4 ms·
Godel Escher Bach is the best book I've read. Very interesting topics and the sheer creativity of the writing is amazing.
by djkivi 2y ago
Godel Escher Bach is the best book I've read. Very interesting topics and the sheer creativity of the writing is amazing.
- KingOfCoders 2y ago[flagged]
- bobosha 2y agoi have the book and tried to read it many times, but never grokked it tbh. ;-)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- spicyusername 2y agoHofstadter is such a brilliant writer. All of his books are really on another level.
- edanm 2y agoI prefer his autobiography (https://xkcd.com/917/ https://xkcd.com/917/). Seriously though, this question is unanswerable, but your answer is probably one of the few books I'd get behind as an answer to this.
- araes 2y agoIn the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference. — Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, p. 363
- red-iron-pine 2y agoNGL, GEB was a slog. There is a free MIT course that covers it, and I'm glad I made use of that. "I Am a Strange Loop" by the same guy covers the same concepts, albeit without the whimsey or color.
- aanet 2y agoWhat is the MIT course that covers this book? Many thanks!
- smrq 2y agoIt was a slog, all three times, and yet it's still probably my favorite book. Sometimes slogging through is just worth it, I guess! (I also enjoyed Joyce the one time I read him, so it's possible that I can just appreciate a good slog...)
- hnfong 2y agoBut... But... But the whims and color were the best things about the book! I also appreciate that I learned a lot of tangential things mentioned in the book that had nothing to do with the mind or consciousness.
- jll29 2y agoI second that. Its translations are also the best translations known to mankind (I read the German one, the French is said to be as good or better).
- wsintra2022 2y agoBeen reading it for about a year on and off, I did read I am a strange loop before and really enjoyed the ideas and also the emotional side of it.
- abecedarius 2y agoI read it in high school and I probably would've picked it at the time. Fun note though: ~3 years later when I was learning Lisp it hit me that my understanding of GEB had been very shallow.
- EasyMark 2y agoOne of the few “you gotta read it” books from intellectual leaning friends that I never bothered reading. It could have states as much in 1/4 the number of pages.
- smrq 2y agoI'm a little confused by this comment. How can you make this particular criticism without having bothered to read the book in the first place?
- oglop 2y agoI think he misrepresents Russell and also Godel in ways. I enjoyed the book when I was young and it did launch my interest in logic but reading Godel’s personal writings, he had great respect for Russell and literally wrote in a paper defending Russell that he would not have made his discovery without the Principia Mathematica, because it showed him an instance of a consistent language and then he took the further step of noticing you could do this infinitely. My recollection was Hasshelhoff thought Russell was a kind of dunce who didn’t know what he was doing. He was putting in the fucking work for others to build on, and it was incredibly hard work if you read Russell’s autobiography of that time.