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4.32 AVERAGE
4.32 AVERAGE
I remember the title more than the content, it was a tough read.
I finally finished this awful book! I honestly only finished it because I have a compulsive need to finish every book I start. I thought this book was going to be this beautiful interweaving of art and math and it was mostly just math. I think some of the connections are actually there, but the way the author expresses those connections makes them feel forced and pedantic. He seems to think he's very clever, and he probably is, but he also comes across as arrogant. He breaks up his pontificating with dialogues, while are thinly veiled pontificating by his characters. He is truly bad at creating dialogues, and those also come out feeling forced and awkward. I found a few topics enjoyable in this book, but the parts I liked were only a paragraph or two at a time, spread thinly throughout 700+ pages of overly intellectualized babbling.
One of those books that left me so happy. The essential point - strange loops - (even though of course many people claim that the book doesn't have an essential point) wasn't difficult to grasp and, once understood, didn't seem particularly novel. What is astounding is Hofstadter's erudition, and his capacity to master this erudition to produce a book that speaks not just about consciousness and our concept of "I", but also in the process, that provides us with short masterclasses and novel thoughts on painting and etching, Bach's music, Pre-Socratic paradoxes, the history of Mathematics etc.
challenging
funny
informative
slow-paced
A book which builds and builds, cleverly setting in place the scaffolding required for the reader to understand an immense but fascinating idea: Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.
For best effect, I recommend working diligently through the book and actually completing the practical exercises. When you arrive at the closing chapters, you'll be rewarded by a sudden flash of insight and understanding that binds together all the concepts the book has introduced one by one.
A challenging read, but well worth the effort.
For best effect, I recommend working diligently through the book and actually completing the practical exercises. When you arrive at the closing chapters, you'll be rewarded by a sudden flash of insight and understanding that binds together all the concepts the book has introduced one by one.
A challenging read, but well worth the effort.
My favorite book. If I had to be stuck on a desert island, this is the book I'd take with me.
Well, that's not true. I'd take a book on ship building and wilderness survival. But this is probably one of the most important books I've read.
Well, that's not true. I'd take a book on ship building and wilderness survival. But this is probably one of the most important books I've read.
I finally finished this. It only took 2.5+ years off and on. I very much recommend the first half, and all of the dialogs, which are informative and consistently entertaining. The second half (except the dialogs) drags quite a bit, so I stopped looking forward to reading it. But the first half remains a great introduction to recursion, maps, figure & ground, etc., and is still fun for someone who is already familiar with these concepts.
Dear friends and loved ones,
Please know that while I appreciate that you are thinking of me, every time someone recommends that I read GEB I like to imagine that the person has just burst into flames.
Please know that while I appreciate that you are thinking of me, every time someone recommends that I read GEB I like to imagine that the person has just burst into flames.
It's hard to be succinct in reviewing this book, given how expansive it is. I got here by way of [b:The Magician King|10079321|The Magician King (The Magicians, #2)|Lev Grossman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1316177353s/10079321.jpg|13362064]--this is one of the books Julia's read and FTB discusses, and that told me it was worth a look, apparently. I think it gets a reputation for being impossible to understand unless you're already a genius, but the thing is that it's actually really self-contained. You don't have to already know about computer systems, surrealist art, or 18th-century music, because this is meant to be a highly self-referential book. Everything that it's going to talk about it, well, talks about. You don't have to go in with specialised knowledge.
That said, there's a definite density to it and it's not the kind of book you relax into after work. There's mental labour, which is great if you want something you can really chew on, but not everyone does. And my focus definitely waned when things got math-y and Hofstadter wanted us to "play" with TNT theorems. However, these dropped off in the last quarter, and that was also where I thought the book got more interesting and started to better iterate its goals.
I couldn't stop thinking as I read about how 1979 was approximately a millennium ago in computer time. What computers can do has changed so much since this book came out, and AI systems are exponentially more complicated. We still have a lot of the same conversations about their limitations, though, and whether they can be creative without humans as a prime-mover. I'd be curious to know what this would've looked like written in 2016.
That said, there's a definite density to it and it's not the kind of book you relax into after work. There's mental labour, which is great if you want something you can really chew on, but not everyone does. And my focus definitely waned when things got math-y and Hofstadter wanted us to "play" with TNT theorems. However, these dropped off in the last quarter, and that was also where I thought the book got more interesting and started to better iterate its goals.
I couldn't stop thinking as I read about how 1979 was approximately a millennium ago in computer time. What computers can do has changed so much since this book came out, and AI systems are exponentially more complicated. We still have a lot of the same conversations about their limitations, though, and whether they can be creative without humans as a prime-mover. I'd be curious to know what this would've looked like written in 2016.
This is probably the book I've kept longest in the "currently reading" category. I started it in July 2019 and only was able to read a few pages at a time. I'll just go straight off the bat and say this book is NOT FOR EVERYBODY! It's very dense and chaotically structured. Douglas mentions how he refused to let the book be edited before or after release, even though it desperately needs editing.
The book holds many gems of wisdom, insight and creativity but it's like digging through concrete to get to them. The topics it tackles are wide ranging, from mathematics to art and genetics or music. If you are interested in the philosophical aspects of it (what is consciousness and how it relates to the world around us and science/math), I suggest you read "I Am a Strange Loop" (same author) first and come back to this one if you still want more of it.
Strange cookie this one but I overall loved it.
The book holds many gems of wisdom, insight and creativity but it's like digging through concrete to get to them. The topics it tackles are wide ranging, from mathematics to art and genetics or music. If you are interested in the philosophical aspects of it (what is consciousness and how it relates to the world around us and science/math), I suggest you read "I Am a Strange Loop" (same author) first and come back to this one if you still want more of it.
Strange cookie this one but I overall loved it.