4 ms·

GEB touches on the internal looping of G, E and B. There is a real idea underneath.

chubot 8y ago
Pulling out my curmudgeon hat for the sake of argument... I read GEB in college and actually bought a copy about 10 years later, to see if it resonated more. But I ended up barely re-reading it. I don't remember anything that substantive about the connections. "Internal looping" seems like a vague connection. The Godel sentence is self-referential for sure. That's a concrete and specific property. All I remember about Escher is that there is the picture of the hands drawing each other. OK, it's a great picture, and a nice analogy. Is it profound? Did I miss something besides that trivial observation? I don't recall how Bach is supposed to figure in. How is Bach self-referential or how does it display "internal looping"? (And what does that even mean?) Computer science is full of better examples than Escher or Bach, IMO. For example, C compilers written in C, which lead to the Thompson "trusting trust" attack. Compilers are mentioned in GEB, but it's done in a way that I didn't find particularly helpful (probably because I already know something about the subject.) I also experienced this with my Python compiler written in Python [1]. There were some interesting cases where knowledge of the variable names used in the compiler "leaked" into the compiled output via, I believe via the string intern table of the Python VM. [1] http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/03/04.html http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/03/04.html
- mathattack 8y ago
  Escher paintings are circular and self referential. Staircases that perpetually go up. Bach’s music is circular in terms of scales. A up to G and back to A.
  - chubot 8y ago
    But circular != self-referential. Self-referential is a deeper property. If I have 2 mutually recursive functions, that's circular. For example, most parsers have mutually recursive functions. There's nothing self-referential about them though. On the other hand, a C compiler written in C is self-referential. It confuses subject and object, which leads to some interesting paradoxes like the number for the "tab" character never appearing in the source code, as Ken Thompson points out. The Godel sentence is self-referential. It makes a claim about itself. The movie Synecdoche NY and some of Lewis Carroll's works (which figure heavily in GEB as I recall) are self-referential. The person writing the work appears in the work. Charlie Kaufman does this a lot -- the movie Adaption also has these properties. But I don't see that Bach's music is self-referential. The music doesn't write more music, or have any awareness of itself. Escher's two hands is self-referential, because it's confusing subject and object. But the staircases aren't self-referential.

Pulling out my curmudgeon hat for the sake of argument... I read GEB in college and actually bought a copy about 10 years later, to see if it resonated more. But I ended up barely re-reading it. I don't remember anything that substantive about the connections. "Internal looping" seems like a vague connection. The Godel sentence is self-referential for sure. That's a concrete and specific property. All I remember about Escher is that there is the picture of the hands drawing each other. OK, it's a great picture, and a nice analogy. Is it profound? Did I miss something besides that trivial observation? I don't recall how Bach is supposed to figure in. How is Bach self-referential or how does it display "internal looping"? (And what does that even mean?) Computer science is full of better examples than Escher or Bach, IMO. For example, C compilers written in C, which lead to the Thompson "trusting trust" attack. Compilers are mentioned in GEB, but it's done in a way that I didn't find particularly helpful (probably because I already know something about the subject.) I also experienced this with my Python compiler written in Python [1]. There were some interesting cases where knowledge of the variable names used in the compiler "leaked" into the compiled output via, I believe via the string intern table of the Python VM. [1] http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/03/04.html http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/03/04.html

mathattack 8y ago
Escher paintings are circular and self referential. Staircases that perpetually go up. Bach’s music is circular in terms of scales. A up to G and back to A.
- chubot 8y ago
  But circular != self-referential. Self-referential is a deeper property. If I have 2 mutually recursive functions, that's circular. For example, most parsers have mutually recursive functions. There's nothing self-referential about them though. On the other hand, a C compiler written in C is self-referential. It confuses subject and object, which leads to some interesting paradoxes like the number for the "tab" character never appearing in the source code, as Ken Thompson points out. The Godel sentence is self-referential. It makes a claim about itself. The movie Synecdoche NY and some of Lewis Carroll's works (which figure heavily in GEB as I recall) are self-referential. The person writing the work appears in the work. Charlie Kaufman does this a lot -- the movie Adaption also has these properties. But I don't see that Bach's music is self-referential. The music doesn't write more music, or have any awareness of itself. Escher's two hands is self-referential, because it's confusing subject and object. But the staircases aren't self-referential.