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I Am a Strange Loop
Hofstadter's 2007 book — his most personal and most philosophically ambitious — arguing that selfhood is a pattern that becomes real by affecting what produces it, developed partly in response to the death of his wife Carol.
The book is Hofstadter's most direct treatment of consciousness and selfhood, written in the aftermath of his wife Carol's sudden death in 1993. The loss forced on him the question that had always been implicit in his work: what exactly is a self, and what persists when the physical substrate that hosted it is gone? His answer is that a self is a strange loop — a pattern of self-referential processing that becomes causally efficacious in the substrate that hosts it. The pattern is what we mean by 'I.' The substrate matters only as the site where the pattern runs.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book develops the strange loop concept more fully than Gödel, Escher, Bach, which had introduced it somewhat obliquely. Here Hofstadter makes the claim explicit: consciousness is not something that happens to a self-referential system, it is self-reference of a particular kind.