The Year of Mathemagical Thinking

I'm a hopeless romantic and sentimentalist - can't say I understood anything Hofstadter is talking about, but I'm sure I understand this part, and isn't it such a consolence that "whatever pattern exists in my brain could exist in other physical structures in the world", which could have the same feelings and sentiments and emotions - we don't have to prove it, just the fact that it might exist, makes life more hopeful. :)

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1599720,00.html

"I Am a Strange Loop scales some lofty conceptual heights, but it remains very personal, and it's deeply colored by the facts of Hofstadter's later life. In 1993 Hofstadter's beloved wife Carol died suddenly of a brain tumor at only 42, leaving him with two young children to care for. Hofstadter was overwhelmed by grief, and much of I Am a Strange Loop flows from his sense that Carol lives on in him--that the strange loop of her mind persists in his, a faint but real copy of her software running on his neural hardware, her tune played on his instrument. "It was that sense that the same thing was being felt inside her and inside me--that it wasn't two different feelings, it was the same feeling," Hofstadter says. "If you believe that what makes for consciousness is some kind of abstract pattern, then it's sort of a self-evident fact that whatever pattern exists in my brain could exist in other physical structures in the world." I Am a Strange Loop is a work of rigorous thinking, but it's also an extraordinary tribute to the memory of romantic love: The Year of Magical Thinking for mathematicians."