I didn't understand most of the essay. > The dialogues interspersed between the chapters are, indeed, often contrived, arch, heavy-handed, and excessively cute

I didn't understand most of the essay. > The dialogues interspersed between the chapters are, indeed, often contrived, arch, heavy-handed, and excessively cute, but they have virtues that, pedagogically and presentationally if not aesthetically, far outweigh these drawbacks; they are uniformly clear, vivid, memorable, and thought-provoking. Another sentence that I didn't understand. Sigh. I often think that I am just not smart enough to be in this field. But, in any event, I found GEB inspiring. Thinking about these world-changing ideas by approaching them from different directions turned me on. I wrote a book on the Theory of Computation that was inspired by it -- OK it is not itself inspiring, but it tries to give readers all kinds of ways to explore the material, while perhaps not saying anything that can't be proved. I hope some people here might be interested: https://hefferon.net/computation/index.html https://hefferon.net/computation/index.html