Have you ever seen Hofstadter try to summarize the idea conveyed in the book? He really is not able to, and so I think the book pretty much boils down to "hey here's a bunch of weird/cool stuff." Which is not such a bad thing. But for me, there was a point where I had to stop reading, I think when he tries to independently derive propositional logic or something like that? (It has been a while.) I just remember finding it to be a tedious retread of something everyone already took for granted.
He's pretty explicit that the idea is: consciousnesses is a strange loop, and since it's sometimes impossible to understand a system from within that system, we may never be able to understand the human mind because we are trapped within human minds.
