I review Doug Hofstadter’s new book on consciousness in today’s WSJ. (Hofstadter is the guy whose 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach launched a hundred thousand careers in computer science. It’s still in print, I see.)

Is a naturalistic explanation of consciousness possible? Hofstadter makes a very plausible case, but left me still a mysterian at last… though sufficiently hooked on the whole topic that I went and purchased Prof. Robinson’s CDs on Consciousness and Its Implications from the Teaching Company. I shall listen to the lectures on a long walk I have planned.

The main thing here–and Hofstadter makes the point himself–is that the folk-naive notion of consciousness–the “ghost in the machine”–is so well rooted in our language and habits of thought, this is one of those cases where an old generation (i.e. mine) will have to die off & a new one come up before we can really think straight about this. If there really is a new synthesis a-coming down the pike, at my age and with my ingrained ways of talking and thinking, I can’t hope to do more than glimpse it. I’ll never really get it.

That’s always the way with revolutions in thinking. Isaac Newton didn’t even get his own theories. Action at a distance? What’s that? He went scratching around in the Bible for an answer.