In Chapter 7, Hofstadter embarks on some of his central notions, most central of all is the concept of the "I". The "I" is a concept that has obsessed philosophers for centuries, especially it seems, the idealists, who believed that fundamental to reality were conscious perceptions, the physical world being merely a supposition of the self. The "I" is a transcendental point, a center of perception that itself is not part of empirical world. The analytic philosopher, Wittgenstein, has a famous drawing of the self not being in the field of perception in his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus -- you should check this book out if you haven't read it. The "I", even for idealists is not empirically real, but rather is part of a transcendental reality. For Hofstadter, the self is an epiphenomena, by that he means a phenomena which is the result of many things occuring at more micro levels, having no reality itself. He rela...
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