6 ms·

Gödel, Escher, Bach

82 points by DanielBMarkham 15y ago

ctdonath 15y ago
Awesome book. Read it in high school ~1985; so meme-dense I could only absorb about 3 pages at a time ... all 832 pages, with great enthusiasm. Just what I needed at a formative time. A geek must-read.
- brudgers 15y ago
  My friend, Rich, brought a copy to AP Calc. I was at the Waldenbooks in the mall, that afternoon picking up a copy...later traded it for The Complete Works of Shakespeare at university. Picked up another copy, which I still have, about twenty years ago to fill the obvious hole in my library. It's one of those books that people should be familiar enough with to be able to talk about, even if they haven't read it.
- cgh 15y ago
  My experience was similar to yours. I read it when I was 15 or so, a bit at a time. I didn't understand all of it, but I knew that this was something formative and that maybe a computer science degree would be a really good thing to pursue. I've read it several times since. Unfortunately, I've found Hofstadter's other stuff to be less compelling, other than his Scientific American column, which was collected in Metamagical Themas (an anagram of Mathematical Games, the column his replaced).
TylerE 15y ago
Probably worth pointing out that there is a coordinated reading going on over at reddit, starting tomorrow. http://reddit.com/r/GEB http://reddit.com/r/GEB
- dwolfson20 15y ago
  For other busy people, it's also worth pointing out that the schedule is very slow and focused on understanding. For instance, we are taking the introduction one section per day. The guy running it at Reddit created a nice Google calendar for the "course." Needless to say I am psyched for this.
  - Ernestas 15y ago
    https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/embed?src=OXM5YnM0cjgzaXFpbHUzNzY4bmdwcXU0NzhAZ3JvdXAuY2FsZW5kYXIuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ&gsessionid=JkxvltcDC26ejSX4FTXv6w https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/embed?src=OXM5YnM0cjgzaX...
- haroldp 15y ago
  And it just started, so it's not too late to join in.
logicalmoron 15y ago
I'mma let you finish. But I just gotta say that Gauss was the best mathematician of all time. OF ALL TIME!
- bdg 15y ago
  I know that site's down, but hacker news isn't reddit.
bdg 15y ago
I picked this up last week and have been slowly reading through it. It's a great mental exercise in bending your perceptions as well as seeing new abstractions or patterns you hadn't before. Something about that makes it harder than your average writing to read through, despite the fact it isn't loaded with a grandiose lexicon inspired from a linguistic perspicacity, per se.
jgroome 15y ago
I hate to gripe, but it's kind of disappointing that I can't get my hands on an ereader/Kindle edition.
- mdiep 15y ago
  Absolutely. I read GEB in high school, and have often thought of reading it again, but it's a hefty book to carry around. Unfortunately, I don't think we'll see an eBook edition too soon. Hofstadter describes himself somewhere (in the GEB preface, maybe?) as very picky about the layout of his books. I remember him saying that he would sometimes rewrite sentences in order to make the layout better.
  - ugh 15y ago
    He describes in some later edition how he typeset the book himself which is in itself a towering achievement (with him not being a typesetter and all).
    - RockofStrength 15y ago
      Hofstadter cares a lot about form, and thinks it is intimately connected to function. I believe in the end of "I Am a Strange Loop" he said that he edits every single line of text so it fits evenly and aesthetically across the line. In other words, each line must stretch to the far right of the page, but the letters can't be stretched out/separated too much. This must be extremely tedious to accomplish.
      - eru 15y ago
        Prof. Knuth made up a formula for such beauty.
      - Create 15y ago
        ...and this is also true for all the translations of the book that I came across.
- TylerE 15y ago
brudgers 15y ago
>"So how do you join up a philosopher, a pencil artist, and a composer and get something useful out of it" Into an eternal golden braid, of course. [Utilitarian applications left as an exercise for the reader]
holri 15y ago
Probably the antithesis, also worth reading: Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/986428.Computer_Power_and_Human_Reason http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/986428.Computer_Power_and...
- eru 15y ago
  The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose is the other anti-thesis.
dbkbali 15y ago
Nice review made me want to go back and read it again
biot 15y ago
If your background includes experience dealing with logic, you enjoy wordplay (puns, double entendre, etc.), and you're decent at math then you should have no problem sailing through this book at a steady pace. Someone without such a background will likely have a harder time with it, but if that's not you do yourself a favor and pick it up and just start reading. You just might be surprised at how non-daunting it really is. I had to share this as people might get put off by all the claims about how it's so hard. It's really not. It requires patience, logical thinking, a good grasp of language, a "plastic" mind, and no pre-conceptions of what it should be saying. I suspect many here will find it to be a thoroughly enjoyable page-turner that they'll be unable to put down.
- Wilduck 15y ago
  > I suspect many here will find it to be a thoroughly enjoyable page-turner that they'll be unable to put down. This was not my experience at all. The first few times I tried to read this book, I blocked out a few significant chunks of time to get through it. That never worked. As soon as I set it down (a couple hundred pages in) I wouldn't pick it up again. However, I recently succeeded in finishing it. It took me nine months of reading a few pages in bed each night. The book was enjoyable to fall asleep to. GEB was fun and thought provoking, it taught me something about mathematics and made me think about the nature of consciousness, but it was by no means a page turner. I'd definitely recommend reading it though. And you were spot on with this analysis: > You just might be surprised at how non-daunting it really is [...] It requires patience, logical thinking, a good grasp of language. I'd also add that it helps you _develop_ patience, logical thinking, and a good grasp of language =).
- brudgers 15y ago
  >"It requires patience, logical thinking, a good grasp of language, a "plastic" mind, and no pre-conceptions of what it should be saying." Or just skipping over the parts that don't resonate. One of the things which is so marvelous about GEB is that it is entertaining on many levels (pun intended) - just looking at the pictures is thought provoking, reading the dialogs is as well, etc. There's something there for everyone - there's no need to quine.
mikehuffman 15y ago
Not to sound like a fanboy, but GEB is one of the few books (outliers being another) that really made my critical thinking skills about the world, society, and my place in it change. I literally feel like it expanded my mind, or at least my capacity for critical thinking and awareness of such.
robotresearcher 15y ago
From the review: "It's almost like reading an Aesop's fable before the "real" chapter begins" The dialogue form of presenting arguments is traditional in philosophy. http://plato-dialogues.org/plato.htm http://plato-dialogues.org/plato.htm
- JonnieCache 15y ago
  >traditional in philosophy. It's use in GEB is a tribute to Lewis Carroll's discussion of Zeno's Paradox, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles. This is itself a homage to the platonic dialogues.

Awesome book. Read it in high school ~1985; so meme-dense I could only absorb about 3 pages at a time ... all 832 pages, with great enthusiasm. Just what I needed at a formative time. A geek must-read.

brudgers 15y ago
My friend, Rich, brought a copy to AP Calc. I was at the Waldenbooks in the mall, that afternoon picking up a copy...later traded it for The Complete Works of Shakespeare at university. Picked up another copy, which I still have, about twenty years ago to fill the obvious hole in my library. It's one of those books that people should be familiar enough with to be able to talk about, even if they haven't read it.
cgh 15y ago
My experience was similar to yours. I read it when I was 15 or so, a bit at a time. I didn't understand all of it, but I knew that this was something formative and that maybe a computer science degree would be a really good thing to pursue. I've read it several times since. Unfortunately, I've found Hofstadter's other stuff to be less compelling, other than his Scientific American column, which was collected in Metamagical Themas (an anagram of Mathematical Games, the column his replaced).

TylerE 15y ago

Probably worth pointing out that there is a coordinated reading going on over at reddit, starting tomorrow. http://reddit.com/r/GEB http://reddit.com/r/GEB

dwolfson20 15y ago
For other busy people, it's also worth pointing out that the schedule is very slow and focused on understanding. For instance, we are taking the introduction one section per day. The guy running it at Reddit created a nice Google calendar for the "course." Needless to say I am psyched for this.
- Ernestas 15y ago
  https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/embed?src=OXM5YnM0cjgzaXFpbHUzNzY4bmdwcXU0NzhAZ3JvdXAuY2FsZW5kYXIuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ&gsessionid=JkxvltcDC26ejSX4FTXv6w https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/embed?src=OXM5YnM0cjgzaX...
haroldp 15y ago
And it just started, so it's not too late to join in.

logicalmoron 15y ago

I'mma let you finish. But I just gotta say that Gauss was the best mathematician of all time. OF ALL TIME!

bdg 15y ago
I know that site's down, but hacker news isn't reddit.

bdg 15y ago

I picked this up last week and have been slowly reading through it. It's a great mental exercise in bending your perceptions as well as seeing new abstractions or patterns you hadn't before. Something about that makes it harder than your average writing to read through, despite the fact it isn't loaded with a grandiose lexicon inspired from a linguistic perspicacity, per se.

jgroome 15y ago

I hate to gripe, but it's kind of disappointing that I can't get my hands on an ereader/Kindle edition.

mdiep 15y ago
Absolutely. I read GEB in high school, and have often thought of reading it again, but it's a hefty book to carry around. Unfortunately, I don't think we'll see an eBook edition too soon. Hofstadter describes himself somewhere (in the GEB preface, maybe?) as very picky about the layout of his books. I remember him saying that he would sometimes rewrite sentences in order to make the layout better.
- ugh 15y ago
  He describes in some later edition how he typeset the book himself which is in itself a towering achievement (with him not being a typesetter and all).
  - RockofStrength 15y ago
    Hofstadter cares a lot about form, and thinks it is intimately connected to function. I believe in the end of "I Am a Strange Loop" he said that he edits every single line of text so it fits evenly and aesthetically across the line. In other words, each line must stretch to the far right of the page, but the letters can't be stretched out/separated too much. This must be extremely tedious to accomplish.
    - eru 15y ago
      Prof. Knuth made up a formula for such beauty.
    - Create 15y ago
      ...and this is also true for all the translations of the book that I came across.
TylerE 15y ago

brudgers 15y ago

>"So how do you join up a philosopher, a pencil artist, and a composer and get something useful out of it" Into an eternal golden braid, of course. [Utilitarian applications left as an exercise for the reader]

holri 15y ago

Probably the antithesis, also worth reading: Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/986428.Computer_Power_and_Human_Reason http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/986428.Computer_Power_and...

eru 15y ago
The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose is the other anti-thesis.

dbkbali 15y ago

Nice review made me want to go back and read it again

biot 15y ago

If your background includes experience dealing with logic, you enjoy wordplay (puns, double entendre, etc.), and you're decent at math then you should have no problem sailing through this book at a steady pace. Someone without such a background will likely have a harder time with it, but if that's not you do yourself a favor and pick it up and just start reading. You just might be surprised at how non-daunting it really is. I had to share this as people might get put off by all the claims about how it's so hard. It's really not. It requires patience, logical thinking, a good grasp of language, a "plastic" mind, and no pre-conceptions of what it should be saying. I suspect many here will find it to be a thoroughly enjoyable page-turner that they'll be unable to put down.

Wilduck 15y ago
> I suspect many here will find it to be a thoroughly enjoyable page-turner that they'll be unable to put down. This was not my experience at all. The first few times I tried to read this book, I blocked out a few significant chunks of time to get through it. That never worked. As soon as I set it down (a couple hundred pages in) I wouldn't pick it up again. However, I recently succeeded in finishing it. It took me nine months of reading a few pages in bed each night. The book was enjoyable to fall asleep to. GEB was fun and thought provoking, it taught me something about mathematics and made me think about the nature of consciousness, but it was by no means a page turner. I'd definitely recommend reading it though. And you were spot on with this analysis: > You just might be surprised at how non-daunting it really is [...] It requires patience, logical thinking, a good grasp of language. I'd also add that it helps you _develop_ patience, logical thinking, and a good grasp of language =).
brudgers 15y ago
>"It requires patience, logical thinking, a good grasp of language, a "plastic" mind, and no pre-conceptions of what it should be saying." Or just skipping over the parts that don't resonate. One of the things which is so marvelous about GEB is that it is entertaining on many levels (pun intended) - just looking at the pictures is thought provoking, reading the dialogs is as well, etc. There's something there for everyone - there's no need to quine.

mikehuffman 15y ago

Not to sound like a fanboy, but GEB is one of the few books (outliers being another) that really made my critical thinking skills about the world, society, and my place in it change. I literally feel like it expanded my mind, or at least my capacity for critical thinking and awareness of such.

robotresearcher 15y ago

From the review: "It's almost like reading an Aesop's fable before the "real" chapter begins" The dialogue form of presenting arguments is traditional in philosophy. http://plato-dialogues.org/plato.htm http://plato-dialogues.org/plato.htm

JonnieCache 15y ago
>traditional in philosophy. It's use in GEB is a tribute to Lewis Carroll's discussion of Zeno's Paradox, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles. This is itself a homage to the platonic dialogues.