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I'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 li

• tom_ 3y ago
  Why 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 ago
      Do 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 ago
        the 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
        • tom_ 3y ago
          They can always read the book, as I suggested, and make their own mind up. They could do that with the other books I mentioned as well!
• bbor 3y ago
  I think it’s an incredibly important book to read if you’re interested in building software systems that mimic the human mind.
• gjm11 3y ago
  That may well be some people's experience. It wasn't mine. Not because I didn't like it: I enjoyed it a lot, I learned things from it, it was one of my favourite books, etc. I still think it's an impressive piece of work. But there was nothing particularly ineffable about it. So let me try to summarize some of the perfectly effable things that people who like GEB tend to like about it, which might (or might not!) make it worth reading for you. 1. It's a playful book. Hofstadter is having a lot of fun as he writes. (I think this is one of the things that people who don't like the book tend to really dislike: if you don't happen to enjoy the same things Hofstadter does, it can just feel self-indulgent.) Here's a fairly typical example of the sort of thing he does: the book alternates between ordinary chapters, where Hofstadter might explain some bit of mathematics or talk about an incident in the life of J S Bach or whatever, and dialogues between some imaginary characters. Each of those dialogues is named after a particular piece of music by J S Bach. For instance, one of them is called "Crab Canon", after one of the little pieces in Bach's "Musical Offering" which has the amusing property that it's the same forwards as backwards. So Hofstadter's dialogue is also the same forwards as backwards, and he's constructed it so that the conversation makes a reasonable amount of sense both ways around. That's a fairly superficial sort of play -- it doesn't have much to do with the deeper underlying ideas Hofstadter is trying to explore, it's just a bit of fun. But he does play around with the deeper ideas too. 2. It brings a bunch of apparently different ideas together and relates them to one another. The "psychedelic" aspects may come from this -- there's something of the "wow, I never realised before, but everything is, like, one thing" to it. And this is another thing that you might either really like -- he's made a bunch of unobvious connections between things you mightn't have seen links between, and connecting things better enriches your mind -- or really dislike, if you feel that the connections he's claiming to make are bogus. For instance, Hofstadter is very keen on what he calls "strange loops", in which category he includes (1) indirect self-reference, as in the machinery of Goedel's incompleteness theorem or "quining" (copy this down, first without the quotes and then again, after a colon, with them: "copy this down, first without the quotes and then again, after a colon, with them") and (2) what happens when a person thinks about their self and (3) Escher pictures like "Print Gallery" or "Drawing Hands" that somehow show something containing or creating a representation of itself and (4) the way in which DNA codes for proteins which make cells with machinery for converting DNA into proteins which etc. and (5) rather more tendentiously, one of Bach's canons which ends a tone higher than it starts so that if you kept on playing it the key would keep rising and rising. The common theme is something about traversing levels of a hierarchy and somehow coming back to where you started. If you agree with Hofstadter that this is an interesting and important general phenomenon (he thinks it's essential to how conscious minds work) and that all these diverse things are cases of it, then you'll find this enlightening, maybe even exciting. If you think he's just grouped together a bunch of things with little in common and convinced himself they're all the same thing, then not. 3. It talks about some really quite exciting mathematics (at least, for those who are able to be excited by mathematics): Goedel's incompleteness theorems. If you just want to learn about how Goedel's stuff works, you can get that more efficiently and probably more clearly in other places. But Hofstadter's explanation isn't so bad, and he intertwines it with all those other things he's interested in, and once again you might like it or hate it. In any case, for many people GEB was their first exposure to the idea that some statements that are just about the properties of the positive integers might be provably neither provable nor disprovable, and to the neat techniques Goedel cooked up by which, in some sense, statements about properties of positive integers can "really" be "talking about" mathematical statements and proofs and whatnot, and these are (again, for some subset of the population) exciting ideas. 4. Escher made some really cool pictures. Bach made some really cool music. If you happen not to be familiar with them before reading GEB, then being introduced to this cool stuff is a pretty valuable service GEB can do you. 5. Chunks of GEB are about artificial intelligence. The world of AI has changed a lot since GEB, of course, and today's AI systems don't have at all the sort of structure I think Hofstadter expected them to have. (It may be that they have some of that structure "hidden inside" -- artificial neural networks are mysterious and inscrutable in something like the same way as brains are -- but I think Hofstadter was expecting that structure to be in the code.) I haven't read GEB in a while and won't try to pronounce on how much value his thoughts-from-way-back-then have today. But I think one thing some people have found exciting about GEB, especially when reading it early in life, is that it was the first thing they read that took seriously the possibility that computers might be able to think in something like the same way as humans, and tried to think about how that might work. The ideas of AI are much more "in the water supply" these days; I doubt anyone will first hear about them from reading GEB any more. 6. (Same theme as 3, 4, 5.) There are just lots of interesting things in GEB. Zen koans. Fractals. Winograd's "SHRDLU" AI system. Bacteriophages. Non-euclidean geometry. Srinivasa Ramanujan. Etc. You won't learn much about any of these things from GEB, but encountering them at all is delightful if one happens not to have seen them before. So the experience of reading the book, if one happens not already to know everything, is one where at any moment you may suddenly encounter some fascinating new thing. I am not claiming that you should read GEB. It's pretty long. All the individual things you could learn from it, you could learn another way. If you're a generally-well-informed adult, you probably already know a lot of the things some people first encounter in GEB. You might not share Hofstadter's taste in wordplay and the like. But it definitely has merits that can be described.
• hnfong 3y ago
  > "I read it when younger and it was like a powerful transformational psychedelic experience at a one day festival" I never had a psychedelic experience but I wouldn't object to this way of framing my experience with the book. I would say there's something more "profound" than what you'd get from reductionistically learning the concepts introduced in the book one by one. It feels as if the author had a powerful transformational psychedelic experience and afterwards he wrote the book to share what he learned about consciousness and its relationships with self-referential computation. While it seems the crowd here is focused on the "Gödel" part, the book actually dives deep into a lot of auxiliary topics, for example (from memory having read it 20 years ago) - ideas about Zen, tensions between reductionism and holism, how DNA replicates itself, contrapuntal music etc. And while GEB isn't necessarily a great introduction to these topics, the concepts are indeed related in some way towards the philosophical question of consciousness, and IMHO the reader benefits from having been introduced these concepts in such a context. So if you're just trying to understand Gödel's theorem there are better books. And the mismatch in expectation is probably much of the frustration by those who didn't like the book that much. All that said, just try reading a couple chapters and see if you like it. The "psychedelic experience" isn't for everyone, so just try it and see for yourself if it vibes with you.
• kragen 3y ago
  no, it's mostly that it's 700 pages long (about half the length of the christian bible) and very wide-ranging (also like the christian bible), so you can't put it into a comment on the orange website howard anton's textbook calculus was foundational for me because it was the textbook i learned the integral and differential calculus from. reading an introductory calculus textbook for me today would not be the same kind of transformational experience because i'd be brushing up on particular integration techniques and theorems rather than encountering a wholly new way of understanding the world for the first time, then struggling to assimilate it into my worldview and skillset. want to know how it changed my worldview? well, if you don't know calculus, i could fully communicate it to you if you make enough effort, but communicating it to you would involve teaching you calculus, and either writing a calculus textbook or persuading you to work through an existing one. you aren't going to understand what i'm talking about after reading a comment on here and geb is the same way. it was my introduction to the following ideas: formal axiom systems, baroque music theory, symbolic ai, gödel's incompleteness theorem, the foundations of mathematics in general, the formalist conception of mathematics in particular, hilbert's program and the entscheidungprobleme, mathematical isomorphisms, the art of magritte, the music of john cage, the central dogma of molecular biology, the concept of holism, the artistic difficulty of linguistic translation, non-turing-complete programming languages, lucas's flawed argument against the possibility of ai, tarski, quines, and shrdlu. there are probably numerous others i've forgotten. some of these he carefully explains in detail; others he just touches on. about a third of these topics have formed significant parts of my intellectual life in the ensuing decades quite aside from thus broadening my intellectual horizons enormously, it was a pure delight. the author's enthusiasm for playing in these fields of thought was contagious, perhaps because i was not yet the bitter, jaded cynic i am today. the aesthetic experience of being led through this gallery of wonders is of course not communicable, any more than the experience of listening to bach (or cage, or king crimson, or icp, or system of a down, or myrath, or the beatles) or watching the sun rise on a partly cloudy day probably if i hadn't run across geb at puberty i would have eventually encountered most of those ideas anyway, and probably encountering it later wouldn't have been nearly so delightful, because explanations of ideas one already understands are rarely as exciting as explanations of utterly novel mind-expanding ideas so in that sense it's true that 'it is an event in time and is unrepeatable', in the same way as learning anything is unrepeatable. it's true that 'it's somehow unable to be fully communicated about to others [who haven't learned it]', in the sense that you can't fully communicate concepts within any given field of knowledge to people who aren't familiar with its basics. if you don't know what a derivative is, nobody is going to be able to communicate stokes' theorem to you. if you don't know what money is, nobody is going to be able to communicate why microsoft europe is headquartered in ireland to you. and, in the same way, if you don't have any idea what string rewriting systems have to do with mathematical provability, gödel's theorem will sound like crazy moon language to you, though of course geb isn't the only way to become acquainted with those notions i think the major difference from psychedelic revelations is that many of the things you'll learn from geb are actually true, in an objective, scientific sense, though not some of the 01970s conventional wisdom about how artificial intelligence could be built hopefully that helps to clarify things for you a bit