[HN Gopher] Godel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in ...
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Godel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life (2022)
Author : drcwpl
Score : 214 points
Date : 2024-02-04 18:48 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (philosophygeek.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (philosophygeek.medium.com)
| atmosx wrote:
| Somewhat related book: https://www.logicomix.com/en/index.html
| j_maffe wrote:
| Excellent book. It really gave me such an interesting vision of
| how to see the mechanics of the world.
| swozey wrote:
| I bought this when I was like 19 and going through some "i'm
| going to be a physicist" mental break and obsessing over michio
| kaku and wild theories and it made absolutely no sense to me at
| all. Do I need to try again now that I'm a grown adult?
|
| I do not know math well.
| g-w1 wrote:
| Yes, it's great. As long as you can follow logic and a bit of
| programming, you'll do fine. Just go slow (I had to re-read it
| a bunch).
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Do you remember what you were confused about? The book does not
| assume the reader has any advanced math education (from what I
| remember) - it tries to teach you the relevant math itself. It
| is long and windy though, so maybe you read through too quickly
| or got bored. You'll probably have more success with it now
| that you're more mature.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I dont recall math equations but it's been a while
| bobosha wrote:
| "if you have a copy of GEB on your shelf collecting dust and
| you've never read more than a chapter or two, dust it off and see
| how it goes this time."
|
| I will freely admit I am one of those who tried to read it
| multiple times, but couldn't grok it.
| codr7 wrote:
| So people say; I usually have a pretty high tolerance when it
| comes to difficult books, but just couldn't keep my eyes open
| trying to read this one.
|
| Maybe I should give it another try...
| lxe wrote:
| I'm also struggling with it despite having it on my bookshelf
| for a while. Not an easy read. It's cited and referred to all
| over the place, so maybe it's worth getting through it.
| hobs wrote:
| I would say give yourself license to skip some stuff, the
| parable stuff (for instance) is either super fun or a chore,
| depending on the mood you are in. A lot of the Achilles stuff
| is more akin to poetry instead of an illuminating guide.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Same. It has the exact same junior high-school giddiness of
| excitement as The Martian, another book that I just couldn't
| tonally work my way through.
|
| I don't mind books that explain concepts in fun ways, but I do
| find it jarring if I'm being treated like a child with an
| overbearing parent, telling me why I should be excited about
| something instead of just telling the story and letting me feel
| how I want to feel about it.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| I share your experience and I've tried it three times. Couldn't
| get through any of his Metamagical Themas articles in
| Scientific American, either. I thought he was in love with
| writing, not communicating, and didn't want to remove a word
| once he'd put it down.
| munificent wrote:
| There's a point in the middle where he's building a foundation
| of formal systems that's a real slog. If you push through that,
| it gets progressively more interesting.
| perrygeo wrote:
| I wanted to love this book. I understood the concepts and found
| them legitimately thought provoking - I just disliked the
| writing style. He uses elaborate metaphors, strained socratic
| dialogue, peppered with cultural references and visual cues...
| and relatively few paragraphs actually articulating the core
| ideas. I only understood Godel's incompleteness theorem when I
| looked it up elsewhere. It's like he focused entirely on the
| mystical "look how deep all this stuff is..." story and forgot
| to actually explain the subject at hand.
| leto_ii wrote:
| GEB is one of the books that as an adult I have learned to not
| care about anymore. I've unsuccessfully tried reading it a few
| times (once made it a couple of hundred pages in) and came to the
| (personal) conclusion that if I want an intellectual challenge
| I'll just directly do maths instead of reading a semi-literary
| essay about maths.
|
| Just like (some of) Joyce's work, GEB seems to me a puzzle who's
| main prize is the satisfaction of having understood it -
| obfuscation and abstruseness for their own sake.
|
| For actually understanding Godel's work I would recommend _Godel
| 's Proof_ (Nagel, Newman, somewhat ironically, prefaced by
| Hofstadter) or _Philosophies of Mathematics_ (George, Velleman).
| lisper wrote:
| I love GEB. It is a masterpiece. But it is important to realize
| before diving into it that one of the things that makes it a
| masterpiece is that it is _literary_ , that is, that it contains
| a wealth of detail that is, strictly speaking, unnecessary to the
| main point. Drawing a parallel between GEB and James Joyce's
| Ulysses is actually quite a good analogy. Indeed, Ulysses is
| almost nothing but "unnecessary detail", to the extent that it
| makes the book all but unreadable (which, I think, is no small
| part of its appeal). If you're waiting for either GEB or Ulysses
| to hurry up and get to the mother fucking point, you're going to
| be waiting a long time. In that regard, both books are good for
| techies to read because every now and then it's good to read
| something that drags you out of your comfort zone and futzes
| around in all kinds of obscure nooks and crannies before getting
| to the mother fucking point -- if indeed it ever does. Getting to
| the point can be important, but there is more to life (and
| literature).
| hobs wrote:
| And to be fair Hofstadter got the message and wrote "I Am a
| Strange Loop" for people who just want the to the point
| version.
| keithalewis wrote:
| I wonder if anyone on the Pulitzer Prize committee for GEB
| understood this was the idea he was attempting to
| communicate. There seems to be a large market for books that
| make dumb people feel smart.
| munificent wrote:
| Personally, I believe that the distinction between "unnecessary
| detail" and "the point" is mostly subjective and in the mind of
| the reader.
|
| The point of a book is to get the reader to reach a certain
| understanding. Every brain is different and while one literary
| path might get some readers to that destination, other paths
| may be required for others. But there is no singular point of
| understanding that exists solely at the end of that path. The
| _path itself_ is what builds that understanding.
|
| Part of the art of writing is covering a large enough space of
| multiple paths to get most readers there without too many of
| them getting lost.
| jahnu wrote:
| > Indeed, Ulysses is almost nothing but "unnecessary detail",
| to the extent that it makes the book all but unreadable
|
| I was always apprehensive of reading Ulysses... until I did.
| And then I read some basic analysis of it and then read it
| again and now I'm slightly baffled why people find it _that_
| difficult. Yes it's not at all typical but it's really not that
| hard and it's definitely no Finnegan's Wake. Now that's a
| challenge!
| ballooney wrote:
| I mean lots of the lore is just residual 16 year old's
| getting into reading stuff. You read l'Estranger
| (translated), decide you're an intellectual, and so have a go
| at Ulysses cos it's the hardest one and so suitable for you,
| an intellectual. The internet has been a good transmission
| vector for the sentiment.
|
| If your ideas about cooking come from watching Masterchef
| (analogously), you might treat the idea of making a beurre
| blanc as a similar act of conquest, triumph in the face of
| splitting adversity whilst a thousand-voice choir crescendos
| in the background as you whisk. But a million french
| housewives happily made it for decades having never been told
| it's impossible, and indeed knowing better that it isn't.
| jahnu wrote:
| Hah! Nice cooking analogy :)
| bdauvergne wrote:
| Everybody is cooking in France, not only housewives, it's a
| part of being French.
| Gimpei wrote:
| I love Ulysses and metafiction in general, but when people
| apply this kind of writing style to philosophy it drives me a
| bit up the wall. Philosophy at the end of the day is about
| arguing a point; it isn't about producing an aesthetic
| experience.
|
| So why would you abuse your reader by making it a pain in the
| ass to figure out what you mean? I know there are some fancy
| arguments around stretching limits of language, but none of
| them seemed all that sensible to me. The only advantage I see
| to obscurantist writing is that it makes it impossible to
| critique the philosophers work. Any critique will just be met
| by the response that you didn't fully understand the author's
| argument. The Searle/Derrida debates are a great example of
| this. The upshot is that people spend all their time debating
| what you actually mean. Which I guess is good for the
| philosopher's brand, but doesn't advance knowledge much.
|
| This isn't to say that you can't have beautiful writing in
| philosophy. I think Gaston Bachelard is a great example of both
| an elegant writer and a clear writer.
|
| That being said, people really really love GEB, so it probably
| is worth reading regardless of these misgivings. One of these
| days I'll get to it.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| Hahah the whole point of op is that there is value in not
| always having a point, but meandering, especially for
| techies. Are you set an proving him right?
| pierat wrote:
| I think it'd be more fair to say that GEB is just
| philosophical navel-gazing with the appearance of some deep
| philosophical truth... When the actual truth is they
| cheaped out on editorial staff :D
|
| I got it, and read a portion of it. It was a meandering and
| badly written mess with no point. It felt like Seinfeld in
| science-ish form.
| generic92034 wrote:
| > a meandering and badly written mess with no point
|
| Yeah, that is just typical for Pulitzer Prize winning
| books. /s
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| > Philosophy at the end of the day is about arguing a point;
| it isn't about producing an aesthetic experience. So why
| would you abuse your reader by making it a pain in the ass to
| figure out what you mean?
|
| This is a funny thing to say about a discipline that was more
| or less founded by Plato, who was notably obscurantist if not
| outright esoteric.
|
| In any case, philosophy is not always about making a point
| and there is not always a point to be made. Sometimes it's
| just asking questions.
| swayvil wrote:
| When philosophy starts with a real observation (...then
| words, then discussion), obscurantism is appropriate and
| expected. Because words can only fit a real observation
| badly.
|
| When philosophy starts with words, a clear point is
| expected, for the obvious reasons.
|
| But that's two completely different worlds.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Is it also valid to draw a comparison to Gravity's Rainbow, or
| parts 2 and 3 of The Divine Comedy? I ask, because those were
| on a tier of their own for being impenetrable (to me); I'm
| worried this will go the same way, but am otherwise intrigued.
|
| Unrelated: Does anyone know of how to get an epub etc of this?
| Unavailable through Amazon etc.
| greggsy wrote:
| There are several copies on Internet Archive.
| poncho_romero wrote:
| I would suggest against an epub. I tried finding one too,
| only to realize the formatting of the book is ill-suited for
| anything but its original printed format (it's far too
| particular for the epub format). Maybe give your local
| library a try?
| daseiner1 wrote:
| libgen.rs
| mmaunder wrote:
| Thanks. Bailed on the motherfucker for this reason and will
| have to revisit.
| Joeri wrote:
| It is funny that you bring Ulysses into it. I've tried reading
| both GEB and Ulysses multiple times and had to concede defeat
| every time somewhere between the 100 and 200 page mark. The
| same goes for the satanic verses. I suppose my mind just wants
| a book to get to the point more than it wants to get to the
| end.
| lisper wrote:
| > It is funny that you bring Ulysses into it.
|
| Actually, the original article did that. I just followed the
| author's lead here.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Well said. It won Pulizer for a reason. It's not for learning
| facts, its for thinking. GEB ponders and it's masterfully
| written.
|
| I can also recommend Metamagical Themas from Hofstadter. It's a
| collection of articles he wrote for Scientific American.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| >good for techies to read
|
| To be sure, you certainly didn't mean it this way, but for the
| sake of the poor guy who has seen GEB touted as one of these
| books that "every programmer/computer scientist/CS major has to
| read" and sees your post in the same light:
|
| You don't have to read GEB. You will be a fine techie without
| reading it. And you'll be a fine person in general without
| reading it. There is no spiritual revelation you can only get
| from GEB or some important technical knowledge that you'll get
| that you wouldn't get from a normal CS degree program. Try it
| out and see if you enjoy Hofstadter's writing - if you do, you
| might be in for a really enlightening and enjoyable experience.
| If you don't, no worries - your time is better spent elsewhere
| - there is no need to put yourself through the pain of slogging
| through a >700 page book that you don't enjoy. There are many
| other perfectly fine entry points for learning about topics in
| computer science, cognitive science, or philosophy of mind.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| I didn't read GEB. But I watched this
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92WHN-pAFCs
|
| And it's an absolutely brilliant - and very direct -
| exposition of Alan Turing's Halting theorem.
|
| (unfortunately I can't find analogues of this for many other
| related subjects)
|
| Some people are saying that GEB is too convoluted, but the
| base material absolutely doesn't need to be.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Right. And to be sure, GEB might have Godel in the name,
| but it's not really a book about Godel's incompleteness
| theorems. It mentions them, but that is not really the main
| thrust of the book. It's not a book about Godel, Escher,
| and/or Bach, really (though of course it discusses the
| ideas of these three people a lot). Hofstadter, if I recall
| correctly, even says as much (or something along these
| lines) in the preface.
|
| So of course, there are more to-the-point resources for the
| technical concepts that Hofstadter employs. It's an
| understandable misconception to have when people so often
| say GEB is a must-read for techies and when it has a name
| that includes "Godel". So remember - GEB is about
| Hofstadter trying to argue for a point about a particular
| thesis (how the mind ("I") arises from the brain), and to
| that end, he employs many different concepts (many of which
| are from computer science) and explains them poetically (at
| least, a lot of people think so). But teaching you these
| concepts is just a secondary, even tertiary, goal of his.
| If you find his writing engaging, it might be a more fun
| way to learn about that stuff - but if not, don't worry,
| GEB wasn't primarily written to teach you anyway. I'm sure
| even the biggest GEB fans will agree.
| dmazzoni wrote:
| It sounds like you're making a distinction between the
| plot and the theme.
|
| I'd argue the plot is entirely about Godel's
| incompleteness theorem. It's not just "mentioned in
| passing", the entire book is centered around a series of
| increasingly complex explanations that culminate in
| explaining the actual theorem itself.
|
| But just like a good novel is way, way more than just the
| plot, GEB is way more than just the Godel incompleteness
| theorem.
|
| Personally I didn't really find any other thesis or theme
| that compelling. However, I absolutely loved the clever
| ways in which he illustrated each concept. Others may
| have appreciated other aspects of it, and that's great
| too. Many people can enjoy the book for different
| reasons.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| I shouldn't have said "mentioned" to insinuate "mentioned
| in passing", you are right. But no, though it plays a
| central role in his argument, GEB is not about Godel's
| incompleteness theorem (I believe Hofstadter even says as
| much in the preface, and he laments that readers didn't
| get the overall point of the book - though I don't have
| my copy with me to confirm, so I might be misremembering
| exactly what he says).
|
| But anyway - you and anyone else of course are free to
| enjoy Hofstadter's explanations of Godel's incompleteness
| theorem - maybe you even think that it is the best/most
| interesting/most fun/most insightful explanation. I just
| mean to say that Hofstadter isn't writing this book
| primarily to explain technical concepts - his
| explanations are a means to an end. So someone who
| struggles to get through this book shouldn't feel bad -
| its main goal was never to be a "must-read for
| programmers" anyway.
| boznz wrote:
| In 30 years I have read about 50 pages and looked at all the
| pictures. Does that count as reading it :-)
| cout wrote:
| I have not read Ulysses but I have read other works from Joyce
| and cannot imagine comparing him to Hofstadter. I put GEB in
| the same mental box as Sophie's World or the Mr. Tompkins
| books, where story is used as a means to the end of teaching
| something to an audience that would otherwise find the material
| unpalatable.
| mcmoor wrote:
| I've heard about this book so many times and was interested to
| read it. But I know that as a non native English reader, my
| track record against reading English proses is very poor, and
| looks like lots of value of the book is exactly in the prose?
| Maybe I'll have to skip this one, unless some brave souls have
| already translated it.
| martin_balsam wrote:
| I don't know what language you speak, but GEB it's been
| translated into multiple languages during the years.
|
| I read it in Italian as a teen, the Italian edition is
| beautiful, and incredibly well translated (the book includes
| many puns and language tricks.)
| Phemist wrote:
| The Dutch translation of GEB is excellent. I think others,
| e.g. the French, are also quite good/excellent, potentially
| because Hofstadter himself was quite involved in the
| translation process. Hell, much of GEB and especially his
| later books discuss translation extentensively, so it would
| be strange if there were authorized translations of GEB that
| were somehow lacking in quality.
| dmazzoni wrote:
| I loved GEB, I read it twice and found it mind-blowing.
|
| That said, I don't think it was life-changing in the sense that
| it gave me any interesting perspective on life in any way. I
| didn't find any of the philosophies to be useful in that sense.
|
| However, what the book does do, is manage to explain an
| incredibly complex, deep mathematical theorem while using almost
| no mathematical notation. It does it all mostly through similes
| and wordplay and art, which is quite brilliant.
|
| One of the great things about the book is that even if you give
| up on the math, you can still appreciate each chapter as clever
| writing in its own right.
| labarilem wrote:
| I love this book. It definitely changed the way I think and made
| me ask important questions. Bonus: it got me listening to Bach at
| the time.
| tedheath123 wrote:
| Maybe the book went over my head but it didn't live up to my
| expectations. The book's thesis seemed to boil down to "isn't
| recursion cool, maybe it has something to do with consciousness".
| I did enjoy some of the digressions though.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| Consider it the Lisp equivalent to _whys poignant guide to
| Ruby.
| kibibu wrote:
| That is about the strongest anti-recommendation you could
| have possibly made for me.
| jameshart wrote:
| The GEB concept of 'self reference' is not the same as
| 'recursion'.
| jrflowers wrote:
| GEB is crucial reading in that if you want to appear
| intellectually superior all you have to do is sprinkle "Ho ho!
| Much like the eternal golden braid I must say!" into conversation
| and no one will call you out on it or ask you to extrapolate (or
| if in the off chance that they do, you can say _anything_ and
| still get away with it)
|
| The best response to someone bringing up GEB in casual
| conversation is to look them dead in the eye and simply say "I
| have also read that book."
|
| This will instantly create palatable tension and a change of
| topic
| huytersd wrote:
| Or you can read it and not tell anyone. This comment is a
| pretty pathetic attempt at shaming anyone who displays even a
| modicum of discourse higher than the baser level.
| Congratulations.
| kevindamm wrote:
| My favorite response is to ask deadpan if they've finished
| reading the book. There is only one appropriate answer, IYKYK.
| tibanne wrote:
| I don't know. Tell me Kevin. Damm.
| kevindamm wrote:
| Well, I don't want to give too much away but... it has
| something to do with one of the interpretations of
| RICERCAR.
| tptacek wrote:
| This is funny but GEB is also good so you wouldn't want it to
| go much further than this. Congratulations for getting there,
| now it would be great if you could focus that same energy on
| shooting down people trying to build upon or me-too this snark.
| jrflowers wrote:
| It is a good book, but it is a shame that so many pitch it as
| being a portal into a new and transcendent plane of
| understanding. Especially with it being a rather difficult
| read it leads to people trying to get more out of it than was
| in it to begin with.
|
| To quote one of my professors from back in the day: "Life is
| short and you don't have to read it if you don't want to"
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm with you. It's legit good snark; the problem is that
| it's asymptotically good. :)
| sam_goody wrote:
| There is also the issue that it takes longer to read than
| you expect it to, even when taking into account that it
| will take longer to read than expected... ;)
| The_Colonel wrote:
| This is my impression as well. Kinda similar in its "bragging
| rights" to The Art of Computer Programming.
|
| GEB was a frustrating read. I mean, it's interesting in places,
| but it's just all over the place, jumping between many
| different topics. The central theme is meant to be the strange
| loops, but it's IMHO not very interesting concept and his
| application on the cognition is just author's personal
| conjecture.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Let's be clear. No one has just read the Art of Computer
| Programming.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| Mr Knuth almost certainly has
| BirAdam wrote:
| Debatable. How much did he dictate to a ghost writer?
| comonoid wrote:
| No, he wrote it only.
| jacobolus wrote:
| It's utterly unlike TAOCP. One is a comprehensive algorithms
| reference full of (hard) technical problems. The other is an
| extended personal essay. (Neither one is worth "bragging"
| about reading in my opinion.)
|
| "Reading" all of TAOCP would take literally years of intense
| effort even if you set aside all other activity. There are a
| lot of great problems inside, and plenty of dry humor, and I
| would recommend people try to at least skim sections of TAOCP
| which seem interesting or relevant to their work, but very
| few people are going to even nominally work through the whole
| thing, and the people who might are professional scholars of
| the topic.
|
| Reading GEB can be done leisurely over the course of a few
| days or maybe weeks, depending on how much time someone
| spends reading every day. It's not quite as easy a read as a
| pulp novel or comic book, but it also doesn't take any
| inordinate amount of work to make basic sense of, or require
| any special skills or background understanding to start on.
| It's a fun book to hand to a ~13-16 year old.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| I compared the two in the sense how it's fashionable to
| have them on your bookshelf, but IMHO few people actually
| enjoy them and understand them beyond the surface level.
| jacobolus wrote:
| This discussion is evidence that some people really liked
| GEB and other people found it boring or too unfocused. It
| can't be that many people who bought it just to look cool
| on a shelf. The people who found it boring should perhaps
| try to appreciate that sometimes other people can
| genuinely like things they don't like (and vice versa I
| guess).
|
| Again, if you do any work with computer algorithms, it's
| worth checking out TAOCP at the library and skimming the
| sections relevant to your work. If you might need it as a
| reference, it's not a bad source to have at hand; I look
| things up in there maybe a few times a year for the past
| decade. Some parts are now a bit outdated in this fast-
| moving field, but it's still the best available survey
| source about some topics, and there are some nice
| explanations and a lot of great problems in there. Knuth
| is a pretty funny writer if you enjoy dry humor.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| You are absolutely right. It was a great book to hand to a
| 21 year old me.
|
| I've often read the hate on this site for this book. At
| least for me, I find the discussions and analogies to help
| me in thinking about, and eventually understanding the
| material. I contrast it with a graduate intro to Recursion
| Theory which can leave a reader feeling that they followed
| all the precise arguments but still somehow missed a lot.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >"bragging rights" to The Art of Computer Programming
|
| Or bragging rights to "The Anatomy of Lisp"!
|
| https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20.
| ..
| karmakaze wrote:
| I took the book with me on holiday and I couldn't put it down,
| almost literally reading right up until lights out each night.
| I was surprised and somewhat disappointed to be done in short
| time. The literary writing combined with the deep
| mathematical/philosophical meanings is entrancing.
|
| I don't often get to meet people IRL who have read the book and
| wish I had more opportunities to discuss it. One (of the many
| things) that stuck out to me was the idea of foreground and
| background. Prime numbers to me is background that remains when
| you construct all the composite numbers, so technically they're
| 'non-composite' lacking the property of being a product of
| distinct numbers.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| Is it possible these people are attempting to make conversation
| and link fun ideas together, rather than just trying to appear
| "smart"?
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| That's what makes it tricky: Both are possible.
| matsemann wrote:
| Do you also harass people for wanting to discuss a movie they
| just watched?
| Almondsetat wrote:
| The best response is to actually know things about Godel,
| Escher and Bach
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _palatable tension and a change of topic_
|
| When someone enthusiastically mentions something they liked and
| wanted to talk about and you immediately take a shit on it,
| it's not really a surprise that this creates "palatable
| tension" and a change of subject (and likely a longer-term
| wariness to share when talking to you). If you really dislike
| discussing related topics, there are surely less condescending
| ways of expressing that.
| greggsy wrote:
| They're implying that many people use it as a way to take
| some moral high ground in a conversation, not knowing that
| others might also have acquired this 'intellectual power'.
| jacobolus wrote:
| My experience is that when faced with what seems at first
| like pseudo-intellectual nonsense, it's usually more
| productive to either explicitly say I don't feel like
| discussing the topic, or else try to get someone into a
| serious conversation about the details, instead of trying
| to insult or shame the other person. Sometimes people are
| just bad at smalltalk / earnestly oblivious to the
| impression they leave / trying hard to impress for whatever
| reason, and aren't really trying to be pretentious even if
| they initially come across that way. YMMV.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| What if they counter with "do you like apples?"
| jrflowers wrote:
| I offer them an apple slice from the bag that I carry around
| in my pocket
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| GEB is in my top three as well. But looking back at it and the
| other important books in my life, it seems that it matters very
| much when I read them, and where I was at the time. For example,
| the Lord of the Rings was hugely influential for me, in part
| because I bought it (in one volume paperback) with the sales of
| my first program, and read it in school (also during our English
| lessons, the good teacher let me do that when she saw what I was
| reading).
| svat wrote:
| The most valuable thing about GEB for me was how self-indulgent
| it is. The book is entirely Hofstadter having fun: all those
| tricky dialogues, acrostics, puns where the setup and payoff are
| hundreds of pages apart, the marrying of form and content, just
| the overall tone of excited sharing.... Hofstadter has put a lot
| of himself into it--it's a deeply personal book--and it was
| revealing to me to see that one's emotions don't have to be set
| aside when writing, nor is it necessary for the kinds of feelings
| that mathematics evokes to be "translated" into more familiar
| ones.
|
| (Edit: As an aside, Hofstadter's translation of Pushkin's _Eugene
| Onegin_ is similarly self-indulgent, and a joy to read. Of course
| one ought to read a couple of other translations first and keep
| them nearby, to become familiar with the content, but in terms of
| sheer wordplay and outrageous rhymes, it tops anything.) (Edit 2:
| Ha, a search reveals I posted a similar comment a little over a
| year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32830008
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32878471)
| thr0waway001 wrote:
| It's the coolest looking book I own that I can't read cause I'm
| too dumb to understand even having taken some university math
| courses. lol
| enriquto wrote:
| I loved the dialogues and the poems, with their various
| translations. The discussio around the "musical offering" is
| incredible, and helped me learn to appreciate music (not only
| Bach). This is one of my favourite books!
|
| The math was insufferable, however. And I say that as a
| mathematician and programmer... I wonder if musicians and poetry
| translators will find "their" parts correspondingly unbearable?
| cjfd wrote:
| I loved this book when I was young. Like 16 years old or so. I am
| still very interested in things like formal systems and automated
| theorem proving and that started with this book. However, when I
| now look at the main idea of the book I find it quite
| cringeworthy, because, besides when he is speaking about real
| mathematics and science, much of it is very speculative and
| probably just false. At best it can be thought provoking, but I
| think it is just not very nice to immediately answer the some
| very real questions with highly speculative answers. It snared up
| the admiration of my 16-year-old self pretty effectively, though.
| digitcatphd wrote:
| MIT Course on GEB: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lWZ2Bz0tS-s
| yreg wrote:
| Are you supposed to watch the lectures after reading the
| chapters (which ones?) or how does it work?
| jiriro wrote:
| Oh, this is brilliant! Thanks for sharing.
|
| This is a very good introduction to the book.
|
| The goal of the book/lecture is to show how meaning emerges
| from not-meaning. So cool!:-)
|
| Also at the end of the lecture 1 he says that the book was
| written like Bach's works - like a piece of music with theme,
| repetitions, inversions etc.
|
| Going to read it asap:))
| cupcakecommons wrote:
| Great synopsis of the book and an excellent synthesis of its
| real-world implications.
| peignoir wrote:
| yeah emergence and strange loops are weird :)
| syllablehq wrote:
| This book played an important role in pushing me into a career in
| software. During the recession in 2009, I lost my industrial
| design job. And GEB started me down a rabbit hole learning more
| and more about software and learning to code. That turned into a
| great software career. I've also read hacker news just about
| every day since.
| dave1010uk wrote:
| > I had a secondary goal in the back of my head... if you have a
| copy of GEB on your shelf collecting dust and you've never read
| more than a chapter or two, dust it off and see how it goes this
| time.
|
| Dusted it off and after only a few pages, it's already a
| completely different read to when I read (a fraction of) it a
| decade or so ago.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| I don't have my copy with me right now, so perhaps I'm
| misremembering, but I recall Hofstadter explaining in the preface
| of my copy that the point of his book was how the mind -
| consciousness - could arise from the brain (or something like
| that). I myself failed to get past the ~100 page mark (he went in
| depth explaining topics that I was already familiar with from
| other sources, which bored me. And I didn't really find the
| connections to art and music that insightful or interesting - but
| maybe I'm just too uptight). My understanding from skimming the
| book and reading some of Hofstadter's other works (including his
| response to Searle's "Minds, brains and programs" article) is
| that the book is trying to establish how complexity can emerge in
| systems with many simple moving parts via recursion (or something
| like that) in different scenarios, suggesting that this is how
| consciousness emerges from a complex web of neurons (the brain).
|
| This seems a little wishy-washy to me. I don't see this as a good
| counterargument against Searle's argument that syntaxx alone is
| not enough to give rise to semantics. (I find Dennett's argument
| about intuition pumps a more convincing counterargument.) Maybe
| my understanding of Hofstadter's argument is too simplistic - I'm
| happy to be educated (I wasn't able to make it through even half
| of GEB after all).
|
| And of course, that's not to say that GEB isn't a valuable book -
| it seems like most readers really enjoy it and learn a lot, even
| if they don't much care for the ultimate cognitive
| science/philosophy of mind position Hofstadter is trying to
| defend.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > it seems like most readers really enjoy it and learn a lot,
|
| I think it's one of those books which most people actually
| don't enjoy that much, but don't want to admit it, because it
| has such an intellectual aura around it.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I found this book dull, uninteresting and pretentious. Whatever
| it tried to say in what 1000 pages could have been said in 200.
| People will probably recommend it highly in this thread, but here
| is a vote to just leave it alone. It's just not good if you like
| pop sci but don't like pretentious fluff around it. It's the
| least inspiring and mind-blowing book I ever read. This could be
| related to having read a lot on the topics in the past so the
| subject matter was familiar, and having _zero_ tolerance for the
| type of writing in it.
| kleiba wrote:
| De gustibus non est disputandum.
| gordon_freeman wrote:
| "In matters of taste, there can be no disputes."
| pierat wrote:
| Go ahead, eat the book and let us know it tastes!
| Almondsetat wrote:
| De gustibus non disputandum est
| booleandilemma wrote:
| What's the most inspiring and mind-blowing book you've ever
| read?
| tootie wrote:
| Not OP, but as someone who found GEB pretentious, I think the
| most mind-blowing books I have read were probably Kurt
| Vonnegut. Mother Night and Timequake probably at the top.
| greggsy wrote:
| I gave it a good hard go, but came to the same conclusion. It
| might (should?) have been razored to half the size by a more
| judicious publisher.
| dmazzoni wrote:
| For those of us who enjoyed the book, that'd be removing the
| best part.
|
| For me this was one of those books that was more about the
| journey than the destination.
|
| 2001: A Space Odyssey could easily be trimmed to 25 minutes
| or less if all you care about is the plot. But should it?
| qarl wrote:
| > This could be related to having read a lot on the topics in
| the past so the subject matter was familiar
|
| I think you've hit the nail on the head. For many people, this
| book is their first encounter with much of this material (as it
| was for me, so long ago.)
|
| For you, it's like reading a tour guide of your home city.
| You're not the intended audience.
| pierat wrote:
| Well you just don't understand it! /snark
|
| That's the usual refrain around hyper-preventious navel gazer
| books. The moment you criticize, your intellect is up for
| question, because "you didn't understand it".
|
| This form of logical fallacy is the worst in economics and
| philosophy.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| And to this I want to quote the first comment of this thread
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17461506 "Why I Don't Love
| Godel, Escher, Bach"
|
| > stuntkite on July 5, 2018 | flag| favorite | next [-]
|
| > I'd owned this book for many years and had a similar
| experience to OP. But one day someone gave me I am a Strange
| Loop, which I started reading and enjoyed way more. After
| getting in a little bit Hofstadter makes some apologies for GEB
| saying it was the sum of work of a very young person. I think
| he was 24? I think it's pretty incredible considering his age.
| The things that lead him to thinking critically about
| consciousness because of his disabled sister I found to be
| something that changed not only how I interacted with people
| that were differently abled, but also changed how I saw my own
| disabilities. Sure it's more than a bit full of itself, but I
| can't for the life of me think how I would edit it any
| differently. It's honest from the place he was standing. With a
| lot of thought, a desire to share, and a perspective that no
| one else could just stumble on. IMO, it really does kind of
| have to be what it is.
|
| > So, I decided to put down IAASL and try to really get through
| GEB first.. like for real this time... and found an Open
| Courseware[0] on the book to follow hoping that would help me
| really cut through it. It did! The trick that did it for me was
| the prof's suggestion that you just skip the first 300 or so
| pages and he picked up from there.
|
| > I'd thumbed through it and much like op had "looked" at every
| page, but once I skipped the first 300 and followed along with
| the course, it was like butter. There is something funny about
| all the intro dialogs that can fatigue by the time you get to
| the meat.
|
| > That said, I really enjoyed his reflection on GEB in IAASL
| and enjoyed the read of IAASL a lot more. Regardless of what
| you think about what Hofstadter proposes, I think his
| contribution to critical exploration of the consciousness is
| artful and invaluable. I think it's fun, compassionate, and
| beautiful, and it really changed how I see myself and my
| environment.
|
| > It sticks with me and I think about it a lot and it makes me
| happy to share it with people.
|
| > [0] https://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/humanities-and-social-
| scienc...
| jacobolus wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, Hofstadter was 34 (and 4 years out of
| physics grad school) when GEB was published.
| wirrbel wrote:
| I think u never made it past the first 300 pages and now I
| wonder whether I should try again. I also wonder what
| happened to my copy of the book...
| tptacek wrote:
| Skipping the first several hundred pages is I think a really
| good trick for people already familiar with and jaded by the
| subject matter.
| tootie wrote:
| I feel exactly the same. It was like 1000 pages of patting
| himself on the back for being clever. I certainly didn't learn
| anything and there was very little art to his writing.
| tptacek wrote:
| If you're not a reading-for-pleasure person, or GEB's topics
| just aren't your thing, you're not going to like the book. It's
| not a technical volume; it's not something you read for skills
| acquisition.
| joshxyz wrote:
| same sentiments. i was on 10th page and i was chuckling because
| i still got no idea what these geeks are talking about.
| definitely the day i realized im not that smart, too. haha.
| zw123456 wrote:
| When I was working on m Masters degree in Electrical Engineering
| way back in 1978, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth :) I had a prof
| who was really amazing, he was a Comp Sci prof and he gave me a
| copy of GEB and it changed my life. OK, I'm probably overstating
| a bit, but that first edition copy, it's one of my prized
| possessions. Even to this day, every once in a while I pull it
| out and re-read a chapter.
| calf wrote:
| Godel did not argue or show "there are fundamental epistemic
| limits to the universe". The universe is not a formal axiomatic
| system.
|
| This repeats an very old, popular pop-philosophy misconception
| about Godel's theorems and GEB seems to have done nothing to help
| with this category error.
| samatman wrote:
| Whether or not the universe is (or, to split hairs, may be
| exactly expressed as) a formal axiomatic system, was very much
| an open question, one which Godel helped answer conclusively in
| the negative.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Couldn't really make it through GEB. I like literary or
| maximalist fiction like Pynchon despite not being smart enough to
| understand most of it, so it wasn't the style, and I like out
| there scientific speculation like The Bicameral Mind so it wasn't
| that either.
|
| Most of GEB just has this weird vibe of Hofstadter trying to come
| off as smart and trying way too hard. It's not that the ideas in
| the book are bad but they're also not really that interesting or
| deep or at least weird enough to justify all the flourish around
| it. It's very similar to Infinite Jest which to me also felt like
| the "young, overeducated man namedrops everything he knows
| without saying much" kind of thing.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| I'm going to try and explain why it made a difference in my life
| as briefly as I can.
|
| I read it in the early 90s as a teenager at a community college
| in the suburbs, along with the Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene,
| at a point in my life when I was struggling with having a lot of
| doubt about Catholicism, and the _one_ thing that was keeping me
| from just giving up on religion entirely was that I just couldn't
| understand how the experience of _being_ could be anything but a
| spiritual soul, and those two books gave me the intellectual
| tools to basically completely rebuild my entire conception of
| what and who I was -- which is to say that I could finally see
| consciousness as the an emergent property of ordinary matter, and
| the relationship between consciousness and computation.
|
| It's an experience you can only have if you read the right books
| at the right time in your life. You can only be exposed to any
| particular idea for the first time once in your life, and if they
| ideas in those books are not new to you, I'm sure you'll find GEB
| pretentious and ponderous or whatever, but for me it was like
| fireworks going off on every page. I read it and reread it and
| took notes on it and used it as a launching point for more
| reading for years afterwards.
|
| edit with some extra thoughts: Keep in mind this book was written
| in 1979, when vanishingly few people had access to computers, let
| alone the internet. There was no wikipedia you could go to to
| scratch an itch about some topic. GEB is encyclopedic in scope
| and meandering because it _had to be_, he couldn't expect an
| audience who were familiar with _computers_ let alone artificial
| intelligence and set theory. It's really extraordinary that it's
| accessible as it is, given the breadth that it covered.
|
| Today, given the advances in all the things he was talking about,
| I would think it's mostly interesting to read for historical
| reasons.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| For me, it was the opposite. Reading Shadows of the Mind after
| GEB led me to finally see consciousness is NOT an emergent
| property of ordinary matter.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I find Penrose's argument uncompelling: he doesn't see how
| ordinary physics could result in the sensation of beingness
| and experience, and we don't really understand quantum
| mechanics, therefore quantum mechanics is responsible for
| consciousness. (obviously, his book works on it for 500 pages
| so my summary is a parody, but that was the gist as far as I
| can remember)
| bbor wrote:
| Or one could speculate that consciousness arises from as-
| yet-undiscovered noncomputable laws of quantum gravity
| operating within brain structures called microtubules, as
| Sir Roger Penrose did in his 1994 book *Shadows of the
| Mind*
|
| Heh yeah doesn't seem great. I think it's you nailed it.
| This is from one of the reviews posted above
| knightoffaith wrote:
| You may want to read
| https://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/finite.html. Perhaps
| also https://iep.utm.edu/lp-argue/.
|
| The Lucas-Penrose argument is not generally accepted among
| philosophers. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean it
| fails - truth isn't a popularity contest - but it does
| indicate there are some subtleties at play here; it's not so
| obvious Emperor of the Mind/Shadows of the Mind succeeds in
| its argument.
| anon291 wrote:
| I haven't read the book but I believe many people confuse
| consciousness with qualia.
|
| I believe Hofstadter does as well and he's become critical of
| his earlier work.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| Every book about the nature of consciousness has problems.
| It's not a solved problem. For me it wasn't the details but
| just laying out the landscape and I could see how to get
| there from here, if that makes sense.
| bbor wrote:
| Beautifully put! I recommend "Kants System of Perspectives"
| by Palmquist, it's free online, short/skimmable, and
| explains in detail how Kant (200y ago!) was trying to do
| exactly this; acknowledge the unknowable parts of the
| problem, and instead focus on reasoning out the "landscape"
| or structure of it
| et1337 wrote:
| GEB is like Git. Git is fundamentally a DAG, that's it. It's
| beautiful. But it's expressed via a bunch of tortured confusing
| words like refspecs, detached heads, tree-ish's, and on and on.
|
| GEB is a love letter to some beautiful elegant ideas, but it's
| expressed via a confusing assortment of record players,
| tortoises, and puns. One StackOverflow answer made the
| incompleteness theorem more clear to me than this whole book.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Command+F "chess"
|
| Sweeping that one under the rug, are we?
| rmu09 wrote:
| It's a long time since I last read the book but I remember that
| in a sense the book ends at about 50%, that is a meta discussion
| in the book says it ends now and the rest that's following is a
| redundant. Will have to re-read it to find that location again...
| StopTheTechies wrote:
| The book ostensibly lacks Wittgenstein and/or Chomsky. Not much
| point in discussing the 20th century without them....
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| I gave up at this point: "We might describe the way that planets
| fly around stars as isomorphic to the way that electrons fly
| around nuclei."
|
| We might, but we'd be mistaken.
|
| Why bring incredibly complex topics into a general discussion
| unnecessarily? Why not even bother googling a correct explanation
| of those topics first? (I could guess why, but I don't want to
| ruin the article with spoilers.)
| hackandthink wrote:
| Another philosopher about Godel:
|
| The Collapse of the Hilbert Program: A Variation on the Godelian
| Theme* Saul A. Kripke
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.08346
| thinkingemote wrote:
| I've not read the book so am looking at the comments here for
| reasons why I should. The majority seem to be something like "I
| read it when younger and it was like a powerful transformational
| psychedelic experience at a one day festival".
|
| It is meaningful, reading it is something that is shared with
| others, but it is an event in time and is unrepeatable, and it's
| somehow unable to be fully communicated about to others who were
| not there.
|
| For some it seems foundational because it was encountered at a
| certain time in their life without really elucidating how their
| life actually changed (it's understandable because if it was done
| at their start of their life.)
|
| Is this accurate?
| tom_ wrote:
| Why not just read it? You can always give up halfway through if
| you get bored.
|
| I quite enjoyed it, but there's something of the Young Adult
| Reader about it that sat ill with me. One of those books where
| (once I'd read it) I found myself slightly wary of anybody that
| would bring it up. Same goes for Atlas Shrugged, and Zen and
| the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
|
| The dice man book is played too clearly for laughs IMO, but
| perhaps that one as well.
| bbor wrote:
| I think it's an incredibly important book to read if you're
| interested in building software systems that mimic the human
| mind.
| auggierose wrote:
| > That's a lovely fantasy, but Godel shows that there are
| fundamental epistemic limits to the universe, things that no
| genius will help us to know, no alien race could teach us, no
| machine could be built to solve, and no new kinds of mathematics
| will uncover.
|
| That's not quite true. As an example, take differential calculus.
| It is hard to see how that would have been an idea to arrive at
| automatically by an algorithm, but a few geniuses
| (Newton/Leibniz) got there anyway. Similarly, even when a theorem
| doesn't follow from the usual axioms (and neither does its
| negation), maybe another genius comes along with an axiom that is
| quite obvious, and allows us to prove the theorem (just like
| peano axioms are axioms we would just accept as being obvious).
|
| So it is not that we cannot know everything, it's just that there
| is no guarantee and no obvious way of doing so.
| corysama wrote:
| But, that's not what Godel proved. Not that things are hard, or
| non-obvious. But, that there are actual limits we won't be able
| to get past regardless of how much time and cleverness we apply
| to them. The limits might be very large. Might be unlimited for
| practical purposes. But, they are there waiting for us.
|
| I don't understand his theorems well enough to pretend to
| explain them to this audience. But, this is my understanding of
| them.
| anthk wrote:
| The Greeks were very close to Calculus.
| tootallgavin wrote:
| G.E.B is hegelian philosophy without one mention to Hegel and
| more mechanic than organic
|
| Anyone read the Phenomenology of Spirit and notice the same
| ideas?
| dventimi wrote:
| _After 742 pages and even after having written the paragraphs
| above, I still struggle with a simple answer to the question:
| "What is this book about?" The best I can come up with is that
| GEB equips you with mental models to contemplate philosophy._
|
| No thanks. I'm not reading a book that even its fans can't
| adequately explain.
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