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Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life (2022)
- atmosx 3y agoSomewhat related book: https://www.logicomix.com/en/index.html https://www.logicomix.com/en/index.html
- j_maffe 3y agoExcellent book. It really gave me such an interesting vision of how to see the mechanics of the world.
- swozey 3y agoI bought this when I was like 19 and going through some "i'm going to be a physicist" mental break and obsessing over michio kaku and wild theories and it made absolutely no sense to me at all. Do I need to try again now that I'm a grown adult? I do not know math well.
- g-w1 3y agoYes, it's great. As long as you can follow logic and a bit of programming, you'll do fine. Just go slow (I had to re-read it a bunch).
- knightoffaith 3y agoDo you remember what you were confused about? The book does not assume the reader has any advanced math education (from what I remember) - it tries to teach you the relevant math itself. It is long and windy though, so maybe you read through too quickly or got bored. You'll probably have more success with it now that you're more mature.
- readthenotes1 3y agoI dont recall math equations but it's been a while
- bobosha 3y ago"if you have a copy of GEB on your shelf collecting dust and you’ve never read more than a chapter or two, dust it off and see how it goes this time." I will freely admit I am one of those who tried to read it multiple times, but couldn't grok it.
- codr7 3y agoSo people say; I usually have a pretty high tolerance when it comes to difficult books, but just couldn't keep my eyes open trying to read this one. Maybe I should give it another try...
- lxe 3y agoI'm also struggling with it despite having it on my bookshelf for a while. Not an easy read. It's cited and referred to all over the place, so maybe it's worth getting through it.
- Vecr 3y agoI've only read a few pages around a couple of cited parts, just to make sure the citing author is not just making things up. It's too long otherwise.
- hobs 3y agoI would say give yourself license to skip some stuff, the parable stuff (for instance) is either super fun or a chore, depending on the mood you are in. A lot of the Achilles stuff is more akin to poetry instead of an illuminating guide.
- tetris11 3y agoSame. It has the exact same junior high-school giddiness of excitement as The Martian, another book that I just couldn't tonally work my way through. I don't mind books that explain concepts in fun ways, but I do find it jarring if I'm being treated like a child with an overbearing parent, telling me why I should be excited about something instead of just telling the story and letting me feel how I want to feel about it.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoI share your experience and I've tried it three times. Couldn't get through any of his Metamagical Themas articles in Scientific American, either. I thought he was in love with writing, not communicating, and didn't want to remove a word once he'd put it down.
- leto_ii 3y agoGEB is one of the books that as an adult I have learned to not care about anymore. I've unsuccessfully tried reading it a few times (once made it a couple of hundred pages in) and came to the (personal) conclusion that if I want an intellectual challenge I'll just directly do maths instead of reading a semi-literary essay about maths. Just like (some of) Joyce's work, GEB seems to me a puzzle who's main prize is the satisfaction of having understood it - obfuscation and abstruseness for their own sake. For actually understanding Godel's work I would recommend Gödel's Proof (Nagel, Newman, somewhat ironically, prefaced by Hofstadter) or Philosophies of Mathematics (George, Velleman).
- lisper 3y agoI love GEB. It is a masterpiece. But it is important to realize before diving into it that one of the things that makes it a masterpiece is that it is literary, that is, that it contains a wealth of detail that is, strictly speaking, unnecessary to the main point. Drawing a parallel between GEB and James Joyce's Ulysses is actually quite a good analogy. Indeed, Ulysses is almost nothing but "unnecessary detail", to the extent that it makes the book all but unreadable (which, I think, is no small part of its appeal). If you're waiting for either GEB or Ulysses to hurry up and get to the mother fucking point, you're going to be waiting a long time. In that regard, both books are good for techies to read because every now and then it's good to read something that drags you out of your comfort zone and futzes around in all kinds of obscure nooks and crannies before getting to the mother fucking point -- if indeed it ever does. Getting to the point can be important, but there is more to life (and literature).
- hobs 3y agoAnd to be fair Hofstadter got the message and wrote "I Am a Strange Loop" for people who just want the to the point version.
- keithalewis 3y agoI wonder if anyone on the Pulitzer Prize committee for GEB understood this was the idea he was attempting to communicate. There seems to be a large market for books that make dumb people feel smart.
- davedx 3y agoHa I tried reading I Am a Strange Loop and found that meandering and verbose too. Didn’t finish it. He really labors the “greater than sum of parts” point for example. Ugh
- munificent 3y agoPersonally, I believe that the distinction between "unnecessary detail" and "the point" is mostly subjective and in the mind of the reader. The point of a book is to get the reader to reach a certain understanding. Every brain is different and while one literary path might get some readers to that destination, other paths may be required for others. But there is no singular point of understanding that exists solely at the end of that path. The path itself is what builds that understanding. Part of the art of writing is covering a large enough space of multiple paths to get most readers there without too many of them getting lost.
- dmazzoni 3y agoI loved GEB, I read it twice and found it mind-blowing. That said, I don't think it was life-changing in the sense that it gave me any interesting perspective on life in any way. I didn't find any of the philosophies to be useful in that sense. However, what the book does do, is manage to explain an incredibly complex, deep mathematical theorem while using almost no mathematical notation. It does it all mostly through similes and wordplay and art, which is quite brilliant. One of the great things about the book is that even if you give up on the math, you can still appreciate each chapter as clever writing in its own right.
- 3abiton 3y agoAny books that changed your perspective on life?
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago"The Dice Man" by Luke Reinhart. In my teens it didn't hurt that it had some pretty intense pornographic sex scenes, but the real takeaway - the idea that there is no "singular you", just a swirling multitudes who bob to the surface for attention depending on the context ... yeah, that changed my perspective on life. Too bad about the misogyny. Might even have been racist, but I don't remember that.
- mock-possum 3y ago> there is no "singular you", just a swirling multitudes who bob to the surface for attention depending on the context Sounds a little like “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand” have you read that one? Also, > In my teens it didn't hurt that it had some pretty intense pornographic sex scenes For me, that book is Lockpick Pornography - it’s a fairy horny story, but the main character struggling to figure out what to do about gender and sexuality, and the way that struggle starts out seeming like it’s about systemic oppression and heteronormativity but quickly spirals into the character just having a series of self destructive meltdowns is so so compelling. It even manages to have a bit of a happy non-ending.
- labarilem 3y agoI love this book. It definitely changed the way I think and made me ask important questions. Bonus: it got me listening to Bach at the time.
- tedheath123 3y agoMaybe the book went over my head but it didn't live up to my expectations. The book's thesis seemed to boil down to "isn't recursion cool, maybe it has something to do with consciousness". I did enjoy some of the digressions though.
- bazoom42 3y agoConsider it the Lisp equivalent to _whys poignant guide to Ruby.
- kibibu 3y agoThat is about the strongest anti-recommendation you could have possibly made for me.
- jameshart 3y agoThe GEB concept of 'self reference' is not the same as 'recursion'.
- trgn 3y agoI thought it was going to be first something like "isn't recursion cool" (like, look at these fractals in sea shells!!!!), until GEB actually tried to explain, in detail, how Godel's proof works. tbh, that's kind of what makes the book cool, it just assumes anybody with a passing interest in compsci would also love to dive deep into fundamental theorems of mathematics. Those sort of bold assumptions, and the author just doubling down on them (e.g. you're going love these dialogues!). Crazy that it won a Pulitzer too, a real bestseller.
- jrflowers 3y agoGEB is crucial reading in that if you want to appear intellectually superior all you have to do is sprinkle “Ho ho! Much like the eternal golden braid I must say!” into conversation and no one will call you out on it or ask you to extrapolate (or if in the off chance that they do, you can say anything and still get away with it) The best response to someone bringing up GEB in casual conversation is to look them dead in the eye and simply say “I have also read that book.” This will instantly create palatable tension and a change of topic
- huytersd 3y agoOr you can read it and not tell anyone. This comment is a pretty pathetic attempt at shaming anyone who displays even a modicum of discourse higher than the baser level. Congratulations.
- heikkilevanto 3y agoGEB is in my top three as well. But looking back at it and the other important books in my life, it seems that it matters very much when I read them, and where I was at the time. For example, the Lord of the Rings was hugely influential for me, in part because I bought it (in one volume paperback) with the sales of my first program, and read it in school (also during our English lessons, the good teacher let me do that when she saw what I was reading).
- svat 3y agoThe most valuable thing about GEB for me was how self-indulgent it is. The book is entirely Hofstadter having fun: all those tricky dialogues, acrostics, puns where the setup and payoff are hundreds of pages apart, the marrying of form and content, just the overall tone of excited sharing…. Hofstadter has put a lot of himself into it—it's a deeply personal book—and it was revealing to me to see that one's emotions don't have to be set aside when writing, nor is it necessary for the kinds of feelings that mathematics evokes to be “translated” into more familiar ones. (Edit: As an aside, Hofstadter's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is similarly self-indulgent, and a joy to read. Of course one ought to read a couple of other translations first and keep them nearby, to become familiar with the content, but in terms of sheer wordplay and outrageous rhymes, it tops anything.) (Edit 2: Ha, a search reveals I posted a similar comment a little over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32830008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32830008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32878471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32878471)
- thr0waway001 3y agoIt's the coolest looking book I own that I can't read cause I'm too dumb to understand even having taken some university math courses. lol
- enriquto 3y agoI loved the dialogues and the poems, with their various translations. The discussio around the "musical offering" is incredible, and helped me learn to appreciate music (not only Bach). This is one of my favourite books! The math was insufferable, however. And I say that as a mathematician and programmer... I wonder if musicians and poetry translators will find "their" parts correspondingly unbearable?
- cjfd 3y agoI loved this book when I was young. Like 16 years old or so. I am still very interested in things like formal systems and automated theorem proving and that started with this book. However, when I now look at the main idea of the book I find it quite cringeworthy, because, besides when he is speaking about real mathematics and science, much of it is very speculative and probably just false. At best it can be thought provoking, but I think it is just not very nice to immediately answer the some very real questions with highly speculative answers. It snared up the admiration of my 16-year-old self pretty effectively, though.
- digitcatphd 3y agoMIT Course on GEB: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lWZ2Bz0tS-s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lWZ2Bz0tS-s
- yreg 3y agoAre you supposed to watch the lectures after reading the chapters (which ones?) or how does it work?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- digitcatphd 3y agoThe book itself is challenging and at times even cryptic. I watched the lecture after reading it, but in hindsight would have followed the course or read after.
- jiriro 3y agoOh, this is brilliant! Thanks for sharing. This is a very good introduction to the book. The goal of the book/lecture is to show how meaning emerges from not-meaning. So cool!:-) Also at the end of the lecture 1 he says that the book was written like Bach’s works - like a piece of music with theme, repetitions, inversions etc. Going to read it asap:))
- drcwpl 3y agoFantastic, thank you - will watch it carefully... ha 7 years!
- syllablehq 3y agoThis book played an important role in pushing me into a career in software. During the recession in 2009, I lost my industrial design job. And GEB started me down a rabbit hole learning more and more about software and learning to code. That turned into a great software career. I've also read hacker news just about every day since.
- cupcakecommons 3y agoGreat synopsis of the book and an excellent synthesis of its real-world implications.
- peignoir 3y agoyeah emergence and strange loops are weird :)
- dave1010uk 3y ago> I had a secondary goal in the back of my head... if you have a copy of GEB on your shelf collecting dust and you've never read more than a chapter or two, dust it off and see how it goes this time. Dusted it off and after only a few pages, it's already a completely different read to when I read (a fraction of) it a decade or so ago.
- peterashford 3y agoI'm interested to know: How so?
- drcwpl 3y agoExcellent - would be interested to know how you get on with it.
- knightoffaith 3y agoI don't have my copy with me right now, so perhaps I'm misremembering, but I recall Hofstadter explaining in the preface of my copy that the point of his book was how the mind - consciousness - could arise from the brain (or something like that). I myself failed to get past the ~100 page mark (he went in depth explaining topics that I was already familiar with from other sources, which bored me. And I didn't really find the connections to art and music that insightful or interesting - but maybe I'm just too uptight). My understanding from skimming the book and reading some of Hofstadter's other works (including his response to Searle's "Minds, brains and programs" article) is that the book is trying to establish how complexity can emerge in systems with many simple moving parts via recursion (or something like that) in different scenarios, suggesting that this is how consciousness emerges from a complex web of neurons (the brain). This seems a little wishy-washy to me. I don't see this as a good counterargument against Searle's argument that syntaxx alone is not enough to give rise to semantics. (I find Dennett's argument about intuition pumps a more convincing counterargument.) Maybe my understanding of Hofstadter's argument is too simplistic - I'm happy to be educated (I wasn't able to make it through even half of GEB after all). And of course, that's not to say that GEB isn't a valuable book - it seems like most readers really enjoy it and learn a lot, even if they don't much care for the ultimate cognitive science/philosophy of mind position Hofstadter is trying to defend.
- The_Colonel 3y ago> it seems like most readers really enjoy it and learn a lot, I think it's one of those books which most people actually don't enjoy that much, but don't want to admit it, because it has such an intellectual aura around it.
- kragen 3y agoi think it's more that the people who talk about it most are the ones who really did enjoy it that much. (i assure you we exist, even if you prefer hanging out with the people who only pretend to have enjoyed it.) i suspect this is because, unlike hemingway and shakespeare and hegel, it's fairly rare for people to be coerced into reading hofstadter
- alkonaut 3y agoI found this book dull, uninteresting and pretentious. Whatever it tried to say in what 1000 pages could have been said in 200. People will probably recommend it highly in this thread, but here is a vote to just leave it alone. It's just not good if you like pop sci but don't like pretentious fluff around it. It's the least inspiring and mind-blowing book I ever read. This could be related to having read a lot on the topics in the past so the subject matter was familiar, and having zero tolerance for the type of writing in it.
- tptacek 3y agoIf you're not a reading-for-pleasure person, or GEB's topics just aren't your thing, you're not going to like the book. It's not a technical volume; it's not something you read for skills acquisition.
- kleiba 3y agoDe gustibus non est disputandum.
- gordon_freeman 3y ago"In matters of taste, there can be no disputes."
- Almondsetat 3y agoDe gustibus non disputandum est
- 3y ago
- zw123456 3y agoWhen I was working on m Masters degree in Electrical Engineering way back in 1978, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth :) I had a prof who was really amazing, he was a Comp Sci prof and he gave me a copy of GEB and it changed my life. OK, I'm probably overstating a bit, but that first edition copy, it's one of my prized possessions. Even to this day, every once in a while I pull it out and re-read a chapter.
- calf 3y agoGodel did not argue or show "there are fundamental epistemic limits to the universe". The universe is not a formal axiomatic system. This repeats an very old, popular pop-philosophy misconception about Godel's theorems and GEB seems to have done nothing to help with this category error.
- samatman 3y agoWhether or not the universe is (or, to split hairs, may be exactly expressed as) a formal axiomatic system, was very much an open question, one which Gödel helped answer conclusively in the negative.
- Barrin92 3y agoCouldn't really make it through GEB. I like literary or maximalist fiction like Pynchon despite not being smart enough to understand most of it, so it wasn't the style, and I like out there scientific speculation like The Bicameral Mind so it wasn't that either. Most of GEB just has this weird vibe of Hofstadter trying to come off as smart and trying way too hard. It's not that the ideas in the book are bad but they're also not really that interesting or deep or at least weird enough to justify all the flourish around it. It's very similar to Infinite Jest which to me also felt like the "young, overeducated man namedrops everything he knows without saying much" kind of thing.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoI'm going to try and explain why it made a difference in my life as briefly as I can. I read it in the early 90s as a teenager at a community college in the suburbs, along with the Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, at a point in my life when I was struggling with having a lot of doubt about Catholicism, and the _one_ thing that was keeping me from just giving up on religion entirely was that I just couldn't understand how the experience of _being_ could be anything but a spiritual soul, and those two books gave me the intellectual tools to basically completely rebuild my entire conception of what and who I was -- which is to say that I could finally see consciousness as the an emergent property of ordinary matter, and the relationship between consciousness and computation. It's an experience you can only have if you read the right books at the right time in your life. You can only be exposed to any particular idea for the first time once in your life, and if they ideas in those books are not new to you, I'm sure you'll find GEB pretentious and ponderous or whatever, but for me it was like fireworks going off on every page. I read it and reread it and took notes on it and used it as a launching point for more reading for years afterwards. edit with some extra thoughts: Keep in mind this book was written in 1979, when vanishingly few people had access to computers, let alone the internet. There was no wikipedia you could go to to scratch an itch about some topic. GEB is encyclopedic in scope and meandering because it _had to be_, he couldn't expect an audience who were familiar with _computers_ let alone artificial intelligence and set theory. It's really extraordinary that it's accessible as it is, given the breadth that it covered. Today, given the advances in all the things he was talking about, I would think it's mostly interesting to read for historical reasons.
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoFor me, it was the opposite. Reading Shadows of the Mind after GEB led me to finally see consciousness is NOT an emergent property of ordinary matter.
- tasty_freeze 3y agoI find Penrose's argument uncompelling: he doesn't see how ordinary physics could result in the sensation of beingness and experience, and we don't really understand quantum mechanics, therefore quantum mechanics is responsible for consciousness. (obviously, his book works on it for 500 pages so my summary is a parody, but that was the gist as far as I can remember)
- et1337 3y agoGEB is like Git. Git is fundamentally a DAG, that’s it. It’s beautiful. But it’s expressed via a bunch of tortured confusing words like refspecs, detached heads, tree-ish’s, and on and on. GEB is a love letter to some beautiful elegant ideas, but it’s expressed via a confusing assortment of record players, tortoises, and puns. One StackOverflow answer made the incompleteness theorem more clear to me than this whole book.
- mullingitover 3y agoCommand+F "chess" Sweeping that one under the rug, are we?
- bbor 3y agolol in this thread full of dozens of paragraph-long attacks on this book, yours is by far the most damning. And funny. For those that are unaware like me: Hofstadter's law is a self-referential adage, coined by Douglas Hofstadter in his book GEB…: Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. **History** In 1979, Hofstadter introduced the law in connection with a discussion of chess-playing computers, which at the time were continually being beaten by top-level human players, despite outpacing humans in depth of analysis. Hofstadter wrote: In the early days of computer chess, people used to estimate that it would be ten years until a computer (or program) was world champion. But after ten years had passed, it seemed that the day a computer would become world champion was still more than ten years away... This is just one more piece of evidence for the rather recursive Hofstadter's Law.
- johnmw 3y agoDoug seems pretty shocked by the pace of AI development in this video [1]. Still, Hofstadter's law has held true for me more often than it has not! [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac-b6dRMSwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac-b6dRMSwY
- rmu09 3y agoIt's a long time since I last read the book but I remember that in a sense the book ends at about 50%, that is a meta discussion in the book says it ends now and the rest that's following is a redundant. Will have to re-read it to find that location again...
- StopTheTechies 3y agoThe book ostensibly lacks Wittgenstein and/or Chomsky. Not much point in discussing the 20th century without them....
- oh_my_goodness 3y agoI gave up at this point: "We might describe the way that planets fly around stars as isomorphic to the way that electrons fly around nuclei." We might, but we'd be mistaken. Why bring incredibly complex topics into a general discussion unnecessarily? Why not even bother googling a correct explanation of those topics first? (I could guess why, but I don't want to ruin the article with spoilers.)
- hackandthink 3y agoAnother philosopher about Gödel: The Collapse of the Hilbert Program: A Variation on the Gödelian Theme* Saul A. Kripke https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.08346 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.08346
- thinkingemote 3y agoI've not read the book so am looking at the comments here for reasons why I should. The majority seem to be something like "I read it when younger and it was like a powerful transformational psychedelic experience at a one day festival". It is meaningful, reading it is something that is shared with others, but it is an event in time and is unrepeatable, and it's somehow unable to be fully communicated about to others who were not there. For some it seems foundational because it was encountered at a certain time in their life without really elucidating how their life actually changed (it's understandable because if it was done at their start of their life.) Is this accurate?
- tom_ 3y agoWhy not just read it? You can always give up halfway through if you get bored. I quite enjoyed it, but there's something of the Young Adult Reader about it that sat ill with me. One of those books where (once I'd read it) I found myself slightly wary of anybody that would bring it up. Same goes for Atlas Shrugged, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The dice man book is played too clearly for laughs IMO, but perhaps that one as well.
- adverbly 3y ago> Same goes for Atlas Shrugged, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I've got all three of these on my bookshelf behind me. Seems like we have similar taste! Any other recommendations? One I'd add to the list would be Unsong(can find it free online).
- Vecr 3y agoDo you also have a full printed out copy of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality on that bookshelf? I'm not sure you understood your parent comment's point.
- kragen 3y agothe comment you refer to was just attempting to displace the discussion we have been having about interesting ideas with chimpanzee dominance games and ingroup-outgroup dynamics, and it should have been flagged. the comment you were replying to was refusing to play the chimpanzee dominance game and returning the discussion to the topic of interesting ideas. your comment is again attempting to return the discussion to chimpanzee status displays and ingroup-outgroup dynamics and should also be flagged
- auggierose 3y ago> That’s a lovely fantasy, but Gödel shows that there are fundamental epistemic limits to the universe, things that no genius will help us to know, no alien race could teach us, no machine could be built to solve, and no new kinds of mathematics will uncover. That's not quite true. As an example, take differential calculus. It is hard to see how that would have been an idea to arrive at automatically by an algorithm, but a few geniuses (Newton/Leibniz) got there anyway. Similarly, even when a theorem doesn't follow from the usual axioms (and neither does its negation), maybe another genius comes along with an axiom that is quite obvious, and allows us to prove the theorem (just like peano axioms are axioms we would just accept as being obvious). So it is not that we cannot know everything, it's just that there is no guarantee and no obvious way of doing so.
- corysama 3y agoBut, that's not what Gödel proved. Not that things are hard, or non-obvious. But, that there are actual limits we won't be able to get past regardless of how much time and cleverness we apply to them. The limits might be very large. Might be unlimited for practical purposes. But, they are there waiting for us. I don't understand his theorems well enough to pretend to explain them to this audience. But, this is my understanding of them.
- auggierose 3y ago> But, that there are actual limits we won't be able to get past regardless of how much time and cleverness we apply to them. Nope, all he proved is that there is no automatic and purely formal way of arriving at truth. Doesn't mean that for any particular truth we cannot stumble upon a way to understand it anyway. For example, we cannot write a program (= automatic and purely formal way) to determine in general if an input program halts. But for a particular input program, we might be able to understand whether it halts anyway. There is just no a-priori guarantee that we will.
- trgn 3y agoI really don't think that this is the case. Godel proved that some truths cannot be proven. That seems pretty fundamental, and I think that's what made him so impactful, e.g. much more than e.g. the halting problem, which is about computation solely. What Godel also showed was that we can expand our a prioris, e.g. add another truth that "feels" intuitive to the axioms, and then we can understand some theorem or truth (ie. look under the hood, understand its mechanics). But that means expanding the system by some sort of oracle, some sort of "genius intuition". Fair enough, mathematicians will agree by consensus if it's the right think to do, but it's also infinitely regressive. So I'd agree with corysama here "we won't be able to get past regardless of how much time and cleverness we apply to them".
- tootallgavin 3y agoG.E.B is hegelian philosophy without one mention to Hegel and more mechanic than organic Anyone read the Phenomenology of Spirit and notice the same ideas?
- bbor 3y agoYES. So, so true. And Hegel in turn was just adapting Kant, despite calling him a “blockhead” in the preface (hilarious, can’t even imagine what 1800s German for “blockhead” is). It’s absolutely Hegelian. To make it more explicit for the HN audience: Hegel wrote a very famous book called the “The Experience of Mind” (or, in obnoxious philosophy language, “The phenomenology of Spirit”). In it, he details how he thinks the mind is made up of successive levels of distinct programs, each of which builds on what came for it in a very specific way he calls “dialectic synthesis”. In this way he goes through all the perceived capabilities of the mind (the big four in order roughly being sensation, understanding, awareness, and reason) and ties them to specific steps in this synthetic chain. I hope it’s obvious from that how this argument mimics GEB (which I understand as roughly “the human mind is a collection of looping programs with these characteristics”).
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago> which I understand as roughly “the human mind is a collection of looping programs with these characteristics” uh ... the center of Hofstadter's worldview, which he re-enunciated later in "I am a strange loop" is almost precisely the opposite of Hegel's persepective. Hofstadter came to see the idea of "heterarchical systems" as central to creativity and, in his opinion, consciousness. These systems are precisely not what Hegel describes, with "each level building on what came before it", but instead the levels are functionally and physically entangled so that "higher level" ones can intimately and profoundly impact "lower level" ones and vice versa.
- bbor 3y agoI love hacker news - I missed this a few days ago. You’re the first human I’ve talked to about these ideas I’ve been obsessing over for months, so it feels good to get some feedback! I’ll definitely have to look more into that. I guess my conception of Hegel has room for such “looping” — Kant explicitly says that high-level Reason produces ideas that directly impact the nature of our low-level Understanding, and I sorta assumed Hegel would agree. He’s obviously much more into the Synthesis as a means-onto-itself, not to mention much more dramatic, so it wouldn’t surprise me if the last chapters of PoS made no mention of the lower faculties. Thanks again, if you ever scroll back through your old comments and see this :). A helpful response indeed
- dventimi 3y agoAfter 742 pages and even after having written the paragraphs above, I still struggle with a simple answer to the question: “What is this book about?” The best I can come up with is that GEB equips you with mental models to contemplate philosophy. No thanks. I'm not reading a book that even its fans can't adequately explain.
- tnias23 3y agoDoes this book rely on a lot of images, or would it be decent on audiobook?
- FabHK 3y agoIt relies on images, typography, and the arrangement of things. I'd say a physical book or PDF would work best.
- j7ake 3y agoHow long does it take to really “read” GEB? There are puzzles and problems inside that could really extend how long you spend in that book.
- rongenre 3y agoPDF of GEB: https://archive.org/details/GEBen_201404 https://archive.org/details/GEBen_201404
- khazhoux 3y agoFun fact: 50% of printings of GEB have the pages all blank. This is rarely noticed.
- adverbly 3y agoGEB is my personal bible. It looks like I'll need to write a post just like this when I have a chance as it impacted me for all of those reasons, but my most significant take-aways(abstraction, the significance of analogies, and the meaning-of-meaning) are not even on OP's list.
- mp05 3y agoI had an ex that went to Bard and she adored this along with the zen motorcycle book, the windup bird book, and pretty much anything by Gladwell and his contemporaries (definitely that pretentious Lehrer guy). The comments in this thread confirm that I was correct to avoid it.
- kragen 3y agoi'm guessing you might mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind-Up_Bird_Chronicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind-Up_Bird_Chronicle? i've really enjoyed the murakami i've read, as well as the others (by lehrer do you mean tom lehrer, the nsa mathematician?) maybe you should introduce me to your ex, or at least tell me what other books she liked
- mp05 3y ago=] Nah it was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Lehrer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Lehrer I heard Murakami has some good stuff and I know my wife has some on the bookshelf. But I'm more commenting on the particular milieu, if you will, of a particular pretentious type of literature that I could never really get into. Perhaps if I went to class naked when I was in college I'd understand better.
- kragen 3y agoi've definitely been to hacker hot tub parties on several occasions, so i'd probably enjoy the naked classroom too i think what these authors have in common is not so much pretension as giving free rein to their very active imagination: caring as much about what could be as about what is. in the case of gladwell and lehrer, they've let it blur the lines between fiction and reporting (to everyone's detriment), but i don't think that's really the case with hofstadter, pirsig, and murakami
- mp05 3y agoThat's a very generous assessment of Lehrer who is about as contemptible a person as I can fathom, but I agree with your take. Different strokes.
- webdoodle 3y agoI picked up GEB after seeing a post about it here on HN. Although Hofstadter makes a few connections I was unaware of, such as Escher's artwork expressing recursive patterns, it was really underwhelming for the most part. As others have said, it takes 1000 pages to get to a point, that could have been made in significantly less. My only thought is that perhaps Hofstadters' rambling was an attempt at literary recursiveness, but his execution was lackluster.
- nullc 3y agoHere is one you won't hear many people say: I met my partner due to GEB. Some twenty years ago I was operating a muni network and was up at stupid hours due to a maintenance window. The people I normally talk to were all asleep, so I made a script that searched people on live journal that had similar tagged interests and added them to my aim buddy list-- then if they were online I messaged them. She was awake at an odd hour because someone had pulled a fire alarm in her dorm. I later went back to see why my program had added her, and there were a number of overlapping tags but it turns out there just weren't many people that listed "douglas hofstadter" as an interest on LiveJournal-- maybe 8 in total at the time-- so it had a lot of weight.
- drcwpl 3y agoWow - great catch...
- _gzov 3y agoIf ripping out the bugs causes systemic collapse then maybe that's a good thing. Regarding capitalism.
- __lbracket__ 3y agoAm I the only one who found it utterly boring?