I'm curious what particular claim you think Hofstadter is pushing that is unwarranted -- I don't see how a book of wandering musings could earn the label "pseud

I'm curious what particular claim you think Hofstadter is pushing that is unwarranted -- I don't see how a book of wandering musings could earn the label "pseudoscience" when it doesn't claim to be scientific in the first place (as far as I recall -- it's been about 15 years since I read it). It's a bunch of interesting ideas he ties together in clever ways. The best I can come up with is that you're talking about his idea that self-reference lies at the heart of consciousness, which I think an intelligent reader can see is just a guess of his. Whether or not it's true, we can still see how it's useful to think of ant colonies as organisms, and we still learn about the incompleteness theorem, and we now understand what a fugue is and how it has textual and visual analogues, etc. Maybe there's a group of people who treat GEB's claims differently than I do that I'm unaware of?