I 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 w

I 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.