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4.31 AVERAGE
4.31 AVERAGE
I still don't hate myself enough to do this, going to retry in x years.
I don’t feel like I qualified to leave a review for this book. Topics ranging from Bach to Zen to AI.
Just read the stars
Just read the stars
For me, this was a book that at times felt like course literature for a logic/philosophy/AI course and just like that there were times when I had to accept that the paragraph I just read gave me very little understanding and that I had to move on just to get finished in reasonable time. Still, it is most impressive and very entertaining. The alternating format between non-fiction and dialogues is refreshing and there is great synergy between them as the dialogues gives an intuitive understanding of the factual chapters. Seeing the similarities between Gödel, Escher and Bach is a challenging and intriguing way of presenting ideas of how our minds possibly work.
All in all, it is both a very difficult and ingenious read. Some parts flew over my head while other parts put a wide smile on my face. It makes you think about how we humans think, quite enjoyable.
Spoiler
between a Tortoise and AchillesSpoiler
and delving into even more farfetched topics such as Zen Buddhism and DNA etc.All in all, it is both a very difficult and ingenious read. Some parts flew over my head while other parts put a wide smile on my face. It makes you think about how we humans think, quite enjoyable.
challenging
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
informative
lighthearted
slow-paced
The book mostly concerns itself with self-reference, strange loops, the notion of self and consciousness. Whether in a person, a machine, or a 'system'. To this end, in the 700+ (dense) pages, there's a slew of "here's a bunch of axioms, see these theorems be deduced, and what does this say about the completeness and consistency of our system and what it can express?"
Not going to lie, it was a much slower read than I was expecting, and a bit of a slog through the mathematical sections, but it was oh-so-rewarding. So much interesting stuff, even the bits trying to explain about 'computers' to an audience of 1979. And there were digressions into music, into art, into language, into pattern recognition, into DNA and genetics...
And even better, when it feels like he's jumped off on a tangent to some new (yet still fascinating) idea, he then relates it back to the earlier chapters and you can see this whole bigger picture that he's constructing.
Wholeheartedly recommend.
Not going to lie, it was a much slower read than I was expecting, and a bit of a slog through the mathematical sections, but it was oh-so-rewarding. So much interesting stuff, even the bits trying to explain about 'computers' to an audience of 1979. And there were digressions into music, into art, into language, into pattern recognition, into DNA and genetics...
And even better, when it feels like he's jumped off on a tangent to some new (yet still fascinating) idea, he then relates it back to the earlier chapters and you can see this whole bigger picture that he's constructing.
Wholeheartedly recommend.
I was first introduced to this book reading The Psychopath Test:
Quite an apt description. It is very playful, and it was a lot of Hofstadter's amusing anecdotes and his overall passion that helped me get through this book. Yes, the Godel's incompleteness proof was amazing in itself and was one of the main reasons why I read this book, but I particularly enjoyed his cute little dialogues and his brief biographies of the greats of the past.
The book doesn't come off as 'intellectual' but it's a very dense book. You would probably need a solid logic, and computer background or at least a willingness to learn (he does a great job in providing the requisite information but some knowledge will come in useful). He doesn't really reveal that much of his personal life but you get a good sense of who he is, what makes him ticks, and his worldview.
Overall, a book I would probably need to re-read (not for a while though ... haha). A lot of gold nuggets hidden in the book, making me take a step back and think about life.
‘If you’re a geek,’ sighed Deborah, ‘and you’re just discovering the Internet and especially if you’re a boy, Gödel, Escher, Bach would be like your Bible. It was about how you can use Gödel’s mathematic theories and Bach’s canons to make sense of the experience of consciousness. Lots of young guys really like it. It’s very playful. I haven’t read it in its entirety but it’s on my bookshelf.’
Quite an apt description. It is very playful, and it was a lot of Hofstadter's amusing anecdotes and his overall passion that helped me get through this book. Yes, the Godel's incompleteness proof was amazing in itself and was one of the main reasons why I read this book, but I particularly enjoyed his cute little dialogues and his brief biographies of the greats of the past.
The book doesn't come off as 'intellectual' but it's a very dense book. You would probably need a solid logic, and computer background or at least a willingness to learn (he does a great job in providing the requisite information but some knowledge will come in useful). He doesn't really reveal that much of his personal life but you get a good sense of who he is, what makes him ticks, and his worldview.
Overall, a book I would probably need to re-read (not for a while though ... haha). A lot of gold nuggets hidden in the book, making me take a step back and think about life.
adventurous
challenging
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
informative
slow-paced
This book is not for everyone. Another review describes this book's topic as thinking and thinking about thinking. That is accurate. If you are interested in the mechanics of logic, the limitations of formal logical systems, parallels of formal logical systems in music and art and Zen koans, and the applicability of such systems to AI, then this might be the book for you.
This book is dense. It is 740 pages, but takes three times as long to read as any fiction that length. Most paragraphs require stopping and pondering.
This is my second time attempting to read this book. The first time, I was 19 and had barely started college. Now, having finished a college education in Computer Science and Math, it was more approachable. I'm curious how approachable (or not) this book is to people who've never had much experience with formal logic or computation theory. Hofstadter certainly tries to write it for a general audience, but my education precludes me from commenting on how well he succeeds.
The dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise are humorous (and at some times downright ridiculous) but (usually) do a good job of illustrating his topics more simply/lightly before diving into them, though they won't really help understanding the more difficult concepts. If you're in a programming mood, you might try reading The Little Schemer (it's short!) to get the best explanation of the Halting problem, then read this book with the understanding that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is, more or less, the mathematical analogue.
He invents his own system of formal mathematical logic and his own procedural programming language to explain concepts, without going into what would be considered a more "standard" formal logic system or even the Turing machine itself. He does a good job piecing them together but at certain times I feel like it'd be more meaningful to read the original works on several of the subjects he touches on.
While formal logic certainly predates this book, a lot of the AI and neuroscience research that he describes were (and are) very much active. The book was published in 1979, and its references to AI reflect the time period. Hofstadter surmises that computers won't pass humans in chess-playing ability in the foreseeable future, but while it might be fun to read and go "oh yeah Deep Blue happened" a more interesting development has been in the use of statistical methods to approximate intelligence that have been more recently developed. For example, Hofstadter discusses translation of text between human languages as having been attempted through trying to parse the sentence and put it back together in another language and expects that computers will only get better at this when they have a fuller model of the world, complete with cultural context; instead, we've made advancements mostly through statistical predictions based on known existing corpuses of translated works, despite complaints about the validity of this approach (see also: Chomsky, Noam). While it might be interesting to see an updated version of the book taking these things into account, he does discuss why he doesn't (in the introduction to the 25th-anniversary-edition) and I agree.
Any complaints? Sure. The book is hard to read, especially for prolonged periods of time. It's dense and the concepts are not the easiest to begin with. Read a chapter every day or two and don't expect to finish this in a week. In fact, read three or four other books while you plow through this one. He gets a little too excited about some of the contrived analogies he comes up with (and sometimes he spends more time explaining an absurd analogy than the concept it is supposed to help) and reaches borderline smugness about certain cute coincidences he has arranged, but on the whole it's only a slight distraction from his main point.
Worth reading? Maybe. Will it expand your thinking? Probably, though maybe not as much as you might expect; due to the broad spectrum of topics covered, it's not as deep as I would like in some areas and spends too much time smoothing over difficult topics in certain fields in order to make "clever" maps between concepts in the fields (though in this aspect he's just being a computer scientist---we like simple representations that map cleanly across everything! Sadly, the world is not that way). Very good? Absolutely.
This book is dense. It is 740 pages, but takes three times as long to read as any fiction that length. Most paragraphs require stopping and pondering.
This is my second time attempting to read this book. The first time, I was 19 and had barely started college. Now, having finished a college education in Computer Science and Math, it was more approachable. I'm curious how approachable (or not) this book is to people who've never had much experience with formal logic or computation theory. Hofstadter certainly tries to write it for a general audience, but my education precludes me from commenting on how well he succeeds.
The dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise are humorous (and at some times downright ridiculous) but (usually) do a good job of illustrating his topics more simply/lightly before diving into them, though they won't really help understanding the more difficult concepts. If you're in a programming mood, you might try reading The Little Schemer (it's short!) to get the best explanation of the Halting problem, then read this book with the understanding that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is, more or less, the mathematical analogue.
He invents his own system of formal mathematical logic and his own procedural programming language to explain concepts, without going into what would be considered a more "standard" formal logic system or even the Turing machine itself. He does a good job piecing them together but at certain times I feel like it'd be more meaningful to read the original works on several of the subjects he touches on.
While formal logic certainly predates this book, a lot of the AI and neuroscience research that he describes were (and are) very much active. The book was published in 1979, and its references to AI reflect the time period. Hofstadter surmises that computers won't pass humans in chess-playing ability in the foreseeable future, but while it might be fun to read and go "oh yeah Deep Blue happened" a more interesting development has been in the use of statistical methods to approximate intelligence that have been more recently developed. For example, Hofstadter discusses translation of text between human languages as having been attempted through trying to parse the sentence and put it back together in another language and expects that computers will only get better at this when they have a fuller model of the world, complete with cultural context; instead, we've made advancements mostly through statistical predictions based on known existing corpuses of translated works, despite complaints about the validity of this approach (see also: Chomsky, Noam). While it might be interesting to see an updated version of the book taking these things into account, he does discuss why he doesn't (in the introduction to the 25th-anniversary-edition) and I agree.
Any complaints? Sure. The book is hard to read, especially for prolonged periods of time. It's dense and the concepts are not the easiest to begin with. Read a chapter every day or two and don't expect to finish this in a week. In fact, read three or four other books while you plow through this one. He gets a little too excited about some of the contrived analogies he comes up with (and sometimes he spends more time explaining an absurd analogy than the concept it is supposed to help) and reaches borderline smugness about certain cute coincidences he has arranged, but on the whole it's only a slight distraction from his main point.
Worth reading? Maybe. Will it expand your thinking? Probably, though maybe not as much as you might expect; due to the broad spectrum of topics covered, it's not as deep as I would like in some areas and spends too much time smoothing over difficult topics in certain fields in order to make "clever" maps between concepts in the fields (though in this aspect he's just being a computer scientist---we like simple representations that map cleanly across everything! Sadly, the world is not that way). Very good? Absolutely.