17 ms·

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 wa

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-sciences/godel-escher-bach/ https://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/humanities-and-social-scienc...

fao_ 8y ago
This. 100 times, this. GEB is an alright book, but nobody I know has actually managed to finish it. I Am A Strange Loop discusses the exact same thing, but does so with the experience of years of writing in metaphor, and more importantly, entirely in metaphor. All of the metaphors are well-crafted in that they are both a pleasure to imagine, can be recalled rather easily, and accurately map to what the author is trying to express. IAASL also distills the main thesis of GEB, so it is not only more expressive but much more to-the-point (Which I, too think is the main problem with GEB as a book). I do not hesitate to recommend -- for all those that struggled with GEB, or all those that wish to read GEB, pick up a copy of IAASL, and then if you still wish to read GEB, try it after reading IAASL.
- stuntkite 8y ago
  Sometimes when my girlfriend and I are laying in bed after a long day and just aren't quite ready to unplug and sleep, we take turns reading randomly selected sections from IAASL. There's a couple other books in the rotation, but it's a fun one. The mini theater of it becomes kind of self referential as we try to mess up how the other person feels about the reality being thrown at them. You really can't do that with GEB. It's still valuable, but I think Hofstadter covers the issues with GEB himself just fine so I won't pick it apart. But yeah, we just pick a section at random and try to sell it to each other with a read. Sometimes we do kind of a theatrical Exquisite Corpse paragraph to paragraph. It's silly, but something about not only the content, but the context of trying to mess up each other's consciousness with the read is not only fun but after 5 minutes you're having a laugh and forget about whatever you cared about all day. Turtles all the way down. Lol. I know it's dumb, but I just wanted to share. Works ok with Garfield comics too.
  - kej 8y ago
    I'm curious what the other books in the rotation are, if you don't mind sharing.
  - core-questions 8y ago
    You're a lucky person to have a partner who appreciates this!
    - gordo4 8y ago
      Yeah I'm jealous too
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  > nobody I know has actually managed to finish it Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by "finish it". Like the blog post guy says, he "looked at every page", but he's not sure he actually absorbed everything about it there was to absorb.
- nabla9 8y ago
zerr 8y ago
Can you be more specific - exactly from what page should one start reading GEB?
- tclancy 8y ago
  You would have to know which printing to be specific about.
- stuntkite 8y ago
  It's been about 2 years I think since I did that. Skip the Socratic dialogs basically. I think the course I linked is the same one I went through. He covers it in the first video. Also once you get through the other parts, the Socratic discussions are easy to come back to. You just don't end up in nowhere taxed with his presentation before you really find the book.
  - stan_rogers 8y ago
    Well, if you forget about the fact that Aunt Hillary is the thesis, I suppose.
  - rspeer 8y ago
    Wow, I would recommend exactly the opposite. If you wanted a dry statement of Hofstadter's philosophy, you could read I Am A Strange Loop, but GEB is remarkable for its form, including the dialogues.
    - stuntkite 8y ago
      Eh, worked for me! YMMV. I couldn't do the dialogs until I got through the rest. I also enjoyed IAASL a bit more than I enjoyed GEB. Definitely not saying what helped me figure the book out is what everyone should do.
      - rspeer 8y ago
        I guess this just goes to show there's a variety of reasons people enjoy Hofstadter's work. Hofstadter, introducing IAASL, said something like: "I wrote this book because people got so distracted by the form of GEB that they didn't get the point I was making." My reaction: "I understood the point, I just didn't care about it as much as everything else that was happening in GEB." Kind of similar to my appreciation of Bach himself, in fact. The content of Bach's compositions is frequently about praising God, which has no particular relevance to me. But the form and aesthetics of Bach are wonderful.
code_duck 8y ago
I read this book when I was a kid and frequently back then, I was not concerned with reading books from beginning to end. I’d start in the beginning, skip to the middle if it got boring, skip to the end if I wanted to kill a cliffhanger, then go back and read everything in between, or eventually restart from the beginning. So this is how I read GEB. I think I never would have gotten through it from start-to-finish.
- stuntkite 8y ago
  It took me too long to figure out that coming into a dense tome can be a dance. You can move around to get an idea, pick out what interests, take a dive, then really do a contextual exploration. Found this after many years of sort of doing something similar without knowing it was a thing. It honestly felt like cheating sometimes for some reason? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
nabla9 8y ago
> think he was 24? I think it's pretty incredible considering his age. This makes sense. I read the book at age of 20 or so, and it made me to change my life and change my career path. It's very playful, it informs, connects and educates. I think older and more cynical me might not have enjoyed it so much. I think "Metamagical Themes" and the "Fluid concepts and analogies" are his best books although GEP had the largest impact on me. They are more refined explorations of ideas. The value of Hofstader's life work is his single minded exploration of one of the hardest problems in cognitive science. Unlike conventional AI/ML research he is tackling the problem beyond the reach of the state of the art and refusing to pick easier problems to solve even when he can't make progress. Hofstader's main proposition is that analogy making is the core of human cognition. He has made repeated attempts to pin it down into something that is formal using toy examples and programs (copycat, letter spirit). I think his approach has been very insightful even if nothing comes out of it. In my opinion the "Fluid concepts and analogies" is the culmination of his work. GEB and "Metamagical Themeas" are the predule, what came afterwards is more like prose and and maybe reflection of his personal tragedy.
- Angostura 8y ago
  > Metamagical Themes It's Metamagica Themas, I think - an anagram of 'Mathematical Games'; the Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American which proceeded it. A lovely book.
  - zazen 8y ago
    I was briefly very confused until I figured out you were correcting Themes to Themas, and the dropped "l" was just an accident!
    - Angostura 8y ago
      If you were only briefly confused, I congratulate you - it would have confused the heck out of me for much longer.
  - lisper 8y ago
    > Metamagica Themas Metamagical Themas (You left out the L.)
ramblerman 8y ago
> I think he was 24? 27, but equally impressive nonetheless
- stuntkite 8y ago
  Definitely. Thanks for the clarification! I honestly think it's kind of an important feature of the book. Since it's about the evolution of one's consciousness. At least for me being able to place how old he was as he found himself making the thing helps the parts that can feel sort of strange have the right contextual... extrusion? I recall what it was like to be in my mid 20s, I was thinking a lot about what it meant to be alive and people started suddenly around 25 treating me like what I thought was an adult. The content of the book being about the procession of consciousness and all, yeah, it's a different book if you know he's 27 than if you think he's 60.
greggarious 8y ago
Thanks for sharing this course, very interesting. I wish HN had an easy way to save comments like Reddit, but this reply should do the trick :)
- js2 8y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=greggarious https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=greggarious has your upvoted and favorited comments and stories. (Your favorites are public, your votes private.)
  - greggarious 8y ago
    Thanks, that is useful but I upvote lots of stuff so a separate saved list can also be useful :) For now, I have a bookmarks folder for stuff like this.
    - dang 8y ago
      The 'favorites' feature is a saved list. It's not widely used. Maybe we should promote it, or maybe get rid of it.
      - mindcrime 8y ago
        My humble suggestion(s) to make "favorites" more useful (and hopefully more used): 1. add the ability to "favorite" from the front page. I rarely "favorite" anything, because I grew accustomed to using "upvote" as the mechanism to save stories. I would switch, but that extra little bit of friction of needing to click through first, means I stick with my old habit. 2. Add "favorite" for comments as well. 3. (maybe) - consider renaming "favorite" to "save"? Possibly people who are used to seeing the "save" link on Reddit would find that more intuitive.
        js2 8y ago
        You can favorite comments but you have to click their timestamp first. It's really hidden. I think most people don't know about the feature. dang: if you get rid of it please don't do so w/o notice so that those of us who do use it can export the links first.
mathattack 8y ago
I appreciate the context. I read the first 150 or so pages about 20 years ago and gave up. (Had the same reaction to Don Quixote) I enjoyed the links between disparate topics but the style got to be much. I’m convinced to pick it back up.
chasing 8y ago
The internet says Hofstadter was born in 1945 and GED was published in 1979. ~34 years later?
- stuntkite 8y ago
  Sounds about right? What's your point? If you're trying to extrapolate his age from the publishing, someone below corrected me. He was 27 when he wrote it. A few years between writing and publishing the first edition lines up.
  - chasing 8y ago
    You said 24. That sounded very young. So I looked. No point beyond that. T’wasn’t an attack.
  - lwerdna 8y ago
    You posted something inaccurate and chasing offered a correction. Instead of e-pretending to miss the point, accept the correction as you did with ramblerman.
vanderZwan 8y ago
> 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. Thank you for sharing your experience, I may have to give `I am a Strange Loop` a try after all, and do the skip-300-pages trick with GEB. I've tried to get through it multiple times, but I never managed to get far into the later chapters without literally falling asleep. I do not blame on the book; it's likely a consequence of my ADD. However, a significant portion of my friends did manage to get through it, and the summaries and explanations they have given of it were very inspiring. Another reason for me to conclude that it's not the book, but me ;) Perhaps interestingly, I typically have no trouble with reading long, dense books. One of my favourite books ever is "The Master & His Emissary", an incredibly flawed but also very inspiring tome mixing loose interpretations of brain science, art history and philosophy (the best way to deal with its flaws is to approach any "scientific" argument as a philosophical line of reasoning inspired by a layman's (mis)interpretation of the underlying science, but that it's the reasoning itself that matters). I wonder if the difference in writing styles between TM&HE and GEB could tell us something about what kind of stimuli an ADHD person does and does not respond to?
- stuntkite 8y ago
  I also live with ADHD. I think that's maybe why the dialogs at the beginning were so impenetrable to me without context. They are important and do a great job of illustrating what he's getting to, but for me it just felt like reading nonsense until I had some context about why they were exploring. I found myself in my initial readings not just bored but kind of offended by how wanky they were. Once I got a better understanding of what he was trying to say, I could see the weave of the thing and even have a few laughs along the way.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - vanderZwan 8y ago
    > I also live with ADHD. I wonder if you would like McGilchrist's book then. It's full of associations and drawing lines between seemingly unrelated things, and with sentences containing more than seven comma's not being uncommon.
burger_moon 8y ago
This is interesting, I picked up GEB a while ago and never finished. Got to page 400 (I just checked because it's sitting next to me). I was fatigued from reading the same book for so long, it didn't get boring but it's not an easy read so I found I couldn't read it before bed otherwise I'd have to reread pages for it to sink in. That means I couldn't spend as much time reading it as I could other books which is part of why the fatigue set in I think. I'm going to try this mit course, I think will help motivate me to get through the rest of the book finally.
xrd 8y ago
Terrific comment on your path to getting more from this book. I just purchased IAASL and am going to review the OCW link. This kind of discussion is so valuable in getting through books like GEB which can be very challenging and require starts and stops.
throw7 8y ago
Thanks for this info. I've attempted and put down geb about 3 times never getting too far. The stories were just childish to me.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- lolikoisuru 8y ago
  I recently started reading the book and when I got to the first dialog part I got incredibly annoyed at how childish and unnatural the writing was. I've yet to see why people think this book is so life changing.
mirimir 8y ago
Same here. I read GEB in grad school, as a distraction from the hassles of my thesis work. And I skipped over parts that mystified me. But then, many years later, I read IAASL. And then reread GEB. Which I could then appreciate much better.
vadansky 8y ago
Thanks for the OCW link, would you happen to have all the lectures saved? Video for lecture 6 and 7 are missing.
theNJR 8y ago
Do you literally mean skip to page 300 and begin?
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  I would assume the idea is to find a chapter or section start around that point. Maybe Chapter X, "Levels of Description, and Computer Systems" on page 285. Or Chapter XI, "Brains and Thoughts" on 337.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

fao_ 8y ago

This. 100 times, this. GEB is an alright book, but nobody I know has actually managed to finish it. I Am A Strange Loop discusses the exact same thing, but does so with the experience of years of writing in metaphor, and more importantly, entirely in metaphor. All of the metaphors are well-crafted in that they are both a pleasure to imagine, can be recalled rather easily, and accurately map to what the author is trying to express. IAASL also distills the main thesis of GEB, so it is not only more expressive but much more to-the-point (Which I, too think is the main problem with GEB as a book). I do not hesitate to recommend -- for all those that struggled with GEB, or all those that wish to read GEB, pick up a copy of IAASL, and then if you still wish to read GEB, try it after reading IAASL.

stuntkite 8y ago
Sometimes when my girlfriend and I are laying in bed after a long day and just aren't quite ready to unplug and sleep, we take turns reading randomly selected sections from IAASL. There's a couple other books in the rotation, but it's a fun one. The mini theater of it becomes kind of self referential as we try to mess up how the other person feels about the reality being thrown at them. You really can't do that with GEB. It's still valuable, but I think Hofstadter covers the issues with GEB himself just fine so I won't pick it apart. But yeah, we just pick a section at random and try to sell it to each other with a read. Sometimes we do kind of a theatrical Exquisite Corpse paragraph to paragraph. It's silly, but something about not only the content, but the context of trying to mess up each other's consciousness with the read is not only fun but after 5 minutes you're having a laugh and forget about whatever you cared about all day. Turtles all the way down. Lol. I know it's dumb, but I just wanted to share. Works ok with Garfield comics too.
- kej 8y ago
  I'm curious what the other books in the rotation are, if you don't mind sharing.
- core-questions 8y ago
  You're a lucky person to have a partner who appreciates this!
  - gordo4 8y ago
    Yeah I'm jealous too
commandlinefan 8y ago
> nobody I know has actually managed to finish it Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by "finish it". Like the blog post guy says, he "looked at every page", but he's not sure he actually absorbed everything about it there was to absorb.
nabla9 8y ago

zerr 8y ago

Can you be more specific - exactly from what page should one start reading GEB?

tclancy 8y ago
You would have to know which printing to be specific about.
stuntkite 8y ago
It's been about 2 years I think since I did that. Skip the Socratic dialogs basically. I think the course I linked is the same one I went through. He covers it in the first video. Also once you get through the other parts, the Socratic discussions are easy to come back to. You just don't end up in nowhere taxed with his presentation before you really find the book.
- stan_rogers 8y ago
  Well, if you forget about the fact that Aunt Hillary is the thesis, I suppose.
- rspeer 8y ago
  Wow, I would recommend exactly the opposite. If you wanted a dry statement of Hofstadter's philosophy, you could read I Am A Strange Loop, but GEB is remarkable for its form, including the dialogues.
  - stuntkite 8y ago
    Eh, worked for me! YMMV. I couldn't do the dialogs until I got through the rest. I also enjoyed IAASL a bit more than I enjoyed GEB. Definitely not saying what helped me figure the book out is what everyone should do.
    - rspeer 8y ago
      I guess this just goes to show there's a variety of reasons people enjoy Hofstadter's work. Hofstadter, introducing IAASL, said something like: "I wrote this book because people got so distracted by the form of GEB that they didn't get the point I was making." My reaction: "I understood the point, I just didn't care about it as much as everything else that was happening in GEB." Kind of similar to my appreciation of Bach himself, in fact. The content of Bach's compositions is frequently about praising God, which has no particular relevance to me. But the form and aesthetics of Bach are wonderful.

code_duck 8y ago

I read this book when I was a kid and frequently back then, I was not concerned with reading books from beginning to end. I’d start in the beginning, skip to the middle if it got boring, skip to the end if I wanted to kill a cliffhanger, then go back and read everything in between, or eventually restart from the beginning. So this is how I read GEB. I think I never would have gotten through it from start-to-finish.

stuntkite 8y ago
It took me too long to figure out that coming into a dense tome can be a dance. You can move around to get an idea, pick out what interests, take a dive, then really do a contextual exploration. Found this after many years of sort of doing something similar without knowing it was a thing. It honestly felt like cheating sometimes for some reason? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

nabla9 8y ago

> think he was 24? I think it's pretty incredible considering his age. This makes sense. I read the book at age of 20 or so, and it made me to change my life and change my career path. It's very playful, it informs, connects and educates. I think older and more cynical me might not have enjoyed it so much. I think "Metamagical Themes" and the "Fluid concepts and analogies" are his best books although GEP had the largest impact on me. They are more refined explorations of ideas. The value of Hofstader's life work is his single minded exploration of one of the hardest problems in cognitive science. Unlike conventional AI/ML research he is tackling the problem beyond the reach of the state of the art and refusing to pick easier problems to solve even when he can't make progress. Hofstader's main proposition is that analogy making is the core of human cognition. He has made repeated attempts to pin it down into something that is formal using toy examples and programs (copycat, letter spirit). I think his approach has been very insightful even if nothing comes out of it. In my opinion the "Fluid concepts and analogies" is the culmination of his work. GEB and "Metamagical Themeas" are the predule, what came afterwards is more like prose and and maybe reflection of his personal tragedy.

Angostura 8y ago
> Metamagical Themes It's Metamagica Themas, I think - an anagram of 'Mathematical Games'; the Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American which proceeded it. A lovely book.
- zazen 8y ago
  I was briefly very confused until I figured out you were correcting Themes to Themas, and the dropped "l" was just an accident!
  - Angostura 8y ago
    If you were only briefly confused, I congratulate you - it would have confused the heck out of me for much longer.
- lisper 8y ago
  > Metamagica Themas Metamagical Themas (You left out the L.)

ramblerman 8y ago

> I think he was 24? 27, but equally impressive nonetheless

stuntkite 8y ago
Definitely. Thanks for the clarification! I honestly think it's kind of an important feature of the book. Since it's about the evolution of one's consciousness. At least for me being able to place how old he was as he found himself making the thing helps the parts that can feel sort of strange have the right contextual... extrusion? I recall what it was like to be in my mid 20s, I was thinking a lot about what it meant to be alive and people started suddenly around 25 treating me like what I thought was an adult. The content of the book being about the procession of consciousness and all, yeah, it's a different book if you know he's 27 than if you think he's 60.

greggarious 8y ago

Thanks for sharing this course, very interesting. I wish HN had an easy way to save comments like Reddit, but this reply should do the trick :)

js2 8y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=greggarious https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=greggarious has your upvoted and favorited comments and stories. (Your favorites are public, your votes private.)
- greggarious 8y ago
  Thanks, that is useful but I upvote lots of stuff so a separate saved list can also be useful :) For now, I have a bookmarks folder for stuff like this.
  - dang 8y ago
    The 'favorites' feature is a saved list. It's not widely used. Maybe we should promote it, or maybe get rid of it.
    - mindcrime 8y ago
      My humble suggestion(s) to make "favorites" more useful (and hopefully more used): 1. add the ability to "favorite" from the front page. I rarely "favorite" anything, because I grew accustomed to using "upvote" as the mechanism to save stories. I would switch, but that extra little bit of friction of needing to click through first, means I stick with my old habit. 2. Add "favorite" for comments as well. 3. (maybe) - consider renaming "favorite" to "save"? Possibly people who are used to seeing the "save" link on Reddit would find that more intuitive.
      - js2 8y ago
        You can favorite comments but you have to click their timestamp first. It's really hidden. I think most people don't know about the feature. dang: if you get rid of it please don't do so w/o notice so that those of us who do use it can export the links first.

mathattack 8y ago

I appreciate the context. I read the first 150 or so pages about 20 years ago and gave up. (Had the same reaction to Don Quixote) I enjoyed the links between disparate topics but the style got to be much. I’m convinced to pick it back up.

chasing 8y ago

The internet says Hofstadter was born in 1945 and GED was published in 1979. ~34 years later?

stuntkite 8y ago
Sounds about right? What's your point? If you're trying to extrapolate his age from the publishing, someone below corrected me. He was 27 when he wrote it. A few years between writing and publishing the first edition lines up.
- chasing 8y ago
  You said 24. That sounded very young. So I looked. No point beyond that. T’wasn’t an attack.
- lwerdna 8y ago
  You posted something inaccurate and chasing offered a correction. Instead of e-pretending to miss the point, accept the correction as you did with ramblerman.

vanderZwan 8y ago

> 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. Thank you for sharing your experience, I may have to give `I am a Strange Loop` a try after all, and do the skip-300-pages trick with GEB. I've tried to get through it multiple times, but I never managed to get far into the later chapters without literally falling asleep. I do not blame on the book; it's likely a consequence of my ADD. However, a significant portion of my friends did manage to get through it, and the summaries and explanations they have given of it were very inspiring. Another reason for me to conclude that it's not the book, but me ;) Perhaps interestingly, I typically have no trouble with reading long, dense books. One of my favourite books ever is "The Master & His Emissary", an incredibly flawed but also very inspiring tome mixing loose interpretations of brain science, art history and philosophy (the best way to deal with its flaws is to approach any "scientific" argument as a philosophical line of reasoning inspired by a layman's (mis)interpretation of the underlying science, but that it's the reasoning itself that matters). I wonder if the difference in writing styles between TM&HE and GEB could tell us something about what kind of stimuli an ADHD person does and does not respond to?

stuntkite 8y ago
I also live with ADHD. I think that's maybe why the dialogs at the beginning were so impenetrable to me without context. They are important and do a great job of illustrating what he's getting to, but for me it just felt like reading nonsense until I had some context about why they were exploring. I found myself in my initial readings not just bored but kind of offended by how wanky they were. Once I got a better understanding of what he was trying to say, I could see the weave of the thing and even have a few laughs along the way.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  > I also live with ADHD. I wonder if you would like McGilchrist's book then. It's full of associations and drawing lines between seemingly unrelated things, and with sentences containing more than seven comma's not being uncommon.

burger_moon 8y ago

This is interesting, I picked up GEB a while ago and never finished. Got to page 400 (I just checked because it's sitting next to me). I was fatigued from reading the same book for so long, it didn't get boring but it's not an easy read so I found I couldn't read it before bed otherwise I'd have to reread pages for it to sink in. That means I couldn't spend as much time reading it as I could other books which is part of why the fatigue set in I think. I'm going to try this mit course, I think will help motivate me to get through the rest of the book finally.

xrd 8y ago

Terrific comment on your path to getting more from this book. I just purchased IAASL and am going to review the OCW link. This kind of discussion is so valuable in getting through books like GEB which can be very challenging and require starts and stops.

throw7 8y ago

Thanks for this info. I've attempted and put down geb about 3 times never getting too far. The stories were just childish to me.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lolikoisuru 8y ago
I recently started reading the book and when I got to the first dialog part I got incredibly annoyed at how childish and unnatural the writing was. I've yet to see why people think this book is so life changing.

mirimir 8y ago

Same here. I read GEB in grad school, as a distraction from the hassles of my thesis work. And I skipped over parts that mystified me. But then, many years later, I read IAASL. And then reread GEB. Which I could then appreciate much better.

vadansky 8y ago

Thanks for the OCW link, would you happen to have all the lectures saved? Video for lecture 6 and 7 are missing.

theNJR 8y ago

Do you literally mean skip to page 300 and begin?

jonhendry18 8y ago
I would assume the idea is to find a chapter or section start around that point. Maybe Chapter X, "Levels of Description, and Computer Systems" on page 285. Or Chapter XI, "Brains and Thoughts" on 337.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]