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Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

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In his book Science and Sanity, in explaining his great formulations of _abstracting_ and _consciousness of abstracting_, Alfred Korzybski coined three fundamental truths about human knowledge and understanding: (1)The map is not the territory, (2) the map does not show all of the territory, and (3) the map is self-reflexive. It is this last truth, the map is self-reflexive, which interests Douglas Hofstader, and he does a wonderful job of exploring it in all its richness, using the works of Godel, Escher, and Bach as a theme or jumping-off point, on to modern mathematics and beyond. He says, "I remember at an early age, there was nothing more fascinating to me than the idea of taking three 3's: operating upon 3 with itself! I was sure that this idea was so subtle that it was inconceivable to anyone else--but I dared ask my mother one day how big it was anyway, and she answered "Nine"."

Reading and working with this book is like getting a college education on the cheap, a wonderful introduction to a variety of fascinating and enlightening subjects whose substance is only vaguely understood (if at all) by the average individual. It will clear these up for you quite nicely.

In 1979 a book appeared which expressed a religious vision using examples from mathematics, art, music, psychology, biology, physics and other fields so amazingly that I placed it with my collection of world scriptures. It remains there today.

Written by artificial intelligence researcher Douglas R Hofstadter, the book, Godel, Escher, Bach won a Pulitzer Prize. It was called the "best non-fiction book of the 20th Century." No theologian of any age -- not Aquinas, not Tillich, not Nagarjuna, not Samkara -- has written more ingeniously about God and the mystery of consciousness.

Its 800 pages are difficult but fun.

Even if you don't do math or Zen koans, you can follow the book's development because before each chapter is a story which illustrates the chapter's theme. These fictions are themselves written as pieces of contrapuntal music. "Crab Canon," for example, reads the same whether you begin at the first or the last sentence.

One theme of the book is recursion, which can be described as a procedure which contains a smaller version of itself, like a story within a story. This theme prepares the reader to see how DNA, for example, is information which copies itself through generations -- DNA as both "software" and "hardware."

In this light, the book itself becomes a recursive revelation, a self-extracting document which the universe has brought forth. This suggests that the universe, too, is recursive.

This book illustrates how can we decode its sacred meaning from every and any situation.

If there ever were a book about which it might be said, not in any simple, literal sense, but in the most profound way possible, that it was written by God (if there is a God), this may be the book. How can such a claim be justified? The book pushes Hofstadter aside (or rather, inside) and itself answers in the most natural yet amazing way.

It changed my life. I had majored in philosophy and psychology. It answered all the major questions I had: How can neurons just fire on/off and somehow combine to produce seeing, hearing, thinking, etc.?
Then I found DHR's G.E.B.! My favorite part is the "anthill" analogy: Ants have no brains, just a nerve center, yet these dumb ants prosper. How is that possible? Where is the intelligence? Answer: it is distributed as a system within the anthill itself! Soldier ants defend, queen ants lay eggs, workers do the leg work, etc. -- But each ant doesn't know anything, doesn't have "consciousness". The individual ant (neuron) does one thing, and one thing only, yet in a complex system, the WHOLE is greater than the sum of its PARTS.
It's all related: foreground vs. background, the medium is the message, the simulated feeling in simulated people produce simulated pleasure/pain. The confusion of form & content (like DNA sequencing, and Bach's crab canon) makes one's mind spin!
I don't pretend to understand the mathematical part, but Part Two just blew my mind. Yes, it is my favorite book of all time.

I would never give anything 10 out of 10.

My copy of this book is sitting on the desk to the left to me. It usualy lives on the bookshelves about 40cms to the left of that. It is battered, worn and the paper cover's torn. It is the 1980 Penguin edition. It's been read about 10 times. It's been skimmed a hundred times more.

Max Escher visited my life when I became fascinated with the process of lithography after initially discovering the work of William Heath-Robinson. J S Bach wrote some wonderful blues baselines which I shamelessly plagerised when doing my music O-level. Godel was a strange name (despite my background in mathematics).

I write computer programs for a living. Alan Turing has always been my hero (he died 3 months before I was born). Pictures and music have always been part of my life. Formal systems more so. Zen came in the 60s (via, indirectly, Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance").

There are those who find this book trivial and the jokes facile. There are those who find this book difficult and confusing. The former are those who lack the joy of a child finding magic in numbers and who have their own intellectual agenda to impose. The latter need encouragement: this book needs work, it makes you think and thinking has consequences. You do not need to accept Hofstadter's thesis (though it is a damn sight more convincing than that of Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Clothes), but you *must* find joy in its presentation. The only comparable book (though far more limited in its domain) is Raymond Smullyan's "What is the Name of this Book?".

The very exsitence of GEB adds colour to our lives and gives us, in Ian Drury's immortal words, "reasons to be cheerful". This book is the starting point for thought, converstation and discovery. It presents concepts as a process of revalation. It is the work of a unique mind. Some people don't like that. I do. Try it and see.

_Godel_Escher_Bach_(GEB) is a monumental book, as demonstrated by enthusiastic reviews it received and its winning of the Pulitzer prize. GEB presents and deals with the topics of formal systems, meta-mathematics, recursion, meaning, thinking, levels of existence and artificial intelligence. I will not even attempt supplying a more detailed description of the contents, as in order to justly represent it the whole book must be included, as this book is crammed and packed with ideas, concepts and views which are all essential to its fabric. As the extremely brief and partial list of topics I mentioned may, or may not, suggest, this subjects the book deals with are fascinating. Any intellectually active person will find it enlightening. Among those who I suspect may be most interested in reading this book, and who have the most tools to appreciate it and profit from it, are programmers. GEB supplies an invaluable insight into the heart of computer programming, grasping concepts a programmer will appreciate as a reach into the very soul of creation. What makes this book really special is, however, the way it is built. The whole book is, metaphorically speaking, one continuous intellectual adventure with views which provoke reader's imagination, oracles who challenge his power of logic and wise old men who teach the mysteries of life. The exploration path the book takes inside knowledge is well defined and well structured, while it keeps the reader free to wander off and explore the land around it whenever he is intrigued by the implications of what he learns. One highly amusing and appealing technique used in GEB is preceding each chapter with a short story (a few pages long) "in the spirit of Lewis Carroll" of Achilles, the tortoise and their merry company, a story which vividly demonstrates key concepts which the actual chapter then goes on to discuss, often based on the metaphors presented in that story. All in all, _Godel_Escer_Bach_ is extremely fascinating, entertaining and enriching. Highly recommended.

Can't be described with adjectives, but I'll try. This is, simply put, a book that everybody interested, or potentially capable to understand top level as well as obscure and inner relationships between mathematics, Information Technology, language theory, music, brain structure/thought processes, and genetics definitely HAS to read. I especially liked, or better to say, loved, this book because many concepts in it were exactly the written-down versions of some vague thinking I had done, often unconsciously, in the past, being engaged or interested in most of those knowledge fields. Seeing those ideas dumped to a book available to anybody in such a clear, straightforward form, was really shocking for me at first. After having read the book don't-know-how-many times, the summer was finished. I then realized this book absorbed me in all of my free time. There is almost nothing, even in such a huge book, I could disagree. Perhaps the interleaved form in which concepts are presented confused me at first, but once the reader gets used to this layout (pardon! PATTERN), it greatly adds to the fun of reading on and to the percent of understanding of the underlying analogies between so many different worlds. Years after having read this book, thanks to a congress in Milan, I had the incredible chance to host Douglas and his children at my home for an unforgettable dinner. Needless to say, my copy of "G.E.B." now has Douglas' autograph on it.... what a honor!

I finally finished "Gödel, Escher, Bach" the other day. Does this book deserve a review? Sure, it's over 700 pages long and took me more than a month to read. Not because it was too complicated or difficult but because of my lack of daily reading time. If I were to describe this work in a few words I would say it's mostly a vehicle of self-promotion for the author. Hofstadter seems to yell in a high-pitched tone: "look at me, I know so many things, I know math, computers, molecular biology, ants, zen, logic, artificial intelligence, music and art and philosophy, and I have an opinion on everything" (and he talks about other subjects too which, for the sake of keeping this paragraph within bounds, I chose to omit). The sheer number of topics covered is not the problem; what bothered me about the book - which I started reading with the best intentions - and almost made me abandon it, was that this attitude of "showing-off" pervades everywhere through the superficiality of the story. Hofstadter embarks on a quest to show that many aspects of life are made of "strange loops", which always have a self-referential, unprovable element that leads to incompleteness. His central point seems to be Gödel's theorem of formal systems (I say "seems" because it's never clear what his point actually is), and from there he draws parallels to all things who seem to work by similar rules: the origin of intelligence and logic, the life of ant colonies, Bach's extremely elaborate music, Escher's tricky drawings, the internal mechanisms of the living cell, you name it.

But Hofstadter never offers any insight in any of these subjects, neither for people who are familiar with them nor for those who - like the majority of the readers - have some sort of vague, superficial knowledge about them. He goes on rambling about everything under the sun and at one point, if I remember well, he even starts to dissect and praise his own thought process in relation to how he wrote one of the inane dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise. He tries to write funny sometimes, but his funny parts become quickly rather annoying. He reminds me of the guy whose class workshop I attended once and who couldn't stop cracking jokes for the audience even if nobody was laughing. However, if one is to believe the reviews it gets on Amazon, the book creates an effect of awe on many people, who feel that they belong to a select club for having read it. The average reaction is "This book is awesome although... I didn't understand much of it".

Long story short, I was disappointed. I had expected to be captivated and fascinated but I wasn't. I had expected to learn a great deal but I didn't - the book doesn't go past my own murky ideas about infinity, self-reference, origins of though and the other eternal major questions of humanity. But I wouldn't diss the book completely; it is, after all, a book that makes one think and no such book is ever a waste of paper. If you have read this book you have at least asked yourselves the same questions as the author, and although you may not have an answer, you have started on a journey of the mind, a journey that should never stop. If you haven't read the book but were thinking about it, think again - there are only so many books you can read in a lifetime and this one can be safely skipped. Just don't pick "The DaVinci Code" instead...

I've struggled through this book ... three times. The first, shortly after it came out. The second, immediately after the first. The third, several years later. Finally, I will reread it cover-to-cover soon after 15 more years of life experience.

I do not exagerate to say that my perspective of the world has been altered by this work. My wife, knowing my feelings, had the book leather bound, as a birthday present, at a cost of six times the original price of the book. My copy is dog eared, with extensive margin notes, and pages torn and yellowed with use.

Until I read this book I didn't know:

* The shocking implications of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.

* The mathematical genius of Bach

* That self-reference and self-replication are strange manifestations of the same central phenomenon.

* That ant colonies and the mind are oddly similar.

* That important achievements in many disciplines have the same paradoxical seed.

* That difficult presentations could be so much FUN to read.

This book is aerobics for the mind. If you enjoy thinking, read this book.

A few years ago, a friend lent me this book, and I started to read. 24 hours later, with no sleep and little food, I'd finished it. Each concept in this book was presented in such a clear way, and leading from one thread to the next. A wonderful work, giving part-time and amature philosophers, mathematitians, and computer scientists something to think about! Everyone should read this book at least once. *smile*

Godel Escher Bach is, by far, the absolute best book I have ever read. It is far-reaching and its topics seem scattered, yet, at the same time, it is quite focused, in an odd sort of way. It swallows itself in its rather idiosyncratic way, and you can't help but want to go with it. Each time I read this book(which, by the way, is sitting next to me right now), I find more and more and more. I don't think even Dr. Hofstadter comprehends the entirety of if its complexity and beauty. If you are sophisticated enough to understand it, you can't help but love it.