D.C.D. They affirm, they contradict, they expand, they question, they veer off in their own directions; the reflections would make a neat little book on the topics at hand by themselves.