9 ms·

I 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 literar

by lisper 3y ago

I 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 ago
And 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  Ha 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 ago
Personally, 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.
- felipefar 3y ago
  There is a very clear distinction between details and main point. If you assume that there is no main point in a text, you negate all that the writer is trying to communicate.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Maybe I've been reading books the wrong way my whole life, but I never assume there's a singular "main point" in the text. I mean, why would one waste time writing 100 or 1000 page text circling around some single point for the reader to guess, instead of spelling it clearly up front, and then arguing for it?
  - munificent 3y ago
    You're asserting a dichotomy that I didn't make. Often, writing is like a connect-the-dots drawing where those points are the written details and the point is the overall shape. Yes, there is a "main point" that is not those details. But it's the details that convey it. Subtract all of them, and the shape disappears. For any given reader, some of those detail points won't resonate with them and will be basically ignored. But as long as there are enough other details, they will still trace the right shape and get the overall point. A big part of the art of writing is figuring out which constellation of details will lead to the right shape being traced in the minds of as many readers as possible.
jahnu 3y ago
> Indeed, Ulysses is almost nothing but "unnecessary detail", to the extent that it makes the book all but unreadable I was always apprehensive of reading Ulysses… until I did. And then I read some basic analysis of it and then read it again and now I’m slightly baffled why people find it _that_ difficult. Yes it’s not at all typical but it’s really not that hard and it’s definitely no Finnegan’s Wake. Now that’s a challenge!
- ballooney 3y ago
  I mean lots of the lore is just residual 16 year old’s getting into reading stuff. You read l’Estranger (translated), decide you’re an intellectual, and so have a go at Ulysses cos it’s the hardest one and so suitable for you, an intellectual. The internet has been a good transmission vector for the sentiment. If your ideas about cooking come from watching Masterchef (analogously), you might treat the idea of making a beurre blanc as a similar act of conquest, triumph in the face of splitting adversity whilst a thousand-voice choir crescendos in the background as you whisk. But a million french housewives happily made it for decades having never been told it’s impossible, and indeed knowing better that it isn’t.
  - jahnu 3y ago
    Hah! Nice cooking analogy :)
  - bdauvergne 3y ago
    Everybody is cooking in France, not only housewives, it's a part of being French.
  - 57FkMytWjyFu 3y ago
    I like them apples.
Gimpei 3y ago
I love Ulysses and metafiction in general, but when people apply this kind of writing style to philosophy it drives me a bit up the wall. Philosophy at the end of the day is about arguing a point; it isn't about producing an aesthetic experience. So why would you abuse your reader by making it a pain in the ass to figure out what you mean? I know there are some fancy arguments around stretching limits of language, but none of them seemed all that sensible to me. The only advantage I see to obscurantist writing is that it makes it impossible to critique the philosophers work. Any critique will just be met by the response that you didn't fully understand the author's argument. The Searle/Derrida debates are a great example of this. The upshot is that people spend all their time debating what you actually mean. Which I guess is good for the philosopher's brand, but doesn't advance knowledge much. This isn't to say that you can't have beautiful writing in philosophy. I think Gaston Bachelard is a great example of both an elegant writer and a clear writer. That being said, people really really love GEB, so it probably is worth reading regardless of these misgivings. One of these days I'll get to it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
  Hahah the whole point of op is that there is value in not always having a point, but meandering, especially for techies. Are you set an proving him right?
  - pierat 3y ago
    I think it'd be more fair to say that GEB is just philosophical navel-gazing with the appearance of some deep philosophical truth... When the actual truth is they cheaped out on editorial staff :D I got it, and read a portion of it. It was a meandering and badly written mess with no point. It felt like Seinfeld in science-ish form.
    - generic92034 3y ago
      > a meandering and badly written mess with no point Yeah, that is just typical for Pulitzer Prize winning books. /s
the__alchemist 3y ago
Is it also valid to draw a comparison to Gravity's Rainbow, or parts 2 and 3 of The Divine Comedy? I ask, because those were on a tier of their own for being impenetrable (to me); I'm worried this will go the same way, but am otherwise intrigued. Unrelated: Does anyone know of how to get an epub etc of this? Unavailable through Amazon etc.
- greggsy 3y ago
  There are several copies on Internet Archive.
- poncho_romero 3y ago
  I would suggest against an epub. I tried finding one too, only to realize the formatting of the book is ill-suited for anything but its original printed format (it’s far too particular for the epub format). Maybe give your local library a try?
- daseiner1 3y ago
  libgen.rs
- davedx 3y ago
  Gravity’s Rainbow. I never finished it. It’s more like One Hundred Years of Solitude though; GEB isn’t fiction
- lanstin 3y ago
  Hell is just inherently more interesting to the human mind than paradise or purgatory. I read Ulysses with a book group and a leader that had read it in grad school and a number of books that exist to explain Ulysses. I read GEB as a fourteen year old with no internet access and it changed my life, but the ending isn’t that important. The proof of how the incompleteness theorem works and the stuff on Koans is I think most of the meat.
mmaunder 3y ago
Thanks. Bailed on the motherfucker for this reason and will have to revisit.
Joeri 3y ago
It is funny that you bring Ulysses into it. I’ve tried reading both GEB and Ulysses multiple times and had to concede defeat every time somewhere between the 100 and 200 page mark. The same goes for the satanic verses. I suppose my mind just wants a book to get to the point more than it wants to get to the end.
- lisper 3y ago
  > It is funny that you bring Ulysses into it. Actually, the original article did that. I just followed the author's lead here.
nabla9 3y ago
Well said. It won Pulizer for a reason. It's not for learning facts, its for thinking. GEB ponders and it's masterfully written. I can also recommend Metamagical Themas from Hofstadter. It's a collection of articles he wrote for Scientific American.
knightoffaith 3y ago
>good for techies to read To be sure, you certainly didn't mean it this way, but for the sake of the poor guy who has seen GEB touted as one of these books that "every programmer/computer scientist/CS major has to read" and sees your post in the same light: You don't have to read GEB. You will be a fine techie without reading it. And you'll be a fine person in general without reading it. There is no spiritual revelation you can only get from GEB or some important technical knowledge that you'll get that you wouldn't get from a normal CS degree program. Try it out and see if you enjoy Hofstadter's writing - if you do, you might be in for a really enlightening and enjoyable experience. If you don't, no worries - your time is better spent elsewhere - there is no need to put yourself through the pain of slogging through a >700 page book that you don't enjoy. There are many other perfectly fine entry points for learning about topics in computer science, cognitive science, or philosophy of mind.
- nextaccountic 3y ago
  I didn't read GEB. But I watched this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92WHN-pAFCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92WHN-pAFCs And it's an absolutely brilliant - and very direct - exposition of Alan Turing's Halting theorem. (unfortunately I can't find analogues of this for many other related subjects) Some people are saying that GEB is too convoluted, but the base material absolutely doesn't need to be.
  - knightoffaith 3y ago
    Right. And to be sure, GEB might have Godel in the name, but it's not really a book about Godel's incompleteness theorems. It mentions them, but that is not really the main thrust of the book. It's not a book about Godel, Escher, and/or Bach, really (though of course it discusses the ideas of these three people a lot). Hofstadter, if I recall correctly, even says as much (or something along these lines) in the preface. So of course, there are more to-the-point resources for the technical concepts that Hofstadter employs. It's an understandable misconception to have when people so often say GEB is a must-read for techies and when it has a name that includes "Godel". So remember - GEB is about Hofstadter trying to argue for a point about a particular thesis (how the mind ("I") arises from the brain), and to that end, he employs many different concepts (many of which are from computer science) and explains them poetically (at least, a lot of people think so). But teaching you these concepts is just a secondary, even tertiary, goal of his. If you find his writing engaging, it might be a more fun way to learn about that stuff - but if not, don't worry, GEB wasn't primarily written to teach you anyway. I'm sure even the biggest GEB fans will agree.
cout 3y ago
I have not read Ulysses but I have read other works from Joyce and cannot imagine comparing him to Hofstadter. I put GEB in the same mental box as Sophie's World or the Mr. Tompkins books, where story is used as a means to the end of teaching something to an audience that would otherwise find the material unpalatable.
- lanstin 3y ago
  They both loved word play and enjoyed examples as much as they enjoyed generalities.
mcmoor 3y ago
I've heard about this book so many times and was interested to read it. But I know that as a non native English reader, my track record against reading English proses is very poor, and looks like lots of value of the book is exactly in the prose? Maybe I'll have to skip this one, unless some brave souls have already translated it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- martin_balsam 3y ago
  I don’t know what language you speak, but GEB it’s been translated into multiple languages during the years. I read it in Italian as a teen, the Italian edition is beautiful, and incredibly well translated (the book includes many puns and language tricks.)
  - Pamar 3y ago
    But if memory serves the translators of the Italian version removed a whole chapter of it (I might have to check details because I am far from both my author-signed English edition and the Italian one I bought many years later).
  - mcmoor 3y ago
    It's Indonesian, which as I have guessed, doesn't have one at least as far as I google it. But it's astonishing that this kind of book have so many translations! Even into Chinese, wow! I guess it's truly one of most influential book.
    - flexagoon 3y ago
      And the translations are actually very good, since Douglas Hofstadter worked directly with translators to ensure that as much of the wordplays and Easter eggs as possible are preserved (of which there are a lot)
- Phemist 3y ago
  The Dutch translation of GEB is excellent. I think others, e.g. the French, are also quite good/excellent, potentially because Hofstadter himself was quite involved in the translation process. Hell, much of GEB and especially his later books discuss translation extentensively, so it would be strange if there were authorized translations of GEB that were somehow lacking in quality.
dilippkumar 3y ago
> 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. Ok, for us the lazy, what is mother fucking the point of GEB? A single HN karma point from me is on offer for the honest answers.
- sgdpk 3y ago
  When systems (think "automated" systems like computer programs, mathematical axioms, formal systems, etc, where conclusions can be drawn/calculated "mechanically" from a few starting points) get large enough, they gain the ability to become self-referential. That is, they become expressive enough to encode statements about themselves. A hallmark of this are "incompleteness theorems" like those of Godel or the Turing halting problem. The book argues that these "strange loops" (of a system onto itself) are behind the emergence of intelligence and consciousness, because physical matter itself gives rise to human intelligence, albeit being a mechanical system.
  - MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
    Good summary. Examples of GEB’s “fluff” are missing from this comment section, so I wanted to jump in and add one of my favorite. Bach encoded his own name in music notes in a piece, and when discussing that, Hofstadter encodes a sentence in the first letter of each paragraph in that chapter.
    - lefrancais 3y ago
      Great examples buddy.(I know it's bad).
  - pgsandstrom 3y ago
    I can appreciate a book being obscure or dragging things out when it is trying to give the reader an aesthetic experience. But this point seem to be one that would easiest be communicated clearly and succinctly. Or is the point "there is so much mystery in these systems that perhaps there is room for an explanation for consciousness"? Maybe then I would be more sympathetic. Or perhaps I should just read the book before condemning it :)
atmosx 3y ago
meta-question: Do you have any idea why Joyce called the novel "Ulysses" (latin) and not "Odyssey" (greek)? ps. Haven't read the novel yet, it is in my queue.
- lisper 3y ago
  Not a clue. I've never actually read either one all the way through. GEB is about the limit of my tolerance for literary work.

by lisper 3y ago

hobs 3y ago

And 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 ago
I 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 ago
Ha 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 ago

Personally, 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.

felipefar 3y ago
There is a very clear distinction between details and main point. If you assume that there is no main point in a text, you negate all that the writer is trying to communicate.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Maybe I've been reading books the wrong way my whole life, but I never assume there's a singular "main point" in the text. I mean, why would one waste time writing 100 or 1000 page text circling around some single point for the reader to guess, instead of spelling it clearly up front, and then arguing for it?
- munificent 3y ago
  You're asserting a dichotomy that I didn't make. Often, writing is like a connect-the-dots drawing where those points are the written details and the point is the overall shape. Yes, there is a "main point" that is not those details. But it's the details that convey it. Subtract all of them, and the shape disappears. For any given reader, some of those detail points won't resonate with them and will be basically ignored. But as long as there are enough other details, they will still trace the right shape and get the overall point. A big part of the art of writing is figuring out which constellation of details will lead to the right shape being traced in the minds of as many readers as possible.

jahnu 3y ago

> Indeed, Ulysses is almost nothing but "unnecessary detail", to the extent that it makes the book all but unreadable I was always apprehensive of reading Ulysses… until I did. And then I read some basic analysis of it and then read it again and now I’m slightly baffled why people find it _that_ difficult. Yes it’s not at all typical but it’s really not that hard and it’s definitely no Finnegan’s Wake. Now that’s a challenge!

ballooney 3y ago
I mean lots of the lore is just residual 16 year old’s getting into reading stuff. You read l’Estranger (translated), decide you’re an intellectual, and so have a go at Ulysses cos it’s the hardest one and so suitable for you, an intellectual. The internet has been a good transmission vector for the sentiment. If your ideas about cooking come from watching Masterchef (analogously), you might treat the idea of making a beurre blanc as a similar act of conquest, triumph in the face of splitting adversity whilst a thousand-voice choir crescendos in the background as you whisk. But a million french housewives happily made it for decades having never been told it’s impossible, and indeed knowing better that it isn’t.
- jahnu 3y ago
  Hah! Nice cooking analogy :)
- bdauvergne 3y ago
  Everybody is cooking in France, not only housewives, it's a part of being French.
- 57FkMytWjyFu 3y ago
  I like them apples.

Gimpei 3y ago

I love Ulysses and metafiction in general, but when people apply this kind of writing style to philosophy it drives me a bit up the wall. Philosophy at the end of the day is about arguing a point; it isn't about producing an aesthetic experience. So why would you abuse your reader by making it a pain in the ass to figure out what you mean? I know there are some fancy arguments around stretching limits of language, but none of them seemed all that sensible to me. The only advantage I see to obscurantist writing is that it makes it impossible to critique the philosophers work. Any critique will just be met by the response that you didn't fully understand the author's argument. The Searle/Derrida debates are a great example of this. The upshot is that people spend all their time debating what you actually mean. Which I guess is good for the philosopher's brand, but doesn't advance knowledge much. This isn't to say that you can't have beautiful writing in philosophy. I think Gaston Bachelard is a great example of both an elegant writer and a clear writer. That being said, people really really love GEB, so it probably is worth reading regardless of these misgivings. One of these days I'll get to it.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
Hahah the whole point of op is that there is value in not always having a point, but meandering, especially for techies. Are you set an proving him right?
- pierat 3y ago
  I think it'd be more fair to say that GEB is just philosophical navel-gazing with the appearance of some deep philosophical truth... When the actual truth is they cheaped out on editorial staff :D I got it, and read a portion of it. It was a meandering and badly written mess with no point. It felt like Seinfeld in science-ish form.
  - generic92034 3y ago
    > a meandering and badly written mess with no point Yeah, that is just typical for Pulitzer Prize winning books. /s

the__alchemist 3y ago

Is it also valid to draw a comparison to Gravity's Rainbow, or parts 2 and 3 of The Divine Comedy? I ask, because those were on a tier of their own for being impenetrable (to me); I'm worried this will go the same way, but am otherwise intrigued. Unrelated: Does anyone know of how to get an epub etc of this? Unavailable through Amazon etc.

greggsy 3y ago
There are several copies on Internet Archive.
poncho_romero 3y ago
I would suggest against an epub. I tried finding one too, only to realize the formatting of the book is ill-suited for anything but its original printed format (it’s far too particular for the epub format). Maybe give your local library a try?
daseiner1 3y ago
libgen.rs
davedx 3y ago
Gravity’s Rainbow. I never finished it. It’s more like One Hundred Years of Solitude though; GEB isn’t fiction
lanstin 3y ago
Hell is just inherently more interesting to the human mind than paradise or purgatory. I read Ulysses with a book group and a leader that had read it in grad school and a number of books that exist to explain Ulysses. I read GEB as a fourteen year old with no internet access and it changed my life, but the ending isn’t that important. The proof of how the incompleteness theorem works and the stuff on Koans is I think most of the meat.

mmaunder 3y ago

Thanks. Bailed on the motherfucker for this reason and will have to revisit.

Joeri 3y ago

It is funny that you bring Ulysses into it. I’ve tried reading both GEB and Ulysses multiple times and had to concede defeat every time somewhere between the 100 and 200 page mark. The same goes for the satanic verses. I suppose my mind just wants a book to get to the point more than it wants to get to the end.

lisper 3y ago
> It is funny that you bring Ulysses into it. Actually, the original article did that. I just followed the author's lead here.

nabla9 3y ago

Well said. It won Pulizer for a reason. It's not for learning facts, its for thinking. GEB ponders and it's masterfully written. I can also recommend Metamagical Themas from Hofstadter. It's a collection of articles he wrote for Scientific American.

knightoffaith 3y ago

>good for techies to read To be sure, you certainly didn't mean it this way, but for the sake of the poor guy who has seen GEB touted as one of these books that "every programmer/computer scientist/CS major has to read" and sees your post in the same light: You don't have to read GEB. You will be a fine techie without reading it. And you'll be a fine person in general without reading it. There is no spiritual revelation you can only get from GEB or some important technical knowledge that you'll get that you wouldn't get from a normal CS degree program. Try it out and see if you enjoy Hofstadter's writing - if you do, you might be in for a really enlightening and enjoyable experience. If you don't, no worries - your time is better spent elsewhere - there is no need to put yourself through the pain of slogging through a >700 page book that you don't enjoy. There are many other perfectly fine entry points for learning about topics in computer science, cognitive science, or philosophy of mind.

nextaccountic 3y ago
I didn't read GEB. But I watched this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92WHN-pAFCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92WHN-pAFCs And it's an absolutely brilliant - and very direct - exposition of Alan Turing's Halting theorem. (unfortunately I can't find analogues of this for many other related subjects) Some people are saying that GEB is too convoluted, but the base material absolutely doesn't need to be.
- knightoffaith 3y ago
  Right. And to be sure, GEB might have Godel in the name, but it's not really a book about Godel's incompleteness theorems. It mentions them, but that is not really the main thrust of the book. It's not a book about Godel, Escher, and/or Bach, really (though of course it discusses the ideas of these three people a lot). Hofstadter, if I recall correctly, even says as much (or something along these lines) in the preface. So of course, there are more to-the-point resources for the technical concepts that Hofstadter employs. It's an understandable misconception to have when people so often say GEB is a must-read for techies and when it has a name that includes "Godel". So remember - GEB is about Hofstadter trying to argue for a point about a particular thesis (how the mind ("I") arises from the brain), and to that end, he employs many different concepts (many of which are from computer science) and explains them poetically (at least, a lot of people think so). But teaching you these concepts is just a secondary, even tertiary, goal of his. If you find his writing engaging, it might be a more fun way to learn about that stuff - but if not, don't worry, GEB wasn't primarily written to teach you anyway. I'm sure even the biggest GEB fans will agree.

cout 3y ago

I have not read Ulysses but I have read other works from Joyce and cannot imagine comparing him to Hofstadter. I put GEB in the same mental box as Sophie's World or the Mr. Tompkins books, where story is used as a means to the end of teaching something to an audience that would otherwise find the material unpalatable.

lanstin 3y ago
They both loved word play and enjoyed examples as much as they enjoyed generalities.

mcmoor 3y ago

I've heard about this book so many times and was interested to read it. But I know that as a non native English reader, my track record against reading English proses is very poor, and looks like lots of value of the book is exactly in the prose? Maybe I'll have to skip this one, unless some brave souls have already translated it.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
martin_balsam 3y ago
I don’t know what language you speak, but GEB it’s been translated into multiple languages during the years. I read it in Italian as a teen, the Italian edition is beautiful, and incredibly well translated (the book includes many puns and language tricks.)
- Pamar 3y ago
  But if memory serves the translators of the Italian version removed a whole chapter of it (I might have to check details because I am far from both my author-signed English edition and the Italian one I bought many years later).
- mcmoor 3y ago
  It's Indonesian, which as I have guessed, doesn't have one at least as far as I google it. But it's astonishing that this kind of book have so many translations! Even into Chinese, wow! I guess it's truly one of most influential book.
  - flexagoon 3y ago
    And the translations are actually very good, since Douglas Hofstadter worked directly with translators to ensure that as much of the wordplays and Easter eggs as possible are preserved (of which there are a lot)
Phemist 3y ago
The Dutch translation of GEB is excellent. I think others, e.g. the French, are also quite good/excellent, potentially because Hofstadter himself was quite involved in the translation process. Hell, much of GEB and especially his later books discuss translation extentensively, so it would be strange if there were authorized translations of GEB that were somehow lacking in quality.

dilippkumar 3y ago

> 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. Ok, for us the lazy, what is mother fucking the point of GEB? A single HN karma point from me is on offer for the honest answers.

sgdpk 3y ago
When systems (think "automated" systems like computer programs, mathematical axioms, formal systems, etc, where conclusions can be drawn/calculated "mechanically" from a few starting points) get large enough, they gain the ability to become self-referential. That is, they become expressive enough to encode statements about themselves. A hallmark of this are "incompleteness theorems" like those of Godel or the Turing halting problem. The book argues that these "strange loops" (of a system onto itself) are behind the emergence of intelligence and consciousness, because physical matter itself gives rise to human intelligence, albeit being a mechanical system.
- MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
  Good summary. Examples of GEB’s “fluff” are missing from this comment section, so I wanted to jump in and add one of my favorite. Bach encoded his own name in music notes in a piece, and when discussing that, Hofstadter encodes a sentence in the first letter of each paragraph in that chapter.
  - lefrancais 3y ago
    Great examples buddy.(I know it's bad).
- pgsandstrom 3y ago
  I can appreciate a book being obscure or dragging things out when it is trying to give the reader an aesthetic experience. But this point seem to be one that would easiest be communicated clearly and succinctly. Or is the point "there is so much mystery in these systems that perhaps there is room for an explanation for consciousness"? Maybe then I would be more sympathetic. Or perhaps I should just read the book before condemning it :)

atmosx 3y ago

meta-question: Do you have any idea why Joyce called the novel "Ulysses" (latin) and not "Odyssey" (greek)? ps. Haven't read the novel yet, it is in my queue.

lisper 3y ago
Not a clue. I've never actually read either one all the way through. GEB is about the limit of my tolerance for literary work.