777 pages
English language
Published Jan. 11, 1980 by Penguin.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this book applies Godel's seminal contribution to modern mathematics to the study of the human mind and the development of artificial intelligence.
This is my all-time favorite book.
It feels like you are wandering in a place full of wonders and understanding many things that seemed unrelated, while enjoying the company of the author and his quirky creations.
This book somehow manages to be a fairly light interesting read about a complex set of topics exemplified by the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. Hofstadter managed to connect all kinds of seemingly unrelated topics, and weave them together throughout the entire book
Ich habe dieses gehypte Buch voller positiver Erwartung begonnen und bin bitter enttäuscht worden. Es ist unglaublich langweilig und für mich inhaltlich total irrelavant, abgesehen davon, das ich nix verstanden habe. Ist wohl nur etwas für Mathe-Nerds. Nach 100 Seiten habe ich aufgegeben.
Les personnes dépourvues d’un (gros) minimum d’esprit logique et mathématique et/ou de curiosité intellectuelle peuvent passer leur chemin. Les autres découvriront quelques-uns des principes fondamentaux qui gouvernent le monde, de l’abstraction aride des systèmes formels à l’ADN et à l’intelligence artificielle, de Bach le compositeur à Escher le dessinateur et à Gödel le logicien, tous liés d’une manière assez inattendue.
Version longue : www.coindeweb.net/blogsanssujetprecis/index.php?post/2008/04/16/487-godel-escher-bach-de-douglas-hofstadter
This incredible book explores, through an utterly fascinating synthesis of disparate ideas, what it means to think. Gödel's theorem about the inherent incompleteness of formal systems in mathematics serves as the backbone, while the self-referential and dimension-transcending works of M.C. Escher and J. S. Bach are woven in as needed to illustrate and enrichen the narrative. Hofstadter precedes each chapter with a humorous dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise, borrowed from Lewis Carroll, and other characters, to introduce (sometimes subtly!) the concepts he exposits later in a more conventional way. Drawing on number theory, genetics, computer science, Zen Buddhism, the brain, animal behavior, artificial intelligence, art, music, language, and other topics, Hofstadter doesn't so much drive a point home as he revels in the interconnectedness of all things in his own mind. But perhaps that's the point.
The first part is hard theoretical mathematics, number theory and its relation with programming languages.
The second part is far easier to read, because it is about computer programs, and artificial intelligence. It is quite fun reading some now outdated concepts in AI, only very recently outdated thanks to DeepMind's Convolutional Neural Networks and its use in AlphaGo to beat the best humans players in the world.
Before every chapter there's a dialog with fantastic characters, with meta-commentary about the chapter.
All in all, it is not as impossible to finish as I expected =)
I only understood, at best, 60% of it, so I can't give it more than three out of five, but what I did get was fascinating. I could really have done without the dialogues "in the spirit of Lewis Carroll," though.
I should like this book. The subject matter covers things I have studied in depth and find interesting. The premise is something I mostly agree with. The writing is good enough to not get in the way and I like going on recursive tangents that may or may not add to the overall text (I'm looking at you Moby Dick). In spite of this it was not enjoyable at all.
It wasn't a matter of not getting it, I've slogged through Godel's paper and dug into technical aspects of many of the topics Hofstadter covers in the book. I even enjoyed working out the puzzles. I think it boils down to already having a similar working knowledge of the material covered and the presentation here did not provide any significant new illuminations to what I already knew. Maybe this is because the lessons from GEB have already permeated into things …
I should like this book. The subject matter covers things I have studied in depth and find interesting. The premise is something I mostly agree with. The writing is good enough to not get in the way and I like going on recursive tangents that may or may not add to the overall text (I'm looking at you Moby Dick). In spite of this it was not enjoyable at all.
It wasn't a matter of not getting it, I've slogged through Godel's paper and dug into technical aspects of many of the topics Hofstadter covers in the book. I even enjoyed working out the puzzles. I think it boils down to already having a similar working knowledge of the material covered and the presentation here did not provide any significant new illuminations to what I already knew. Maybe this is because the lessons from GEB have already permeated into things I've read that have been published since. Either way this was a long slow read with little payoff outside the Escher prints.
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 …
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.''
advice to other reviewers; if you've not read Hostader's 20th anniversary preface, please do. all he wanted/s to do i/was show how self-awareness, the sense of "I", grows out of self-reference. mathematically speaking, which H insists he is not about, observes in Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica, while trying to build a Maginot Line in math against "self-reference", lays the seeds for it's own refutation in favor of self-reference. returnreturnin as few words as possible: it's not about the substance, but the patterns.
