> "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

> "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.