The Mind's I

The Mind's I

The Mind's I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul (ISBN 0-553-34584-2) is a collection of essays and other texts by various authors concerning the nature of the mind and the self, edited with commentary by popular science writers Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. It was first published in 1981.

This book is an exploration of the human mind and soul, ranging from early philosophical and fictional musings on a subject that could seemingly only be examined in the realm of thought, to works from the 20th century where the nature of the self became a viable topic for scientific study.

The book popularized an essay by Stanisław Lem that led to the creation of SimCity franchise of computer games. But it has also been criticized for popularizing a non-metaphorical reading of Richard Dawkins' proposals regarding memes, leading to widespread misunderstanding (in the form of memetics) and the reification of the original idea-as-replicator metaphor.