"I read Gödel, Escher, Bach in high school, and it warped my brain. In that book and later in I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter argued that human consciousness arises from an intricate, self-referential feedback loop. A system of symbols acquires the ability to reflect upon itself, crossing hierarchical levels until an "I" emerges from the tangle. For decades, Hofstadter seemed to suggest that if we ever built an intelligence, it would arrive through that same kind of deep, recursive, analogical architecture. Then LLMs landed, and Hofstadter has been openly devastated. In interviews—most notably in The New York Times and in video discussions like his interview on the state of AI—he’s spoken about the profound existential vertigo of watching systems like GPT-4 "scaring the daylights out of me" by producing witty, analogical, seemingly profound text without having traversed the slow, decades-long path of embodied human living. It felt to him like an unsettling shortcut, threatening to reduce the sanctity of mind and decades of his life's work to feed-forward statistical tricks." https://blog.lmorchard.com/2026/09/27/pragmatic-anthropomorphism/