Gödel, Escher, Bach
“A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll”, by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
This book was so good. I was initially worried that I’d be able to finish it, but it was a page-turner.
On the front, it’s pitched as a “metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carrol” which I think, in retrospect, is an incredibly accurate description. A fugue is a musical form in which different voices enter one after another, each one a theme or melody on its own while also serving the dual purpose of a harmonic element.
The book is a fugue on all these different ideas from mathematics and logic (Gödel), art (Escher) and music (Bach) and cleverly weaves them into an “eternal golden braid”. Like a fugue, each “voice” stands on its own as an interesting introduction and exploration of a topic, but also contributes to this overarching narrative about the nature of reality and conciousness.
This is how Hofstadter puts it himself in the beginning:
(…) let me try one last time to say why I wrote this book, what it is about, and what it’s principal thesis is.
In a word, GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle? What is an “I”, and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russel Edson once wonderfully phrased it, “teetering bulbs of dread and dream” - that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts? (…)
Some of it was pretty technical, but it was the gist that mattered. The in-depth details of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, complete with “arithmoquinification” and all the stuff about “generally recursive functions” I didn’t quite grasp, or at least I did on a very surface level. I think it would be nice to come back to it again at some point in the future, with a little bit more knowledge behind me.
It’s sparked this personal interest about how seemingly simple rules can give rise to complex behaviour. The parts about the structure of the brain were especially interesting – how all this meaning comes out of the systematic firing of neurons, though that isn’t to diminish the complexity of the brain at all. This book convinced me to study AI a bit more personally, and read [[AI - A Modern Approach]]N. I’m excited to see where this goes.
But one of the best parts of the book was the form. I’d never read a book quite like it, where the book “knew” it was a book and was just so incredibly meta on levels that I’d never seen before. It all came to an amazing crescendo at the end when the author himself appeared in the dialogue, and the whole distinction between what was what and who was who got blurred.
The ending was one of many highlights. It was all presented so cleverly – the whole idea of using a conscious ant colony as a metaphor for the mind, or how in one dialogue there was a double, reversed acronym that spelt out what was going on. And it was full of jokes, like when they are discussing “organ points” in music and one of the characters just keeps repeating “Gee!” and “Gee!” over and over again.
And it definitely didn’t take itself too seriously.
And there was so much good stuff. I saw something a while ago that said reading was good because you increase the number of connections between things that you can make in your brain. There was just so much in here that I felt like could connect to so much else. Even while reading it, there was an episode of [[Bit of a Tangent]]? where they talked about the “self” or the “I”, and it was just cool to see how everything linked up. And it was fun to see that very idea explored in the last dialogue!
So in summary… a really good book. One of the best books I’ve ever read.
Chapters
This helped me whilst I was reading it:
It provides a good breakdown of each of the chapters.