My apologies, the actual book had a better format. Although not quite a summary, here's what it's about:
"The content that most interested me was Hofstadter’s insistence that self-awareness and consciousness arise directly from what he calls “strange loops”, i.e. self-referential structures in formal systems, of which human minds are just one example (what else could they be?). It’s a very difficult subject to think about in a reasonable way. We all have that sensation of the homunculus inside our heads, somehow driving us from a seat just behind our eyes, and we naturally ascribe the same sense of self-awareness to other systems like ourselves, other people. But where does that sense of self-awareness really come from? There isn’t a homunculus driving us! All there is in our heads is a kilogram or two of glucose-fueled computing machinery, and yet somehow, from the fluctuations and vacillations of that tissue, our sense of I arises. How on earth does that happen? And if it can happen in our brains, can it happen in other systems? In a lot of discussions of artificial intelligence, there is a failure to appreciate the scale issues at work in this problem (Searle’s Chinese Room is a particularly egregious example). There are tens or hundreds of billions of neurons in the human brain with hundreds of trillions of connections. How do we begin to imagine or understand what epiphenomena might arise from that scale of complexity? Hofstadter tries to get at this scale problem a little using the example of a self-aware ant colony called Aunt Hilary, a friend of one of the characters in the dialogues, an Anteater.
Aunt Hilary knows little and cares less about ants, and the Anteater even now and then eats some of the ants composing the computing substrate on which Aunt Hilary’s personality runs. The other participants in the dialogue where this is discussed are a little horrified and not a little sceptical, but the Anteater insists that Aunt Hilary is just as self-aware as they are, and that there’s nothing particularly surprising about the whole setup. The analogies ants : ant colony :: neurons : brain and ant colony : Aunt Hilary :: brain : you or me are whimsical and a little silly, but render the central issue of consciousness in real clarity: how can the collective interactions of a large number of (more or less) simple elements lead to complex emergent behaviour?"