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That doesn't refute the fact that he spent his life researching the content in GEB.

by Retra 8y ago

jamesrcole 8y ago
"The idea that changed Hofstadter’s existence, as he has explained over the years, came to him on the road, on a break from graduate school in particle physics. Discouraged by the way his doctoral thesis was going at the University of Oregon, feeling “profoundly lost,” he decided in the summer of 1972 to pack his things into a car he called Quicksilver and drive eastward across the continent. Each night he pitched his tent somewhere new (“sometimes in a forest, sometimes by a lake”) and read by flashlight. He was free to think about whatever he wanted; he chose to think about thinking itself. Ever since he was about 14, when he found out that his youngest sister, Molly, couldn’t understand language, because she “had something deeply wrong with her brain” (her neurological condition probably dated from birth, and was never diagnosed), he had been quietly obsessed by the relation of mind to matter. The father of psychology, William James, described this in 1890 as “the most mysterious thing in the world”: How could consciousness be physical? How could a few pounds of gray gelatin give rise to our very thoughts and selves? Roaming in his 1956 Mercury, Hofstadter thought he had found the answer—that it lived, of all places, in the kernel of a mathematical proof. In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself. Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.” He sat down one afternoon to sketch his thinking in a letter to a friend. But after 30 handwritten pages, he decided not to send it; instead he’d let the ideas germinate a while. Seven years later, they had not so much germinated as metastasized into a 2.9‑pound, 777-page book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which would earn for Hofstadter—only 35 years old, and a first-time author—the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction." https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man...
- Retra 8y ago
  What is your point? When Hofstadter was 35, he had spent his adult life studying a subject which culminated in the publication of a book about it. He wasn't passively throwing words on pages to get anything published, he was publishing his life's work. You seem to be trying to argue that -- because he continued to live afterward, he somehow didn't spend his entire life on the book. But that's not what was being asserted -- only that he had spent "his life" up to the time of the work's publication on the work. And it's not even relevant if it were meant as you seem to be assuming, because Hofstadter has continued to study the very same subject ever since. He's also published more books on the very same matter in the following years. It was his life's work then, and it continues to be today.
  - jamesrcole 8y ago
    > When Hofstadter was 35, he had spent his adult life studying a subject First, a nitpick - the book was published when he was 34, and he was even younger when he wrote it. But the main point is that the post is clearly talking about people who have spent the entirety of a lifetime studying an area, not someone who has spent their adulthood so far studying the subject. And Hofstadter clearly hadn't devoted the entirety of his adulthood up to age 34 studying the subjects of GEB. The quoted passage says that his formal study had been in particle physics.
    - Retra 8y ago
      I disagree with your assessment of what the main point is. I don't think anyone else is interpreting it that way, and can confidently assert that the error is entirely on your end. Moreover, Hofstadter's study of physics isn't unrelated to his study of intelligence. I personally got a degree in physics to study language and intelligence, because the way physicists use language, analogy, and simple concepts to understand the world is particularly effective and interesting. So I can tell you first-hand that they are related. In fact, anyone who studies philosophy is probably making a serious mistake to not study physics first.
      - jamesrcole 8y ago

That doesn't refute the fact that he spent his life researching the content in GEB.

by Retra 8y ago

That doesn't refute the fact that he spent his life researching the content in GEB.

"The idea that changed Hofstadter’s existence, as he has explained over the years, came to him on the road, on a break from graduate school in particle physics. Discouraged by the way his doctoral thesis was going at the University of Oregon, feeling “profoundly lost,” he decided in the summer of 1972 to pack his things into a car he called Quicksilver and drive eastward across the continent. Each night he pitched his tent somewhere new (“sometimes in a forest, sometimes by a lake”) and read by flashlight. He was free to think about whatever he wanted; he chose to think about thinking itself. Ever since he was about 14, when he found out that his youngest sister, Molly, couldn’t understand language, because she “had something deeply wrong with her brain” (her neurological condition probably dated from birth, and was never diagnosed), he had been quietly obsessed by the relation of mind to matter. The father of psychology, William James, described this in 1890 as “the most mysterious thing in the world”: How could consciousness be physical? How could a few pounds of gray gelatin give rise to our very thoughts and selves? Roaming in his 1956 Mercury, Hofstadter thought he had found the answer—that it lived, of all places, in the kernel of a mathematical proof. In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself. Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.” He sat down one afternoon to sketch his thinking in a letter to a friend. But after 30 handwritten pages, he decided not to send it; instead he’d let the ideas germinate a while. Seven years later, they had not so much germinated as metastasized into a 2.9‑pound, 777-page book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which would earn for Hofstadter—only 35 years old, and a first-time author—the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction." https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man...

Retra 8y ago
What is your point? When Hofstadter was 35, he had spent his adult life studying a subject which culminated in the publication of a book about it. He wasn't passively throwing words on pages to get anything published, he was publishing his life's work. You seem to be trying to argue that -- because he continued to live afterward, he somehow didn't spend his entire life on the book. But that's not what was being asserted -- only that he had spent "his life" up to the time of the work's publication on the work. And it's not even relevant if it were meant as you seem to be assuming, because Hofstadter has continued to study the very same subject ever since. He's also published more books on the very same matter in the following years. It was his life's work then, and it continues to be today.
- jamesrcole 8y ago
  > When Hofstadter was 35, he had spent his adult life studying a subject First, a nitpick - the book was published when he was 34, and he was even younger when he wrote it. But the main point is that the post is clearly talking about people who have spent the entirety of a lifetime studying an area, not someone who has spent their adulthood so far studying the subject. And Hofstadter clearly hadn't devoted the entirety of his adulthood up to age 34 studying the subjects of GEB. The quoted passage says that his formal study had been in particle physics.
  - Retra 8y ago
    I disagree with your assessment of what the main point is. I don't think anyone else is interpreting it that way, and can confidently assert that the error is entirely on your end. Moreover, Hofstadter's study of physics isn't unrelated to his study of intelligence. I personally got a degree in physics to study language and intelligence, because the way physicists use language, analogy, and simple concepts to understand the world is particularly effective and interesting. So I can tell you first-hand that they are related. In fact, anyone who studies philosophy is probably making a serious mistake to not study physics first.
    - jamesrcole 8y ago