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The idea that changed Hofstadter’s existence, as he has explained over the years, came to him on the road, on a break from graduate school in particle physics. Discouraged by the way his doctoral thesis was going at the University of Oregon, feeling “profoundly lost,” he decided in the summer of 1972 to pack his things into a car he called Quicksilver and drive eastward across the continent. Each night he pitched his tent somewhere new (“sometimes in a forest, sometimes by a lake”) and read by flashlight. He was free to think about whatever he wanted; he chose to think about thinking itself. Ever since he was about 14, when he found out that his youngest sister, Molly, couldn’t understand language, because she “had something deeply wrong with her brain” (her neurological condition probably dated from birth, and was never diagnosed), he had been quietly obsessed by the relation of mind to matter. The father of psychology, William James, described this in 1890 as “the most mysterious thing in the world”: How could consciousness be physical? How could a few pounds of gray gelatin give rise to our very thoughts and selves?

Roaming in his 1956 Mercury, Hofstadter thought he had found the answer—that it lived, of all places, in the kernel of a mathematical proof. In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself. Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.” He sat down one afternoon to sketch his thinking in a letter to a friend. But after 30 handwritten pages, he decided not to send it; instead he’d let the ideas germinate a while. Seven years later, they had not so much germinated as metastasized into a 2.9‑pound, 777-page book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which would earn for Hofstadter—only 35 years old, and a first-time author—the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

GEB, as the book became known, was a sensation. Its success was catalyzed by Martin Gardner, a popular columnist for Scientific American, who very unusually devoted his space in the July 1979 issue to discussing one book—and wrote a glowing review. “Every few decades,” Gardner began, “an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event.” The first American to earn a doctoral degree in computer science (then labeled “communication sciences”), John Holland, recalled that “the general response amongst people I know was that it was a wonderment.”

Hofstadter seemed poised to become an indelible part of the culture. GEB was not just an influential book, it was a book fully of the future. People called it the bible of artificial intelligence, that nascent field at the intersection of computing, cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. Hofstadter’s account of computer programs that weren’t just capable but creative, his road map for uncovering the “secret software structures in our minds,” launched an entire generation of eager young students into AI.

But then AI changed, and Hofstadter didn’t change with it, and for that he all but disappeared.