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4.32 AVERAGE
4.32 AVERAGE
This book defies description. It’s at once number theory introduction, philosophy, brilliant wordplay and literary analysis, plus a thorough analysis and description of some primitive AI back from the 70s.
The analysis of cognition and self awareness is strong. The literary structure and multi nested analysis are just a brilliant work of art.
The biggest surprise from a 2022 standpoint is that even though there’s extensive analysis of the brain and neurons, neural nets aren’t considered. The second biggest surprise is that there’s practically no discussion of randomness or statistics. Everything is assumed to follow simple logical steps and loops. These two missing pieces would probably require a wholesale rethinking of every part of the argument.
Anyway glad I spent the time. Very very good.
The analysis of cognition and self awareness is strong. The literary structure and multi nested analysis are just a brilliant work of art.
The biggest surprise from a 2022 standpoint is that even though there’s extensive analysis of the brain and neurons, neural nets aren’t considered. The second biggest surprise is that there’s practically no discussion of randomness or statistics. Everything is assumed to follow simple logical steps and loops. These two missing pieces would probably require a wholesale rethinking of every part of the argument.
Anyway glad I spent the time. Very very good.
challenging
informative
tense
slow-paced
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter is a truly unique book. It's hard to explain exactly what it is about because Hofstadter brings in a multitude of themes. The most prevalent is the origins of intelligence and how intelligence can arise from inanimate matter.
Hofstadter weaves in Gödel's incompleteness theorem, the imagery of Escher and the works of Bach.
Gödel, Escher, Bach is a long read that alternates perfectly between the deep and technical subject matter and easy and lighthearted explanations. All the chapters are generally preceded by a tale that should illustrate the principle. These tales are great to read and introduces the concept to come in an easygoing manner. Then comes the concept itself which can be Gödel's incompleteness theorem, or how the brain works.
I must admit I did not completely understand this book. It is dense and detailed and I think it's one of these books that keep revealing new details on each reading. Hofstadter has done a magnificent job putting in puns, double meanings (isomorphism) and detail in this book, that I think it is hard to comprehend in the first reading.
I would really recommend this book if you are interested in philosophy, artificial intelligence or simply want to challenge yourself.
Hofstadter weaves in Gödel's incompleteness theorem, the imagery of Escher and the works of Bach.
Gödel, Escher, Bach is a long read that alternates perfectly between the deep and technical subject matter and easy and lighthearted explanations. All the chapters are generally preceded by a tale that should illustrate the principle. These tales are great to read and introduces the concept to come in an easygoing manner. Then comes the concept itself which can be Gödel's incompleteness theorem, or how the brain works.
I must admit I did not completely understand this book. It is dense and detailed and I think it's one of these books that keep revealing new details on each reading. Hofstadter has done a magnificent job putting in puns, double meanings (isomorphism) and detail in this book, that I think it is hard to comprehend in the first reading.
I would really recommend this book if you are interested in philosophy, artificial intelligence or simply want to challenge yourself.
Lots of interesting ideas, well presented. Not quite introductory level, but certainly no math degree required.
Of the many people who have recommended this book to me, I don't know any who actually finished it. Enlightening and silly in about equal measures, it's a heady slog through artificial intelligence, paradoxes, consciousness, and......stuff. Noteworthy as a curiosity more than anything else.
I especially enjoyed the preface to the 20th anniversary edition, which I read last.
1) ''In Zen, too, we can see this preoccupation with the concept of transcending the system. For instance, the koan in which Tozan tells his monks that ''the higher Buddhism is not Buddha''. Perhaps, self-transcendence is even the central theme of Zen. A Zen person is always trying to understand more deeply what he is, by stepping more and more out of what he sees himself to be, by breaking every rule and convention which he perceives himself to be chained by # needless to say, including those of Zen itself. Somewhere along this elusive path may come enlightenment. In any case (as I see it), the hope is that by gradually deepening one's self-awareness, by gradually widening the scope of ''the system'', one will in the end come to a feeling of being at one with the entire universe.''
2) ''[...] This suggests a distinction that could be drawn between two senses of ''form'' in patterns which we analyze. First, there are qualities such as well-formedness, which can be detected by predictably terminating tests, as in BlooP programs. This I propose to call syntactic qualities of form. One intuitively feels about the syntactic aspects of form that they lie close to the surface, and therefore they do not provoke the creation of multidimensional cognitive sructures.
By contrast, the semantic aspects of form are those which cannot be tested for in predictable lengths of time: they require open-ended tests. Such an aspect is theoremhood of TNT-strings, as we have seen. You cannot just apply some standard test to a string and find out if it is a theorem. Somehow, the fact that its meaning is involved is crucially related to the difficulty of telling whether or not a string is a TNT-theorem. The act of pulling out a string's meaning involves, in essence, establishing all the implications of its connections to all other strings, and this leads, to be sure, down an open-ended trail. So ''semantic'' properties are connected to open-ended searches because, in an important sense, an object's meaning is not localized within the object itself. This is not to say that no understanding of any object's meaning is possible until the end of time, for as time passes, more and more of the meaning unfolds. However, there are always aspects of its meaning which will remain hidden arbitrarily long.''
3) ''In his book J.S. Bach's Musical Offering, Hans Theodore David writes: ''Throughout the Musical Offering, the reader, performer, or listener is to search for the Royal theme in all its forms. The entire work, therefore, is a ricercar in the original, literal sense of the word.'' I think this is true; one cannot look deeply enough into the Musical Offering. There is always more after one thinks one knows everything. For instance, towards the very end of the Six-Part Ricercar, the one he declined to improvise, Bach slyly hid his own name, split between two of the upper voices. Things are going on on many levels in the Musical Offering. There are tricks with notes and letters; there are ingenious variations on the King's Theme; there are original kinds of canons; there are extraordinarily complex fugues; there is beauty and extreme depth of emotion; even an exultation in the many-leveledness of the work comes through. The Musical Offering is a fugue of fugues, a Tangled Hierarchy like those of Escher and Gödel, an intellectual construction which reminds me, in ways I cannot express, of the beautiful many-voiced fugue of the human mind. And that is why in my book the three strands of Gödel, Escher and Bach are woven into an Eternal Golden Braid.''
2) ''[...] This suggests a distinction that could be drawn between two senses of ''form'' in patterns which we analyze. First, there are qualities such as well-formedness, which can be detected by predictably terminating tests, as in BlooP programs. This I propose to call syntactic qualities of form. One intuitively feels about the syntactic aspects of form that they lie close to the surface, and therefore they do not provoke the creation of multidimensional cognitive sructures.
By contrast, the semantic aspects of form are those which cannot be tested for in predictable lengths of time: they require open-ended tests. Such an aspect is theoremhood of TNT-strings, as we have seen. You cannot just apply some standard test to a string and find out if it is a theorem. Somehow, the fact that its meaning is involved is crucially related to the difficulty of telling whether or not a string is a TNT-theorem. The act of pulling out a string's meaning involves, in essence, establishing all the implications of its connections to all other strings, and this leads, to be sure, down an open-ended trail. So ''semantic'' properties are connected to open-ended searches because, in an important sense, an object's meaning is not localized within the object itself. This is not to say that no understanding of any object's meaning is possible until the end of time, for as time passes, more and more of the meaning unfolds. However, there are always aspects of its meaning which will remain hidden arbitrarily long.''
3) ''In his book J.S. Bach's Musical Offering, Hans Theodore David writes: ''Throughout the Musical Offering, the reader, performer, or listener is to search for the Royal theme in all its forms. The entire work, therefore, is a ricercar in the original, literal sense of the word.'' I think this is true; one cannot look deeply enough into the Musical Offering. There is always more after one thinks one knows everything. For instance, towards the very end of the Six-Part Ricercar, the one he declined to improvise, Bach slyly hid his own name, split between two of the upper voices. Things are going on on many levels in the Musical Offering. There are tricks with notes and letters; there are ingenious variations on the King's Theme; there are original kinds of canons; there are extraordinarily complex fugues; there is beauty and extreme depth of emotion; even an exultation in the many-leveledness of the work comes through. The Musical Offering is a fugue of fugues, a Tangled Hierarchy like those of Escher and Gödel, an intellectual construction which reminds me, in ways I cannot express, of the beautiful many-voiced fugue of the human mind. And that is why in my book the three strands of Gödel, Escher and Bach are woven into an Eternal Golden Braid.''
This is absolutely one of the best things that I have ever read. the premise is quite simple, I think, that consciousness can be reduced down to a pattern/ patterns of self reflecting process of information. the rest of the book are games, descriptions and dialogs about and of this idea, ad ideas generated and relate to this this idea, which serves to actually help me go on the same thought process and different meditative processes, which convinces and shows by presenting the experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_Gallery_(M._C._Escher)#/media/File:Print_Gallery_by_M._C._Escher.jpg
this is also such a good choice to convey his main idea.
this is also as dense in information, humor and inventiveness as any Nabokov book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_Gallery_(M._C._Escher)#/media/File:Print_Gallery_by_M._C._Escher.jpg
this is also such a good choice to convey his main idea.
this is also as dense in information, humor and inventiveness as any Nabokov book.
An absolute delight to explore.* The great appeal of GEB is Hofstadter's extended use of analogy and isomorphism as a way to enable high-level understanding of dense topics like AI research, Bach's compositional methods, mathematical proof, and consciousness.
As suggested by the title, Hofstadter spends a lot of time highlighting the deep connections and isomorphisms between the work of Gödel, Escher, and Bach (and their respective fields of formal logic/mathematics, representational art, and Baroque music). The constant shifting between different fields provides an enticing approach to infamously dry subjects (like set theory and logic). Sugarcoating the spoons helps the medicine go down, as each successive comparison serves to strengthen previous analogies.
After establishing the foundational insights of these figures, Hofstadter contextualizes the "primary" subjects with their contemporaries in similar fields. Computer science, AI, biology, linguistics, Zen Buddhism, and consciousness come to the fore and the book becomes much more than a series of interesting connections between three figures in history. It shifts up a level to examine the very cognitive processes by which such connections are created and what these processes might tell us about what it means to be a conscious being. In a way, the book starts examining itself; it becomes self-referential. The genius of GEB is that the self-reference enabled by "shifting" between different levels is the primary connection drawn between the work of Gödel, Escher, Bach, and all the "secondary" fields Hofstadter explores. Eventually, these explorations culminate in Hofstadter's claim that consciousness can also be explained by this self-reference and interaction between different levels of a system—what he calls a "strange loop." However, at this point there is little direct attempt to convince the reader by comparing his view to other leading theories. Indeed, it'd be difficult to condense a formal argument since the conclusion depends on intuitions built up from countless analogies.
In the end, GEB is more educational or generative than it is argumentative or conclusive. It doesn't feel like I've (consciously) changed any positions, but it does feel like I've gained a new perspective on mathematics, Baroque music, and representational art. Furthermore, this perspective may well be an important part of the Western zeitgeist in the last 100 years, as it provides connective tissue among prominent theories and advances in seemingly disparate fields. Regardless of what conclusions are reached, GEB presents an engaging methodology and a wealth of knowledge. I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in any one of the primary figures/fields.
*I say explore because I read it in three chunks over four years and because it led to just as much time outside of the book as in it. (E.g. It re-inspired a love of Bach and the Baroque. It required brushing up on some low-level math and high-level philosophy of mathematics and metaphilosophy.) This book isn't easy, but there is a lot to entice the next page turn.
As suggested by the title, Hofstadter spends a lot of time highlighting the deep connections and isomorphisms between the work of Gödel, Escher, and Bach (and their respective fields of formal logic/mathematics, representational art, and Baroque music). The constant shifting between different fields provides an enticing approach to infamously dry subjects (like set theory and logic). Sugarcoating the spoons helps the medicine go down, as each successive comparison serves to strengthen previous analogies.
After establishing the foundational insights of these figures, Hofstadter contextualizes the "primary" subjects with their contemporaries in similar fields. Computer science, AI, biology, linguistics, Zen Buddhism, and consciousness come to the fore and the book becomes much more than a series of interesting connections between three figures in history. It shifts up a level to examine the very cognitive processes by which such connections are created and what these processes might tell us about what it means to be a conscious being. In a way, the book starts examining itself; it becomes self-referential. The genius of GEB is that the self-reference enabled by "shifting" between different levels is the primary connection drawn between the work of Gödel, Escher, Bach, and all the "secondary" fields Hofstadter explores. Eventually, these explorations culminate in Hofstadter's claim that consciousness can also be explained by this self-reference and interaction between different levels of a system—what he calls a "strange loop." However, at this point there is little direct attempt to convince the reader by comparing his view to other leading theories. Indeed, it'd be difficult to condense a formal argument since the conclusion depends on intuitions built up from countless analogies.
In the end, GEB is more educational or generative than it is argumentative or conclusive. It doesn't feel like I've (consciously) changed any positions, but it does feel like I've gained a new perspective on mathematics, Baroque music, and representational art. Furthermore, this perspective may well be an important part of the Western zeitgeist in the last 100 years, as it provides connective tissue among prominent theories and advances in seemingly disparate fields. Regardless of what conclusions are reached, GEB presents an engaging methodology and a wealth of knowledge. I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in any one of the primary figures/fields.
*I say explore because I read it in three chunks over four years and because it led to just as much time outside of the book as in it. (E.g. It re-inspired a love of Bach and the Baroque. It required brushing up on some low-level math and high-level philosophy of mathematics and metaphilosophy.) This book isn't easy, but there is a lot to entice the next page turn.