I haven't checked any of his recent projects, but from his books he's firmly rooted in the symbolic tradition. He adds some interesting wrinkles, sure, but wouldn't he still be diametrically opposed to someone like Rodney Brooks? http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00043702919... (Intelligence Without Representation)

No, you're wrong.

Hofstader begins with symbolics but definitively goes off them.

The point of something like a "strange loop" is that it can't be encompassed by an ordinary symbolic system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop

You're right, and flipping through my copy of I Am a Strange Loop for the first time in a while I find some things that are reminiscent of non-computational theories. I guess I was/am caught up on the computationalism vs. non-computationalism debate and am conflating GOFAI with everyone working in a computationalist framework. Hofstadter pushes the boundaries, but he's still a computationalist.

For someone who takes the idea of a system that's impossible to model further, IMO, check out the biologist Robert Rosen's Life Itself and Essays on Life Itself. He pushes more in the direction of complex systems theory than self-reference (maybe a physics version of the same idea?) but his writings are brilliant. Less fun than Hofstadter's, but more rigorous and with a necessary appreciation of the biological and physical sciences. Anyways, I'm rambling.

it's not just strange loops. Read "Creative Analogies". The 'copycat' program, in particular. Those algorithms were solving problems that watson never would be able to do: Problems that require genuinely creative thinking, especially in the face of open-ended, indefinite answer domains.