
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - kudu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
======
VonGuard
Don't quite know why this is here, but if you haven't read any Douglas
Hofstadter, this is probably where to start. This is a book that will A:
change your life, B: require a pencil and paper to read with, C: Introduce you
to Bach's genius, and D: will probably give you a greater appreciation of
social interactions and language if for no other reason than it boils all of
consciousness down to, essentially, language.

I'm so over simplifying it, and there's a lot more here than this. But I still
found it extremely interesting to read this and contemplate just how
intricately tied to our inner-narratives we are. Without that never-ending
dialog in our heads, we're not really sentient, and without a language, we
can't have that dialog...

Again, way more here, but this was the big thing I took away. I am a strange
loop, after all.

~~~
rrss1122
I think you're going a little too far with A: change your life. It's
definitely an entertaining read, but that's as far as it goes for me.

~~~
lucastx
It changed my life as well -- along with other great books he wrote:

"The Mind's I", a collaboration with Daniel Dennett, is a more light read than
Gödel Escher Bach which also talks about consciousness, emergence and
cognition.

"Metamagical Themas" is a collection of fascinating articles he wrote for
Scientific American after Martin Gardner stopped publishing his "Mathematical
Games" (do you see what he did here?)

I can perceive the influence his ideas have in the way I raise my child,
relate to people and act in the world. I would go as far as to say that my
spirituality was sparked by his texts, specially those related to Zen and
consciousness.

Sure, YMMV -- this is entirely subjective (as everything in life, really).

~~~
dominotw
>It changed my life as well -

Lots of people are saying this here. May I ask how it changed your life?

~~~
lucastx
It introduced me to cognition as a emergent phenomena (specially the chapter
"Prelude ... Ant Fugue" [1]).

It made me think about various philosophical topics such as holism vs
reductionism and syntax vs semantics, the meaning of "meaning", intelligence,
cognition...

...and then absolutely blew them all with the Zen approach to life.

[1]
[http://themindi.blogspot.com.br/2007/02/chapter-11-prelude-a...](http://themindi.blogspot.com.br/2007/02/chapter-11-prelude-
ant-fugue.html)

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DanAndersen
This is probably the only physical book I've purchased in the past several
years and felt was a good investment, because of the lack of a decent e-book
version. I haven't actually worked my way all the way through it yet; I had
started about a year ago, made it about a third of the way through before
getting distracted, and now I'm starting it again because it really is the
kind of book that you have to build up piece by piece as a reader. I feel like
my Web-browsing-Stack-Overflowing approach to reading over the past several
years has hurt me and I hope working through GEB can help me get more
experience in really working with a text deeply.

I've also found it helpful to consult the MIT OCW video lectures on this book:
[http://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/humanities-and-social-
science...](http://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/humanities-and-social-
sciences/godel-escher-bach/video-lectures/)

~~~
hatu
This seems like a cool lecture, thanks. I've read it maybe halfway through
before getting distracted also. It was one of the maybe 5 out of over a 100
books I brought with me when I moved.

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GrantS
After you're done reading GEB, I highly recommend moving on to the rarely
mentioned "The Mind's I", Hofstadter and Dennett's 1981 collection of essays
and stories about self/mind by themselves, Alan Turing, Richard Dawkins,
Stanislaw Lem, and others:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind's_I](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind's_I)

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kjhughes
Great book! See also "Ask HN: Is "Gödel, Escher, Bach" still worth reading?"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7014299](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7014299)

where I answered:

    
    
      It is a timeless classic which will draw you in if you give it
      the chance it deserves. If you find parts to be a bit heavy,
      you can speed up or slow down per your personal preference. I
      chose to slow down and read all the more carefully. I feel I
      was truly rewarded for the effort but believe that hurrying
      through such parts would be a viable alternative -- certainly
      better than abandoning the book as often seems to happen.
    
      It's my favorite book. I recommend you do try it.

~~~
dominotw
'Its great just read it' is not a convincing at all. Why is it your favorite
book?

~~~
beat
My own answer is that it is the most readable and entertaining text on the
actual nature of consciousness - and a marvelous introduction to the processes
of actual geniuses as well.

~~~
dominotw
Sorry for being a pest. If a cutout the hyperbolic adjectives 'most readable',
'entertaining' , 'marvelous introduction' from your sentence. It leaves me
with 'text on the actual nature of consciousness'.

How did it change your view of human consciousness. How do you define
consciousness now after reading this book? Just a couple of lines summary of
about consciousness in this book would be good a motivation for me.

~~~
beat
I'm sorry, but I simply can't give you a neat summary of one of the most
profound books I have ever read in a sentence or two. It'd be like saying
Hamlet is a play about some dude whose dad died.

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ahussain
I have read the first 20% of this book 5 times... Each time I get a little
further but still a long way to go!

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jesuslop
This is a fine book, a sort of mind playground and one of those you cherish in
the shelves of your memory. My Philosophy teacher at high school (hi Faustino)
recommended it to the class and it led me to read later in college the
collected works of Gödel, and never repented it.

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stonogo
This book is fantastic as a tool. I have used it in many classrooms to teach
students about how to identify pseudoscience. This and "Quantum Learning" are
excellent examples of the work of well-read blowhards contributing nothing to
human knowledge (aside from a very stylish series of handwaving and cargo
cults).

Like most popular gibberish of this ilk, the most valuable part of the book is
the reference list; most pseudo-philosophers are very careful to make as many
references as possible to really excellent works, probably in an attempt for
'success by association.'

~~~
GrantS
I'm curious what particular claim you think Hofstadter is pushing that is
unwarranted -- I don't see how a book of wandering musings could earn the
label "pseudoscience" when it doesn't claim to be scientific in the first
place (as far as I recall -- it's been about 15 years since I read it). It's a
bunch of interesting ideas he ties together in clever ways.

The best I can come up with is that you're talking about his idea that self-
reference lies at the heart of consciousness, which I think an intelligent
reader can see is just a guess of his. Whether or not it's true, we can still
see how it's useful to think of ant colonies as organisms, and we still learn
about the incompleteness theorem, and we now understand what a fugue is and
how it has textual and visual analogues, etc.

Maybe there's a group of people who treat GEB's claims differently than I do
that I'm unaware of?

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lbarrett
Eh. I started reading his book "I am a Strange Loop", and it became obvious
that the author is an enormous blowhard. Is it really worth reading despite
the pretentiousness?

~~~
kachnuv_ocasek
Perhaps, it's not the author who's pretentious.

~~~
stonogo
Are you accusing the copy editor of something?

~~~
kachnuv_ocasek
Well, you never know... People are strange.

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bckmn
Started reading this book in mid-February and I'm about halfway through today.
Fantastic thinking, and still relevant despite its publication date.

~~~
beat
Great thinking doesn't rely on publication date. One could argue that anything
that only works in a certain short period of time isn't great thinking. There
are things written thousands of years ago that are still relevant.

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reallifepixel
Whenever I see GEB, I always chuckle thinking how Steve Martin turned me on to
Hofstadter.
[https://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/images/s...](https://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/images/stevemartin.jpg)

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VikingCoder
I don't understand any of the words used to describe Bach's music, and I don't
know any of the pieces. Is there an accompanying audio track I could listen to
that shows the examples the book is referencing, and explains the words used
to describe them?

~~~
kachnuv_ocasek
Wikipedia has a nice glossary of terms used in music theory and lots of linked
articles:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_musical_terminolog...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_musical_terminology)

You can find a lot of recordings on YouTube and, in twenty or so years, all of
them on [http://allofbach.com](http://allofbach.com)

If you can read sheet music at least on a basic level, there's a huge
repository on IMSLP:
[http://imslp.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Johann_Sebastian_Bach](http://imslp.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Johann_Sebastian_Bach)

Also, if the piece is particularly significant, it's likely that there'll be a
Wikipedia article about with some more detail. There may be some books
dedicated solely to the work of Bach, but I don't think they're necessary for
this purpose.

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fdej
This book had a big influence on me. I bought it right when I started
university, and it contributed a great deal to my decision to switch study
program from software engineering to physics/math after the first year. I
never regretted that decision.

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ZanyProgrammer
I always thought it was interesting that apparently Hofstadter isn't into geek
computer/tech culture (from what I remember reading on his Wiki page, IIRC).
Its ironic considering who his biggest fans are.

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spain
I actually started reading this a week or so ago. It's very interesting but
every now and then I get the feeling that everything in it is really beyond
me. I've sort of dismissed that thought because it's probably how everyone
feels when first reading it, and that eventually it'll start making sense.

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hbogert
Oh yes, wonderful book sofar, only started recently. The mini assignments are
great and I get a small smile if I have one correct in one go, only to be
completely cranky if I don't get one.

Absolute recommend-er for AI people, linguistics. Actually, everybody should
read this.

~~~
hatu
I think there's definitely some programming mindset stuff in it too, I
remember the chapters about building your own set of instructions to do
multiplication with only loops and earlier axioms (adding numbers together). I
thought it was really fun to think about the problems.

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vezzy-fnord
See also my previous thread on whether it's currently relevant (in summary,
yes, it is, but with a few caveats):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7014299](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7014299)

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seanc
For those might get discouraged when struggling to read this book (of which I
am one), don't forget that Hofstadter struggled quite a bit to write it.

So it's not just you.

~~~
lucastx
Not only the mathematical content gets hard, but the book is full of puns,
metalinguistics, crossreferences, good enough to make you laugh out loud and
subtle enough to not become saturated.

~~~
jamesbritt
Yeah, what's striking is that the book itself is an example of what the book
covers. For example, read the last page, then go to the first page.

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IBCNU
This book changed my life in High School. I eventually worked out Gödel's
theorem. I felt good. I've forgotten it now, it's hard.

~~~
IBCNU
Oh, it basically proves that computers can't think!

~~~
gshubert17
Current computer programs do not operate the way human brains operate. But ...
Given that human intelligence is a capability of matter arranged and operating
in a certain way, isn't it possible that different arrangements of matter
(computers) might eventually be capable of "thinking" in a way similar to
human intelligence? Even if not, won't we learn more about ourselves in trying
to write AI programs?

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cromulent
Thanks for reminding me. I just went and found my first edition to re-read.
It's been more than a few years, I will enjoy this.

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JustinBrown
This has been sitting on my "too read" pile far too long. That changes this
summer.

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rabino
Without any doubt one of my favorites ever. Few books had so much impact on me

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CletusTSJY
I don't read a lot of books and this one is enormous but I did read it cover
to cover. In its best moments it's genius, in its worst moments it's either
dry or over my head. But it was a combination of delightful to read,
educational, and mind blowing in parts.

