
Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach - DyslexicAtheist
https://blog.infinitenegativeutility.com/2018/7/why-i-dont-love-godel-escher-bach
======
stuntkite
I'd owned this book for many years and had a similar experience to OP. But one
day someone gave me `I am a Strange Loop`, which I started reading and enjoyed
way more. After getting in a little bit Hofstadter makes some apologies for
GEB saying it was the sum of work of a very young person. I think he was 24? I
think it's pretty incredible considering his age. The things that lead him to
thinking critically about consciousness because of his disabled sister I found
to be something that changed not only how I interacted with people that were
differently abled, but also changed how I saw my own disabilities. Sure it's
more than a bit full of itself, but I can't for the life of me think how I
would edit it any differently. It's honest from the place he was standing.
With a lot of thought, a desire to share, and a perspective that no one else
could just stumble on. IMO, it really does kind of have to be what it is.

So, I decided to put down IAASL and try to really get through GEB first.. like
for real this time... and found an Open Courseware[0] on the book to follow
hoping that would help me really cut through it. It did! The trick that did it
for me was the prof's suggestion that you just skip the first 300 or so pages
and he picked up from there.

I'd thumbed through it and much like op had "looked" at every page, but once I
skipped the first 300 and followed along with the course, it was like butter.
There is something funny about all the intro dialogs that can fatigue by the
time you get to the meat.

That said, I really enjoyed his reflection on GEB in IAASL and enjoyed the
read of IAASL a lot more. Regardless of what you think about what Hofstadter
proposes, I think his contribution to critical exploration of the
consciousness is artful and invaluable. I think it's fun, compassionate, and
beautiful, and it really changed how I see myself and my environment.

It sticks with me and I think about it a lot and it makes me happy to share it
with people.

[0] [https://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/humanities-and-social-
scienc...](https://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/humanities-and-social-
sciences/godel-escher-bach/)

~~~
fao_
This.

100 times, this.

GEB is an alright book, but nobody I know has actually managed to finish it. I
Am A Strange Loop discusses the exact same thing, but does so with the
experience of years of writing in metaphor, and more importantly, _entirely in
metaphor_. All of the metaphors are well-crafted in that they are both a
pleasure to imagine, can be recalled rather easily, and accurately map to what
the author is trying to express. IAASL also distills the main thesis of GEB,
so it is not only more expressive but much more to-the-point (Which I, too
think is the main problem with GEB as a book).

I do not hesitate to recommend -- for all those that struggled with GEB, or
all those that wish to read GEB, pick up a copy of IAASL, and then _if you
still wish to read GEB_ , try it after reading IAASL.

~~~
stuntkite
Sometimes when my girlfriend and I are laying in bed after a long day and just
aren't quite ready to unplug and sleep, we take turns reading randomly
selected sections from IAASL. There's a couple other books in the rotation,
but it's a fun one. The mini theater of it becomes kind of self referential as
we try to mess up how the other person feels about the reality being thrown at
them.

You really can't do that with GEB. It's still valuable, but I think Hofstadter
covers the issues with GEB himself just fine so I won't pick it apart.

But yeah, we just pick a section at random and try to sell it to each other
with a read. Sometimes we do kind of a theatrical Exquisite Corpse paragraph
to paragraph. It's silly, but something about not only the content, but the
context of trying to mess up each other's consciousness with the read is not
only fun but after 5 minutes you're having a laugh and forget about whatever
you cared about all day. Turtles all the way down. Lol.

I know it's dumb, but I just wanted to share. Works ok with Garfield comics
too.

~~~
core-questions
You're a lucky person to have a partner who appreciates this!

~~~
gordo4
Yeah I'm jealous too

------
audunw
I read and finished GEB first, and then read 'I am a Strange Loop'.

I think the trick to reading GEB is to not take it so seriously. You can skim
sections, you can skip parts, you don't have to understand everything, not
everything has to make sense. I think the author here misses that when he
complains such about the quality of the metaphors. They're not meant to help
understand, as much as being there to give a vague idea about what's coming in
a fun way.

If you still don't enjoy GEB, then it's not for you, and that's OK too.

I found 'I am a Strange Loop' a more dry and less enjoyable read than GEB, but
it was certainly a lot clearer, and better written in many ways. I would
probably recommend it before GEB for most people.

~~~
UnderProtest
You're hitting the nail on its flattest head here. The metaphors are
_deliberately_ broken. The ways in which they break are meant to show aspects
of the system.

Theorems have characteristics that aren't obvious to non-mathematicians.
Hofstatder's goal was to convey some of these characteristics. A metaphor that
says "if a theorem were a record and a mathematical system were a record
player, here is what would happen to the record player when it played a self-
referential theorem record" is an excellent way to show how theorems are
different than anything we normally deal with.

A more modern book would have been able to rely on the metaphor of a program
"crashing" which would have been sad and inept. There are a thousand ways a
program can crash and very few of them reflect any aspects of Gödelian
incompleteness. They're just poorly made, like a record with a big hole in the
track that breaks the record needle.

There are essays in Hofstadter's collection "Metamagical Themas" that expand
significantly on his idea of what metaphors and analogies actually are and
what he thinks they're capable of doing. Reading those makes it very clear why
he'd use broken metaphors in GEBEGB.

I think GEBEGB is most useful in exposing people who don't yet have any formal
training in mathematical theory to some deeper concepts and inspiring them to
find the subtle edges of these systems. I read it at about 12 and it changed
my life by exposing subtle fripperies of thought. If I'd read it at 20, as the
author of this article did, I too would probably have experienced these little
amusements as lack of rigor. Instead I experienced them as mysteries, and now
as an adult I experience them as very dry jokes and thought prompts.

~~~
erikb
> The metaphors are deliberately broken

Also adding to this. A main point of the book is also that there is no logical
system that can be complete, so someone trying to get the real big picture
needs to be able to live outside logic comfortably as well.

A little bit like Zen thinking. You cannot make a clapping sound with one
hand. But you have to accept that the question can exist in a space with zero
answers.

------
jweather
I've read it cover-to-cover at least three times, gifted a copy, and read it
out loud to my son. I find it very playful and mind-expanding. I will admit
that it is verbose and wandering, but I think that's part of the charm.

Out of curiosity I wandered through Amazon's 1-star reviews of this book to
see what other people had to say. "Obtuse and impenetrable", I can certainly
understand. It takes a certain bent to put the effort into reading it, and a
certain level of interest to sustain that effort.

The bulk of the critiques, though, including the OP, seem to be that it's too
shallow in some specific area. How could it possibly dive any deeper into a
fraction of the topics covered without being split into a multi-volume set?
Perhaps more economical prose would allow for deeper dives, but personally I
think it serves as an excellent layperson's introduction to a huge number of
topics in logic, philosophy, theology, biology, music, art, language, etc.

~~~
extralego
I agree with you for the most part. My central issue while reading was
Hofstadter’s self-references. They eventually fall into the background but it
was a turn-off for me in the beginning. And they aren’t inherently distasteful
but in context of the ‘wandering’ and precarious nature of the work, I had to
wonder if the dependency on one’s own series of particular fascinations _do_
have an intellectual corollary or not. If I had to conclude, I’d say they do,
but the book itself might still be a house of cards, however inspiring and all
the rest.

~~~
jweather
"House of cards" is an interesting analogy. Most books do a better job of
appealing to a wide audience, while GEB comes with a long list of potential
pitfalls, even for interested readers.

------
jimhefferon
> The high-level, slightly handwavey description of this theorem is that, for
> any sufficiently expressive mathematical proof system, there are more true
> facts within the system than there are proofs for facts, which in turn means
> that not every fact can be proved

No, no, no. The proof is not by cardinality. The proof is constructive. That
is the point of the book, or at least a major theme of it. For example, that
is the point of the record player analogy.

~~~
gota
If I recall, the point is that if you have a record player that can play
_every record_, then it can play _a record that breaks it_.

I think the piece's statement is supposed to relate to the "enumerating all
deductions" bit of the Godel-numbering

~~~
cowpig
The author also wrongly asserts that this metaphor is supposed to illuminate
the incompleteness theorem when really it's just teasing some ideas that he
explains in more detail later in the book.

------
Procrastes
Like another commenter, I was in my 20s. I had no background in Math or CS
when I read GEB. I was just a self taught C programmer writing door games for
BBS systems. I read it cover to cover and it inflated my mind like a segmented
bouncy castle. I had whole rooms to play in that I had never even realized
were in there. Parts of it were slow, but I just put that down to my ignorance
and plowed on. I can honestly say the book changed my life.

~~~
chillingeffect
Similar here. I accept that it's a cartoon-y version of Big Adult Concepts,
but as a teenager, it taught me what meta means.

------
yosefzeev
I think there is a modern predisposition particularly in analytic, academic
circles wherein criticizing a work is tantamount to somehow being "more
superior" than the work itself. This article reminds me of such ivory tower
conceits.

What I liked about Godel, Escher and Bach was that although it introduced some
heavy concepts--it did so in a playful way. It opened many doors in relation
to consideration of the world and the things in it that had been closed to me
previously.

I am sure I could find some way to suggest that the work is somehow "not as
good as everything thinks". I can do that with any literature but such
articles are more like flame bait. What I have to ask is "Did my engaging with
the work leave me having a fundamentally different worldview? Did it broaden
my horizons somehow?" In the case of this work, yes, it did. Everything else
is a footnote to that experience.

~~~
guelo
What's the point of, without any knowledge about him, attacking the reviewer
as a poorly motivated elitist? That he disagrees with you does not mean that
he is an inferior person to you.

~~~
ggm
You missed the point: sui generis, this _kind_ of review... its a _kind_ of
thing. it belongs in a set. The observations relate to the set, the general
properties of the set. Thats why we're allowed to make them. Does he know the
author? no. Does the author display all the tropes which conform to members of
the set? Yes.

------
dmd
There's a discussion in GEB about mystery/detective novels, and how the
physical fact of seeing that you're near the end of the book leaks information
about the state of the plot to you.

He muses - what if you inserted some number of blank pages at the end, so you
weren't sure where the end was? But no, that's too easy - you might flip
through and see them. What about Lorem Ipsum text? Well, that's better, but
still obvious.

What you really need to do is pad out the book with text that _looks as much
as possible_ like the real book, but isn't.

And then one reads the latter parts of GEB, and you start wondering...

~~~
KevanM
Chuck Palahniuk wanted one of his novels to direct the reader to a page number
when the chapter ended so you wouldn't be able to tell when the book was going
to end, seems like a sensible solution.

~~~
iak8god
I am reminded of the Choose Your Own Adventure Series:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure)

------
inputcoffee
This was a pre-internet book though.

The internet has made explanations hyper competitive. At this point I can find
dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of explanations of Godel's theorem.

But in the pre-internet days I could go to the library, or have my friend Kent
explain it to me. (He had to explain first that languages were either complete
or true -- he called it sound if I recall. soundness was the property -- and
then it was demonstrated that these formal languages were sound, therefore
incomplete.)

Back then you couldn't just google Godel and say "oh, that reminds me of music
returning to the tonic" or whatever and then google that.

I think because a lot of the ideas have sort of spread out into culture, and
been re-explained over the years, the best explanation are not in those books
anymore.

~~~
pfortuny
“The best explanation”... That is something which you should reconsider. Few
problems have a single optimal solution. And knowledge is more a matter of
cumulative subjective experiences than a single event.

What is good for me is bad for you (as a matter of fact I find Gödel’s proof
unmistakeaby clear).

~~~
inputcoffee
I concede the point: the "best" explanation is best in a context.

The best explanation for a PhD candidate about to defend their thesis the next
day is not the same as it is for, say, me.

But that reinforces the point I am making.

------
jhbadger
A couple of comments: 1) The author complains that the Socratic dialogs are
contrived and largely consist of one character explaining something and the
other saying "I see" and so on. Well, that's true, but that's kind of how the
format works. You could make a similar complaint about Plato's _Republic_. 2)
I think the author totally misses that the reference to not hearing the
silverware during 4'33" in a cafe is a _joke_. Of _course_ it wouldn't work
that way.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" The author complains that the Socratic dialogs are contrived and largely
consist of one character explaining something and the other saying "I see" and
so on. Well, that's true, but that's kind of how the format works. You could
make a similar complaint about Plato's _Republic_."_

Plato is widely criticized by philosophers for doing just that. We cut him
some slack, however, as he was one of the first to do so. Hofstadter, by
contrast, was reusing a well-worn technique and had 2500 years of critiques of
Plato and literary innovations to draw on.

Socratic dialogs do not have to be so one-sided. It's not difficult to make
both sides of the dialog raise relevant, interesting, thoughtful points, and
many Socratic dialogs post-Plato do this. It's sheer lazyness, incompetence,
or intellectual dishonesty to make them one-sided.

~~~
nabla9
(Socratic dialog as literary device should not be confused with Socratic
method/questioning as a thinking device)

Socratic dialog's have different uses. On the one end it can be used to
consider serious existing counterarguments and provide answers to them. One is
to explain one point of view and not to provide balanced opinion.

One-sided Socratic dialog that is like a 'happy path' without hairy
counterarguments falls into the latter category. Hofstadter uses them to
illustrate a concepts, not to go question them.

In fact the hole book is just attempt to repeat the same ideas again and
again.

------
brudgers
My first GEB, I traded for a complete works of Shakespeare. The second is
sitting on a shelf alongside _Fluid Analogies_. Thinking about the GEB
phenomenon today, boggles my mind. Sure it won a Pulitzer. But it was a best
seller. That's how different the world was...non-fiction could be thick and
highly technical and sell in volume to the general public...it didn't need to
be a new journalistic summary or popular history, it could have long passages
that many readers wouldn't fully understand and puzzles that they could not
solve. A non-fiction book could require the reader to work. Not vague self-
improvement homework, but intellectually in the present moment of the text. It
was OK for a book to be hard. GEB is a piece of genius that would never get
off the ground today. Basic Books is part of a conglomerate and self-
publishing isn't a replacement.

~~~
alexgmcm
The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose was a bestseller just recently and I
found that impossible to read even with a graduate degree in Physics.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
This makes me feel better.

So far as I can tell, without a graduate degree in physics, that book is a
giant bucket full of minced-up grad-level math, and Penrose is a pretty
terrible guide to it.

On the up side it made me think I should put some time and effort into
understanding the math and the ideas. That was nearly fifteen years ago now,
and it's turned out to be a lot of fun as an occasional side hobby.

On the down side, he completely fails to make even relatively simple concepts
either simple or accessible.

When you spend your life surrounded by some of the smartest grad students in
the world, you're going to have a very unrealistic idea of what the average
human can understand. Of of how to explain things to the average human in a
way that makes understanding more likely.

Infuriating book - but I'm still glad he wrote it, and that I tried to read
it.

------
DanielBMarkham
_“A fun illustration of something,” is pretty much as far as the book goes: it
hints at grand unifying patterns, but the pattern it finds is just the
abstract notion of self-reference, and then it keeps bringing it up, making a
few unnecessary references, showing some pictures, and asking, “Isn’t that
cool? Isn’t that weird?”_

The book is a puzzle. That's it. It's not the answer to life, the universe,
and everything. It's a nice puzzle that illustrates how self-referential
things relate to one another. Superficially. I'm okay with that.

Because it's a fun little puzzle, it engages people's minds in new ways. This
is what has caused all of the praise over the years, not because it's some
post-grad-level deep-dive into epistemology or something. I think the reviewer
misses the point. The criticisms they make are actually features.

I could criticize the book as well. I struggled with it. But I wouldn't
criticize it along these lines. They don't look very insightful.

~~~
amptorn
What's the solution?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
It's a duck.

Seriously, "puzzle" in the sense that things are assembled and related to one
another to create mental constructs that are pleasing to contemplate. The
solution is to read the book and work the puzzle. Or it's a duck. The duck
thing might work better for some of the more literal-minded, including the
author of the critique.

------
tombert
I admit that I found the book a bit pretentious and irritating the first time
I read it, but someone encouraged me to read it again, and I was unemployed at
the time, and I really enjoyed it the second time. I don't know if I just
didn't understand it very well the first time, or if I had just become a bit
more interested in theoretical math and philosophy, making me pay better
attention.

I admit that the tortoise and Achilles analogies get kind of weird, and
sometimes feel a bit contrived, but I actually found them instrumental to the
overarching theme of the book: self-reference.

The theme was a bit more clear in "I am a Strange Loop", but I still really
enjoyed GEB, if for no other reason than it made me finally understand the
concepts of "axioms" and "theorems" and whatnot.

------
jason_s
<quote>…well, it would have been, but for some reason I kept struggling to get
through it. I thought highly of it, but my secret shame was that my admiration
for the book was based mostly on the first two hundred or so pages. It took
slogging effort to get myself through the rest, effort sporadically applied
over the course of years. I did eventually make my way through the whole
thing, but even now, I can’t necessarily be sure I’ve read and absorbed every
page, even though I’ve certainly looked at each one. By the end, my impression
of the book was much more reserved: it does have some genuine high points and
I can understand how it came to have its classic reputation, but I also felt
it had a number of problems I’ve rarely seen discussed. For me personally, it
ended up falling short of its reputation as a sparkling, effervescent text
that drew together art, mathematics, and culture, and given how little I’ve
seen this discussed, I wanted to write down why I feel this way. </quote>

That's not the point. So what if you don't get everything? Are you supposed to
get everything in Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming on the first read?

The record-playing example is a wonderful metaphor for Godel's theorem, not a
terrible one.

~~~
pvg
_Are you supposed to get everything in Knuth 's The Art of Computer
Programming on the first read?_

The Art of Computer Programming is a reference work so this isn't as trenchant
a counterpoint as you might have thought.

~~~
jason_s
GEB is just as technically deep as TAOCP.

------
honoredb
Nitpick: "…had 13 not been prime" is not _meaningless_ whimsy--a prime number
of images is harder to lay out on the page. Mentioning this in the caption
without explaining it is whimsical, but like a lot of GEB I'd argue it's
whimsy with a purpose: training the reader to look for applications of
abstract concepts. The reader ideally goes "wait, what? There's no connection
between those two things! Unless..."

~~~
vilhelm_s
Indeed. And it's a small but interesting sentence, because it serves as a
counterexample to some theories of counterfactuals. To quote the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on David Lewis (p □→ q means "if p were
true then q"):

> The basic idea behind the alternative analysis was similar to that proposed
> by Robert Stalnaker (1968). Let's say that an A-world is simply a possible
> world where A is true. Stalnaker had proposed that p □→ q was true just in
> case the most similar p-world to the actual world is also a q-world. Lewis
> offered a nice graphic way of thinking about this. He proposed that we think
> of similarity between worlds as a kind of metric, with the worlds arranged
> in some large-dimensional space, and more similar worlds being closer to
> each other than more dissimilar worlds. Then Stalnaker's idea is that the
> closest p-world has to be a q-world for p □→ q to be true.

But "13 is prime" is the most central example of a necessary truth; in this
example there _are_ no p-worlds. So the fact that this sentence is, in fact,
meaningful shows that the way we use language is doing something different
from Stalnaker's model.

And of course, the connection between counterfactuals, analogy making, and
general intelligence is one of Hofstader's research interests, and he comes
back to it in a later chapter. This example of his again kindof makes fun of
counterfactual reasoning about mathematical objects:

> Related to this notion of slipping between closely related terms is the
> notion of seeing a given object as a variation on another object. An
> excellent example has been mentioned already-that of the "circle with three
> indentations", where in fact there is no circle at all. One has to be able
> to bend concepts, when it is appropriate. Nothing should be absolutely
> rigid.

------
jrochkind1
I could have plenty of other critiques (and share some of OP's), but I had no
problem with the record-player metaphor, I found it pretty apt.

The very physical/analog nature of a record player makes it not hard for me to
imagine a record designed to break a player, one can totally imagine one whose
grooves jostle the arm so much it breaks (no idea if this is actually
practical, it doesn't really matter).

I wonder if it doesn't work anymore now that fewer people have experienced a
record player, although the author DID say he encountered it first 20 years
ago and had trouble with it then, I dunno.

> can the problem of record-player-breaking-records be suitably addressed by
> redesigning record-players? If no, why not? What if we simply read the
> information from a record using a visual device with no moving parts?

Dude, it's a metaphor/analogy, it's not that hard to realize taking it that
literally takes you out of it. No analogy can ever be carried to it's end and
still be a good analogy or metaphor. That's why it's an analogy, not the thing
analogized. (which is a lesson that is (ironically? intentionally?) consistent
with the messages of GEB? The map is not the territory.)

~~~
grkvlt
And if I remember correctly, in the dialog, one of the record-player-
destroying-record-proof record players R^whatever _does_ scan the record
visually to see if it would break the player - but is still vulnerable to a
recording of 'this record cannot be played on player R^whatever' so this point
is addressed...

------
danharaj
The treatment of Godel's theorems in GEB always struck me as gratuitous: It
treats a technical result as having great philosophical import. The
philosophical content of Godel's theorems is already found in the Liar
paradox, "This statement is false." and incompleteness in a grand sweeping
sense involving _language in its entirety_ can be found in works as early as
the Daoists and the Greeks.

Edit: I should say that this wasn't at all obvious to me when I was in college
and thinking hard about incompleteness. The limitations of mathematics
disturbed me deeply. These days, I think it's part of the beauty of
mathematics that its limitations are its own result.

~~~
rwallace
> The philosophical content of Godel's theorems is already found in the Liar
> paradox, "This statement is false."

Sort of. Common reactions to the English version of the liar paradox are along
the lines of 'that's meaningless so it doesn't imply anything' or 'so natural
language is inconsistent, what do you expect?' Most of the work Gödel did was
to find a way to encode meta-logic into formal language in such a way that he
could then state the liar paradox in a format so ironclad that it could no
longer be dismissed.

~~~
danharaj
Sure, that's the technical content of Godel :) If people chose not to take the
Liar paradox seriously, I think they would gnash their teeth just as
vigorously at the incompleteness theorem, and there is an expansive graveyard
of attempts to circumvent it.

------
criddell
> it hints at grand unifying patterns, but the pattern it finds is just the
> abstract notion of self-reference, and then it keeps bringing it up, making
> a few unnecessary references, showing some pictures, and asking, “Isn’t that
> cool? Isn’t that weird?”

That is pretty much what I thought of the book the first time I tried to read
it but didn't get all the way through. The book, especially in the beginning,
was super fun to read but it lost its charm for me after the first third.

One huge benefit to me from the book is a nice introduction to Bach's music.
To this day I enjoy finding patterns in music.

------
Tomte
GEB is a book – like TAOCP – that makes me feel inadequate.

I "know" I "should" work through it. I "know" I "should" enjoy it.

But I never follow through. This review gives me hope that maybe I'm not just
a ludicrous failure, but that there are different ways to go.

Obviously, I do believe that, and I don't believe I'm a total failure, but
still, I can't deny the nagging voice in the back of my head sometimes.

~~~
pvg
Second time in this thread I see someone mention GEB in the same breath as
TAOCP. I'm curious how they ended up occupying the same kind of mental space
for you and apparently others. In the immortal words of Jules Winnfield, it
"ain't the same fuckin' ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the
same fuckin' sport". Not that you are under any obligation to read either and
plenty of very good arguments can be made you're better off not-reading at
least one of them.

~~~
Tomte
In the same way as both chocolate ice cream and riding a rollercoaster make me
happy, but are totally different. :-)

~~~
pvg
Right but do you feel you _have_ to read, to pick a slightly less fraught
example, the white algorithms book? Or Patterson and Hennessy? Like TAOCP,
those work perfectly well skimmed or read in bits and parked on your bookshelf
or in your bathroom.

GEB (or Moby Dick) are _intended_ to be read in entirety.

~~~
commandlinefan
I assume you mean CLRS when you say "the white algorithms book" \- if so, I'm
not sure I necessarily agree that any of these books are meant as reference
works or "not intended to be read entirely". They're textbooks, of course, so
there's something of an expectation that you'll read them over the course of
months or years, but I do believe that all three of your examples are _meant_
to be read cover to cover rather than used as a reference book like a
dictionary or a thesaurus or even a cookbook; if you pick up any of these
books and start at a random chapter (much less a random section) you're likely
to be lost. You might use them as references once you've finished them, but
you are expected to start on page 1 and finish on page 1,892 (or whatever
insane page count these books have now).

~~~
pvg
This 'reference' business really seems to stick in people's craws for some
reason. I don't mean it disparagingly nor do I feel 'reference' is limited to
the style of cookbooks and dictionaries. Nobody writes a multi-volume (or
monolith-sized) technical work without the intent it also be used as
reference. The work might have other purposes and even a different stated
primary purpose - that doesn't make it not-a-reference.

------
perfunctory
> The dialogues are a big part of why I originally struggled with the book:
> they are meandering and long, and they regularly outstay their welcome.

I would disagree. I found the dialogues absolutely beautiful and a big part of
what makes this book so enjoyable.

I think it would be a mistake to treat this book as a textbook whose goal is
to convey some material in the most efficient way.

------
microtherion
I still like GEB, which I first read as a teenager. But later, when I read
Hofstadter's "Le Ton beau de Marot", I was struck by similar thoughts about
Hofstadter's non-mathematical ideas as this review hinted at:

His tastes in music, poetry, etc, are very conservative and rather
conventional, he doesn't seem to make any effort to engage seriously with any
modern work, and he tries to pass this off as edgy sophistication.

After the 50th repetition of "they were playing this awful _Rock Music_ and my
brilliant friend X remarked on how awful it was", it gets a bit old.

------
cestith
Personally, I enjoyed the whimsy and the references in GEB. I considered the
weak references past the author's knowledge to be a nod and a pointer to go
make a bibliographic romp through other material as one wished. It's an
inspiration along the discussion of its ideas, but is not complete. That
incompleteness may be because it so deeply references itself, hence the book
itself being a funny metaphor.

As directly useful reading to get someone more acquainted with a broad
discussion of algorithms and logic without textbook depth of individual
topics, I'd recommend _The_New_Turing_Omnibus_ by Alexander Dewdney and
_The_Advent_of_the_Algorithm_ by David Berlinski. Probably the latter and then
the former, actually.

I wouldn't call GEB a bad read. I think because of its high reputation people
expect too much from it, like it should be the definitive book of truth about
logic and proofs. It's one book, and if one reads it in the light of it being
a fun romp through topics that are somehow loosely connected in the vein of
James Burke I think it delivers rather well.

------
adultSwim
"I realized that I wanted to like the book much more than I actually liked it
in practice."

This. Maturing has moved me past books that I "should" like. Communication is
important! If it takes you 500 pages of hot air to explain something simple,
where will there ever be room for a complex idea? For nuance?

It's embarrassing how a ten minute CPG Grey can be better than many books I've
read.

------
javajosh
I actually tend to agree with this review - the record-player analogy for
incompleteness _is_ particularly bad. But what you have here is a young man
high on his intellectual gifts playing in beautiful abstract worlds,
imperfectly, sometimes pointlessly. It's that intellectual playfulness that
makes this book special, since books are usually either intellectual or
playful but rarely both.

Not to change the subject, but Frank Herbert's work has a similarly undeserved
reputation for depth, IMHO. The Dune series wants to be about so many
interesting, connected things: consciousness, religion, ecology, psychology,
politics and speculates about (non-scientific) connections between mind and
matter. Herbert had the good taste to not describe every detail about the
world, but all of his considerable artifice is a very thin veneer on what is
ultimately a juvenile power fantasy. There is really nothing there,
philosophically speaking, even though, to my young teenage self, it really
felt like there was.

~~~
nwah1
Can you give an example of fiction in which there is "something there"?

~~~
javajosh
Yes, I can. Actually Herbert himself did have a good (taboo) thought in Dune
with his Golden Path idea, that to save humanity it must endure a tyrant for
thousands of years. Asimov's Foundation series had a lot to say about the
natural ebb and flow of civilization on a long time scale, a very Buddhist
view. He also had a lot to say about the nature of general AI, and the
relationship to such beings with humans, in his Robot novels (I'm most
familiar with the Daniel R Olivaw novels, e.g. Caves of Steel). Of course,
when it comes to society, politics, and technology, Neal Stephenson, in both
Snowcrash and The Diamond Age, has a lot of great philosophical ideas. Like a
good author he shows, and doesn't tell us about his ideas. The character Raven
in Snowcrash, for example, expresses the now pretty common understanding that
individuals, armed with technology, can challenge states (e.g. bin Laden).
There are lots and lots of other authors and ideas.

------
alkonaut
Has anyone read it and _not_ found the dialogue bits meandering and
superfluous? I found the other chapters acceptable but the useless dialogue
left me feeling the whole book was pretentious and babbling.

~~~
Invictus0
I loved the dialogues; they were really helpful in explaining some of the more
technical content and I loved the little puzzles and devices he scattered
throughout them. The use of metaphoric exposition followed by technical
description is brilliant for making reinforcement learning fun.

------
code_duck
For me this book was a companion to Metamagical Themas, a collection of
Hofstadter’s Scientific American articles. Being a collection of articles,
that book is much more accessible.

------
vanderZwan
> _I’m familiar with how record-players work, but I have never played a record
> designed to break a record-player!_

If I recall correctly, at some point there were copyright protection measures
on some audio CDs got so aggressive that they would actually brick your CD-ROM
drive if you were foolish enough not to have autorun disabled (I'm not even
talking about the Sony Rootkit scandal). That's a quarter century after GEB
was written though.

------
ajmurmann
I'm so glad I read this. I've tried to finish the book au least three times
over the last 15-20 years and never made it much beyond page 200. I loved the
prose sections but had a hard time getting through the Achilles & Turtoise
sections. Some of them were super long and I always felt like they were
clearly trying to convey some important, deep message that I'm too stupid to
understand. Despite not enjoying them I actually reread some sections because
I thought it must be me not getting it, although I had no problem
understanding the actual explanation. I'm so happy to learn that I can skip
the silly stories and dialogs without missing the value of the book. Maybe now
I'll finally finish the book?!

------
dunk010
The author's main points are:

* The dialogs are overlong and obtuse * Some specific metaphors don't click * The author attacks various things which he feels Hofstadter belittles (avant-garde music, Zen)

He may be right about the dialogs, though as others have said perhaps it's
better to read the chapters backwards. Or, even, metaphorically like the Crab
Canon: dialog, chapter, and then dialog again.

He's clearly projecting his own perspective without thinking about the
perspective of others when it comes to the metaphors. This won a Pulitzer, not
everyone has a mathematical background and can straight up understand Godel
when directly explained.

But it's the third part that is most troubling. These days it's fashionable to
take some earlier cultural artefact, and assassinate it on the basis that
every point of view is valid, genuine, and can't be criticised. I smell that
same pattern in his counter-attacks on "avant-garde social commentary
masquerading as music" and Zen. Hofstadter has an opinion on these. A strong,
negative opinion. Attacking Hofstadter the way he does to me more smacks of a
post-hoc character assassination than intelligent engagement with the
material.

As an aside: I read Hofstadter (somewhere) say that he has spent a lot of his
life after GEB trying to hammer home that it was about self-reference, self-
reference, and nothing but self-reference. I think he even described "I am a
Strange Loop" as being GEB but much more direct (I still need to read that
one).

------
DonHopkins
From the classic MIT-AI Lab humor directory: AI:HUMOR;GEB REVIEW

(I'm including a copy for reference and archiving since the web server
publishing this link is written in MACLISP running under ITS on a PDP-10
emulator.)

[http://up.update.uu.se/DSK%3AHUMOR%3BGEB%20REVIEW](http://up.update.uu.se/DSK%3AHUMOR%3BGEB%20REVIEW)

The following review of "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,"
Douglas R. Hofstadter, New York: Basic Books, appeared in "Fusion", Magazine
of the Fusion Energy Foundation, Oct. 1979, pp. 61.

"Douglas Hofstadter, author of "Godel, Escher, Bach," has not had such a
vaired experience with the antiscience movement as Bateson [Bateson, Gregory,
"Mind and Nature--A Necessary Unity", preceding review in Fusion], but his
brief career, nevertheless, is a clue to the message of his book.

Hofstadter is a computer expert in the field of artificial intelligence. This
dismal discipline, which emanates from the Bertrand Russell-Karl Korsch
networks, has been used primarily to develop brainwashing programs. Hofstadter
claims to be part of his network through his close association with Marvin
Minsky who, in turn, works closely with linguistician Noam Chomsky at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Politically these "artificial
intelligence" academics link up to the Bateson circles through the various
radical groups they mutually support.

Artificial intelligence is as nasty a discipline as its use in brainwashing
implies. It is based on the premise that the operations of the human mind are
essentially compatible with formal Aristotelian logic and thus can be
replicated by a sufficiently complex computer.

......

Douglas Hofstadter's interminable driveling (777 pages) reiterates Bateson's
point from the perspective on an attack on Kurt Godel's 1931 proof that any
system determined by a fixed lawfulness (axiomatic login) is necessarily
incomplete, hence incapable of solving problems that can be posed within its
limits. The obvious conclusion to be reached from this proof is that there is
a higher order of lawfulness (reason) that determines successive, reason-
determined locally lawful systems. The British oligarchy never forgave Godel
for this insight, which negate Bertrand Russell's attempted destruction of
Georg Cantor's introduction of the concept of the transfinite into
mathematics.

Hofstadter simultaneously slanders Godel and the musical genius Johann
Sebasian Bach--whose recognition of the same principle in musical composition
made Beethoven's subsequent breakthroughs possible--by lumping them with the
psychotic Dutch draftsman M.C. Escher.

The paradoxes of formal logic, Hofstadter contends--for example, Epimenides's
statement that all Cretans are liars--are really Zen koans. There is nothing
new here that the eastern mystics and their systematized irrationality did not
discover in bygone millennia. In fact, he says, the solution is to imbed
simple axiomatic systems in more complex ones in regress. Once this is
accomplished, presto, mind and the universe can be programmed into a computer.

(Reviewed by: John Schoonover)

------
agentofoblivion
I also found the book to be pretentious and full of nonsense. It gave the
impression something profound was being said, but was mostly poetic license
that might be charming to some, but I found to be irritating since it seemed
to confuse rather than clarify.

------
purplezooey
_Tortoise: Right—who wants to hear the racket of clinking dishes and jangling
silverware?_

OP completely missed the tongue-in-cheek reference to silence here.

------
patfla
I first bought GEB in the early 80's. At that point, I had only a year in
college and I made little headway with the book. Went back to college and
ended up double-majoring in Japanese and Computer Science and took a bunch of
math courses. Have now spent something like 30 yrs as a software engineer and,
in particular, I've worked with many interesting people including one
mathematical logician who taught me about such as Alonzo Church and the
history of functional programming languages.

So picked up GEB again a couple of years ago and found it much easier going.
But then put it down again because most of the ideas, in addition to being
very verbosely explained, are now old and there really wasn't a whole lot new
there aside from elaborate explanation.

I imagine that the book served its purpose in its time although if not
Hofstadter, someone else would probably have come along and put together the
various ideas.

------
superkuh
Maybe he read it too old. I read it in high school and it absolutely blew my
mind. It was a slog at parts, predicate calculus and symbolic manipulation
like that was new to me, but I can say without qualification that it changed
my thinking and life.

------
dgreensp
_A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll_

The dialogues are supposed to be whimsical and bizarre dream-like riffs on the
topic at hand, a la Alice in Wonderland, not sharp teaching instruments.

I think Hofstadter did get the supposed point of Cage’s piece, or why would he
have joked about whether people want to hear ambient noise or not?

The review gets good in the middle when it starts talking about Zen, and I
agree with some of the conclusions towards the end. As another commenter
pointed out, Hofstadter was young. In a way, the whole book is like an amateur
piece of music or film or poetry, at times clumsy or campy but generally
endearing. I understood this even as a kid.

------
Upvoter33
I had much the same reaction to GEB as this author: it seems like I really
should have liked it, but never have. To me, it always just seemed too clever
by a half (or, perhaps, I am just too dull witted by some other fraction ...)

------
amyjie
I haven't read GEB yet, but I had a similar experience reading "I Am A Strange
Loop." It was too prosy, too long, too many examples and too obvious for
anyone that has thought about these things before. It didn't go deep enough or
propose mechanisms for anything. If you've never thought about any of these
things before you might find it cool, otherwise it's a verbose rehash of
things that have been said in better ways.

[https://altreason.com/i-am-a-strange-loop/](https://altreason.com/i-am-a-
strange-loop/)

------
jatsign
Does anyone have a better metaphor, or a link to someplace with a better
explanation, of the Incompleteness Theorem?

~~~
beaconstudios
I'm not familiar with directly, but if you're more familiar with comp-sci:
based on my understanding of Curry-Howard correspondence, I would think it's
the logic equivalent of the halting problem. I could be way off-base though,
I'd appreciate a mathematician chiming in on whether my intuition is accurate
here.

~~~
chriswarbo
(Caveat: I'm a computer scientist, not a mathematician)

The halting problem, and universal computation itself, came directly out of
work on incompleteness. Incompleteness is about being unable to prove
statements in a _particular_ system; it leaves open the possibility that a
more powerful system might be able to prove that statement (but that more
powerful system will have its own incompleteness, and so on).

Turing got involved after attending a series of lectures on Goedel's
incompeteness theorem. He came up with turing machines, showed that they
cannot decide their own halting problem, and proved that they're equivalent to
lambda calculus. Goedel tried to make a more powerful alternative to lambda
calculus, called general recursive functions, but it _also_ turned out to be
equivalent to turing machines and lambda calculus.

This lead to the Church-Turing thesis, which claims that any
effective/physical/realisable system of logic cannot be more powerful than
turing machines/lambda calculus/general recursive functions. In this sense, we
can still "solve" the halting problem by using a more powerful logical system
(e.g. oracle machines), but the Church Turing thesis says that we can never
carry out those calculation to get a true/false answer.

I like to think of incompleteness as a mathematical property, applying to all
systems but allowing the "escape hatch" of switching to a more powerful
system; and I like to think of the Church Turing thesis as a law of physics,
that there is a limit to the logical power of any physical system (i.e. Turing
completeness).

There's a nice summary at
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnpcMCW0RUA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnpcMCW0RUA)

~~~
beaconstudios
the question that fascinates me is - what is the property of a program that
makes it undecidable? I've been playing around with the idea of trying to make
a program that determines halts/doesn't halt/don't know, given some
representation of a program. I'm running into some interesting implications
when I incorporate dependent typing, but it feels like there must be something
theoretical that's already out there.

~~~
lisper
> what is the property of a program that makes it undecidable?

That is itself an undecidable question!

There are a lot of programs for which you can tell that they halt (programs
with no loops, for example). Likewise there are a lot of programs for which
you can tell that they do not halt (any program whose main body is a WHILE
TRUE loop in a language that does not have exceptions, for example.) And then
there are lots of more complicated cases for which the answer can be found.
But there are some cases where we just don't know. The best known is this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture)

Not only do we not know the answer, but we don't know if it is even possible
to find the answer! We know (because Turing) that there exist programs for
which we cannot find the answer, but we don't know whether the Collatz problem
is one of them. And in general we _cannot_ know, because if we could then we
could use that knowledge to solve the halting problem itself! (We might be
able to prove undecidability for particular programs, just as we can prove
halting or non-halting for particular programs, but deciding undecidability
for any particular program is in general undecidable!)

~~~
beaconstudios
but that's exactly my point - there are clear-cut halting, clear-cut non-
halting, and "we don't know yet" programs. My interest is in delineating the
properties that separate the 3. The collatz conjecture is exactly the example
I use when explaining the "we don't know yet" programs. If I could build a
logic system that can positively prove halting, and one that can positively
prove non-halting, then anything that remains is "dunno".

The halting problem is basically showing that you can never prove the category
of "dunno" to be empty. Which is pretty self-evident given there are unsolved
bounding problems like the collatz conjecture in mathematics.

For a minimal example, if I create a program that takes an AST and runs it
through two truth functions, one that checks if the AST === "return;" and
prints "it halts" and one that checks if the AST === "while(true) {}" and
prints "it never halts", then we've already created such an application, just
with a "dunno" space containing the majority of programs. Adding practical
axioms to a logic system could grow the "halts" and "never halts" spaces to
the point where only a subset of applications cannot be excluded from the
"dunno" space, and my question is: what are the unique properties of those
applications?

~~~
lisper
> the properties that separate the 3

But that is exactly _my_ point: what separates these three classes is the
state of our current mathematical knowledge, and that obviously changes over
time.

> Which is pretty self-evident

No, that is not at all self-evident. (If it were, someone would have proven it
long before Turing, and he wouldn't be famous for it.) I don't know what you
mean by a "bounding" problem, but we can prove a lot of things about programs
with a structure similar to Collatz. For example, we can prove that a program
that searches for a prime larger than its input will always halt for any
input.

~~~
beaconstudios
it's self-evident _at this point in time_, given you could feed such a machine
the collatz conjecture as an algorithm and we just don't know if any arbitrary
input will halt. I'm not claiming it is self-evident in perpetuity. By
bounding problem I guess I mean the mathematical equivalent of knowing it can
halt. I'm not a mathematician as I previously stated so I don't know the
terminology.

I don't think the space I'm talking about is equivalent to the state of all of
our mathematical knowledge, as AFAIK not all problems relate directly to this
space. But a subset of all mathematics, sure (perhaps computability, or logic
in general although of a higher kind than first-order). My interest is in
creating a static analyser based on the set of axioms or deductions that can
be derived from that space.

~~~
lisper
> it's self-evident _at this point in time_

No, it's not. Just because you and I don't know the answer is not proof that
no one knows the answer. Someone may have discovered the answer in the last
five minutes. (In fact, for any mathematical discovery there is always
necessarily a period time when only one person knows the answer.)

> AFAIK not all problems relate directly to this space

And I am telling you that you are wrong about that. If you think that there is
anything about computation that does not relate to math then you have a deep
misunderstanding of either computation or math (possibly both).

~~~
beaconstudios
alright, if you're going to resort to nitpicking and being wilfully insulting
then I see there's not much point discussing this further with you.

~~~
lisper
Let me rephrase that to hopefully make it sound a little less insulting: if
you are able to identify an aspect of computation that cannot be described
mathematically then you will be remembered alongside Turing, Godel and von
Neuman as one of the greatest thinkers humanity has ever produced. (But a
priori, the odds of your being able to do that seem pretty low to me.)

~~~
beaconstudios
well you've just gone and been inaccurate yourself - I said that I didn't
believe all mathematical discoveries had an impact on computability, but you
just suggested I was saying that not all computation is based in mathematics.
Which is absurd and it's clear you think I'm stupid, where to me it's pretty
clear you are misinterpreting what I'm saying, whether that's poor
communication on my part or uncharitable interpretation on yours.

I've been friends with academics before who had an unyielding desire to
interpret lay speak as an attempt to be rigorous and then criticise it as
such, as you have done with me saying "self-evident", but surely you realise
I'm not trying to say "self-evident" in some kind of rigorous mathematical
sense? I mean if you're just trying to be obtuse it's working well but it
comes off like you're trying to hold my conversational and largely intuition-
based ideas to a much higher standard than I am trying to meet. I don't
understand the impulse at all. If I were trying to be totally rigorous with my
thoughts rather than just conversationally trying to communicate an idea that
is still taking shape, I would be learning the correct syntax to write a paper
and sharing that instead.

~~~
lisper
> I said that I didn't believe all mathematical discoveries had an impact on
> computability, but you just suggested I was saying that not all computation
> is based in mathematics. Which is absurd

No, that's not what I said. What I said was that this statement:

"I don't think the space I'm talking about is equivalent to the state of all
of our mathematical knowledge, as AFAIK not all problems relate directly to
this space."

is false. This is not a matter of opinion. There is a formal equivalence
between math and computability. For every theorem, there is a corresponding
program that halts IFF the theorem is true, and for every program, there is a
corresponding theorem that is true IFF the program halts. Therefore, it is
necessarily the case that all mathematical discoveries have an impact on our
knowledge of computability because there is in fact no distinction between
math and computability. They are the exact same field of study, just with
different window-dressing.

> and it's clear you think I'm stupid

No, I don't think you're stupid, merely ignorant (and a bit defensive). And
this has nothing to do with your lack of rigor, it has to do with your
_intuition_ that there might be something worthwhile to be discovered by
trying to examine the structure of known halting and non-halting programs.
This is a well understood problem. It is possible that you could discover
something that everyone else has overlooked. But if you do, it would be a
breakthrough of the highest order, a major revolution in both computability
theory and mathematics.

~~~
beaconstudios
If you think I'm trying to discover something then you've completely missed my
point. I was never looking to discover some new concept, but to find an
existing model of looking at computability and implement it as software. I
know its possible to decide computability for at least some subset of programs
because we can do it by eye, I'm just looking to do the same thing
programmatically in a way that is theoretically sound.

~~~
lisper
Yes, I understand that. And what I'm trying to tell you is that this problem
you have set for yourself is formally equivalent to the problem proving
mathematical theorems. They are the _same problem_. Any substantial progress
on one is necessarily also substantial progress on the other.

~~~
beaconstudios
not quite - I'm trying to implement existing proofs into an axiomatic system.
All unproven theorems can be classified as the "don't know" outcome. But I
don't know what approach to use to implement a system that can look at "f(x:
int) => x is cleanly divisible by 2 ? f(x + 1) : halt" and tell me that this
recursive function all halt under all valid inputs. Because that would require
that it be able to derive such a fact from a core understanding of what
addition and division mean.

~~~
lisper
> that would require that it be able to derive such a fact from a core
> understanding of what addition and division mean

Yes, and that's the part that's not possible in general, only for specific
cases. For example, you can prove that:

f(P: int -> boolean, x: int) => P(x) ? f(x + 1) : halt

will halt for any x IFF there are an infinite number of integers that have the
property P, so f will halt if P is "is an even integer" because there are an
infinite number of even integers (which, obviously, you can also prove).

And with that in mind, you might want to go take another look at:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17465542](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17465542)

------
_emacsomancer_
Though interestingly the beginning of the discussion of 'Zen':

> This might seem unfair, so I’ll give a very specific but pervasive instance
> of this sort of meaningless flavor. Many parts of the book invoke Zen, which
> is a school of Buddhism that originated in China and has spread to several
> other Asian countries but, in the Western mind, is usually associated with
> Japan. (We do, after all, know this school by its Japanese name Zen and not
> by its Chinese name Chán, its Korean name Sean, or its Vietnamese name
> Thiền.)

seems to miss the fact that Buddhism originated in India and that not only the
Japanese word _Zen_ but also Chinese _Chán_ are adaptations of the Sanskrit
_dhān(a)_ (meaning originally something like 'concentration' or
'contemplation').

(Obviously philosophy is not static, and surely there were Chinese
developments in it, but by the same token there were also Japanese
developments and to point out that Zen Buddhism did not originate in Japan and
fail to mention the anterior roots seems rather odd to me.)

~~~
spraak
> seems to miss the fact that Buddhism originated in India and that not only
> the Japanese word Zen but also Chinese Chán are adaptations of the Sanskrit
> dhān(a) (meaning originally something like 'concentration' or
> 'contemplation').

Etymologically this is true, but in the sense of tradition, India doesn't
really have a Zen tradition, it really did originate in China. Dhyāna is much
more broad and not only part of Buddhism, but also Hinduism and Jainism

~~~
_emacsomancer_
> India doesn't really have a Zen tradition,

India certainly has meditative/yogic practices and it seems unlikely to me
that some bits of these wouldn't have travelled from India to China along with
Buddhism and Sanskritic vocabulary.

~~~
spraak
Yes, of course India has a deep history of meditation and yoga and etymology
does show relationship, but it is incorrect to say that it means the same
thing in that place, most especially because the Sanskrit word itself wasn't
purely preserved, it was mutated into a native sounding Chinese and Japanese
word that took on a new, specific connotation reflecting the practice that
evolved there in China.

A simple example of this is the meaning of "pudding" in British English vs
American English.

> Pudding originally referred exclusively to varieties of sweet natural-casing
> sausage. The meaning grew to encompass anything boiled or steamed in a bag,
> then shifted to refer primarily to desserts, especially those cooked by
> boiling or steaming. Most recently, in American English, it has changed to
> refer exclusively to the thick custardy dessertstuff [1]

So this simple example illustrates that location can have a specific effect on
the meaning and connotation of a word, and that a word may have a broad
meaning from where it originates, but can have a very specific and different
meaning elsewhere.

[1]
[https://english.stackexchange.com/a/12564](https://english.stackexchange.com/a/12564)

~~~
_emacsomancer_
I do know how semantic change works, yes. And your pudding example shows that
borrowing (and phonological adaptation) is likely beside the point. Words can
change their meaning (and generally do) even when speakers are staying in the
same geographic location (e.g. Sanskrit _lokaḥ_ "world" became the Hindi
plural marker _log_ ).

But all of this seems somewhat irrelevant to me for the topic at hand.
Buddhism has a long history in India before reaching China, including
meditative/concentration. Obviously there were significant developments in
China (and Japan) which make Zen Buddhism distinct, but it seems odd to ignore
the Indian Buddhist base it's built upon.

~~~
spraak
I'm not ignoring its foundation in India, only affirming that what we know of
as Zen was critically developed in China and Japan. American English has roots
in Britain, but it's distinctly American.

------
VLM
This is what happens decades after something that WAS status signalling at one
point, no longer is status signalling.

------
sgustard
Since the record player analogy was mentioned, I'll just quote the relevant
entry from the Index of GEB, page 772. If the potential wonderment of the
curiosities and untapped frontiers teased herein don't explode the mind of
your 18-year-old self reading the book for the first time, there may be no
hope for you.

record players: alien-rejecting, 487-88; Epsilon-Zero, 486; family of, in
Crab's jukebox, 154-57; Grand Self-assembling, see record player Epsilon-Zero;
as information-revealers, 158-61, 164; intrinsic vulnerability of, 75-86, 102,
424, 470, 486-86, 536, 543, 584, 721, see also Tödelization, TC-battles, etc.;
likened to formal systems, 84, 85; low-fidelity, 77, 85, 101, 406-7, 470;
Omega, 78, 468, 483-84; Numbers 1, 2 ... etc., 76-77; Tortoise-chomping, 483,
487-88; two-channel monaural, 634, 669; see also jukeboxes

------
waserwill
The reviewer has interests which are superficially discussed in the book, and
even those about which readers may often express interest. I believe the book
would have been several times less interesting to me had I not looked into the
philosophy of mind and the problems of consciousness and neurobiology. I'd
enjoyed the math, the music, the art, the cultural references, and the surreal
metaphors; but those weren't the full story—Hofstadter says that the book is
not about those things outrightly, albeit towards the latter chapters, iirc.
These references, though generally enjoyable, serve as a path towards
expressing a strange proposition, however indirectly. Perhaps it was done more
clearly in IAASL, but I've not read it. However, personally, the rhetorical
flourish with which it was done here was enjoyable.

------
jlarcombe
Yes, an irritatingly-written book, very hard to enjoy despite seemingly being
perfectly designed for my interests. I feel the same way about Iain Sinclair's
books, which I kept on buying until I eventually admitted defeat that they're
just not for me, despite the amount of fascinating stuff within

------
mcnamaratw
I think there are at least two groups of people here, completely talking past
each other. This happens a lot on HN. The two big groups seem to be (1) people
talking about enjoying popular science writing, and (2) technical
practitioners talking about what they do. The only thing we maybe forget as a
community is that (1) and (2) are different genres that don't overlap very
much.

One group is trying to read GEB as a popular science book and saying, wow,
it's an unusually good one. The dialogs are a nice rest from the technical
stuff and probably convey something.

Another group is trying to read GEB as an introductory technical book and
saying it's a mixed bag. The dialogs are a distraction from the technical
stuff and sometimes don't convey enough.

------
xkgt
I share the same sentiment with many of the commenters. I found GEB to be
unnecessarily verbose and repetitive. But that is not to say that I wasn't
impressed by the book. Irrespective of your disposition, there is a lot to
take from it. First time I previewed it, I was blown away by its scope and
depth that I decided to buy it. But after few chapters, I found it difficult
to get past the fluff writing. I will take the advise of skipping first 300
pages and re-attempt this.

Like one other commenter, I too recommend the Open Courseware on GEB. I have
only watched the videos on the chapters that I have already completed. It
offers a fresh perspective and academic take on the material presented in the
book.

------
acconrad
Did I just grow up in unintelligent circles? I never even heard of GEB until I
was around 28 (I only heard of IAASL today thanks to this thread/article) and
I'm only now just getting around to it. Did I miss the boat here now in my
30s?

------
gerdesj
Soooo, you didn't like a book that challenged you in a way that you did not
like. I personally did enjoy it first time around.

 _It’s a venerated book among a certain stripe of computer scientist and
mathematician_

That is a bit trite and if I may: a bit disingenuous. I'm neither a comp sci
nor a mathematician but I love GEB. It is a classic. I first discovered it by
accident at school. It did not change my life as such but I think that DH did
have a bearing on the way I think even nowadays.

------
swah
Some folks find it too easy:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1141374](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1141374)

------
ggm
It is not obligatory to like it. Few grand works are truly flawless. The ideas
underneath are entertaining, and informing, and made me think (I got to read a
pre-publication proof copy in the UK on the brink of University Computer
Science degree)

Sure, it could have been shorter. I bet if you cut any bit, somebody out there
would complain it was missing.

------
jbgreer
Like several others I read GEB during my undergrad days. I recall attending a
local CogSci roundtable to announce my achievement, which I then viewed as
something of a right of passage. When I told a prof I had just read GEB he
laughed and said, "Oh no you haven't. You've just started."

------
svanevik
Read GEB when I was 20. Absolutely loved it, and it had a big impact on my
choice of studies and career. Since then I've had a lurking fear that I'd be
grossly disappointed if I picked it up again now. Your review indicates I
should probably let it be. Thanks!

------
amptorn
There's also the fact that Hofstadter persistently equates strong AI with
grandmaster-level chess-playing, and the entire chapter of nothing but totally
unscientific, unfounded, incredibly wrong, biology-free speculation about how
the human brain works.

------
floatboth
> decided to explain its working by coming up with a metaphor involving
> record-players and records that are designed to physically break the record-
> players they’re played on

Wait... I've seen this style of explanation somewhere...

M O N A D T U T O R I A L S

~~~
thanatropism
As I've heard it explained, monads are simply monoids on the category of
endofunctors, or something.

(I know what monoids are in group theory, and have a vague glimpse that
functors are maps between categories. I figure that endofunctors are functors
from a category to itself; how they come to be their own category or how
monoids even apply, well.)

------
Liron
I agree that GEB weaves a nice braid in many ways, just not an eternal golden
one.

------
ianamartin
This critique sounds like it comes from someone who has engaged with a wide
range of topics enough to know that there is a lot of detail and nuance, but
not enough for any of it to have coalesced into a simple understanding of it.

Cage's music is annoying and pretentious, and I largely think that because
Cage was annoying and pretentious. He made a classic mistake in the art world
of trying to tell people what his work was about and then getting pissed off
when people either still didn't like it or chose to interpret it differently.
That's a rookie mistake, and it's a fight artists never win. The smart ones
keep their mouths shut and let the work speak for itself. The good ones make
art that can be meaningful to a lot of different people in a lot of different
ways. This was one of the great sticking points in the "War of the Romantics"
between the New German School (Wagner and Liszt) on the side of program music
against the Leipzig group (Schumann, Brahms) pushing absolute music. This
battle between composers arguing about whether meaning should be explicit and
imposed or if it should be intrinsic to the music and left to the listener was
the context for Cage's work.

And his work is most charitably interpreted as social commentary, even though
that's not what he wanted. The best thing you can say about it is that it asks
the question, "What is music _now_?" But he thought he was the first person to
ever ask this question and got really irritated when people pointed out that
academics had been asking this question for a couple thousand years. So, a lot
of very serious musicians thought he was pretty dumb, and he got pissed and
said it's not dumb, you're dumb and you don't understand it, and if you were
smart you would think it's all genius. It's really hard to defend that kind of
a person, but it gets easier as time passes and you can stop thinking about
the artist as a person and think of the art. But as a professional violinist
for over 30 years and a music theorist, I don't object to the Hof's
assessment. I could say similar things about Milton Babbit too, integrated
serialism, and a lot of contemporary classical music. It would probably get a
response from a certain kind of person who would say that I just don't get it
or that I haven't given it proper study. Well, I have, and I think it's kind
of dumb, it's been done before, and I no longer have the youthful zeal it
takes to debate these things point-by-point.

Similarly, the criticism of the treatment of Zen also seems a little youthful.
I grew up in a very Catholic family with parents who basically don't accept
Vatican 2, and still practice Latin mass, and a large part of my home
schooling was the intense study of Catholic history, philosophy, and theology.
I took being Catholic extremely seriously for a very long time. But over the
years I came to the conclusion that it was basically a bunch of cute fairy
tale stories. Wonderful philosophy; terrible religion. And I'm not blind to
the rich cultural heritage the Catholic church is responsible for. As a
classical musician, I'm extremely aware of (and grateful for) how much the
Church is responsible for Western Music as we know it today.

As I was drifting away from Catholicism, I got pretty deep into Buddhism.
Ultimately I came to a similar conclusion. Great philosophy; silly religion.

Ultimately this article comes across almost as whiny and angsty and teenagery
as John Cage does when he's defending his music: "You just don't understand
me!!!"

No dude. Trust me. I understand it. It's just kind of stupid. You'll grow out
of it eventually.

The book isn't perfect by any means. It _is_ contrived. I don't think you
could write a book like that today. But it was written in a very different
time. A time when the knowledge divide between ivory tower academics and lay
people was explicitly desired by the academics in a wide variety of fields,
including--classical music. Babbit was famous for arguing that classical music
_should not be comprehensible to anyone who didn 't have a PhD in Music Theory
or Composition_. That classical music deserved to be as respected and obtuse
as advanced math and science, and that normal people didn't deserve to be able
to understand great art. This book was a direct reaction to that academic
pretense, and it presaged an era that has disseminated more knowledge across a
wider range than any other explosion of knowledge since the printing press--
and far outdone it.

Outside of that context, the book almost doesn't make any sense. Why would
anyone write like this in a world where the top academic minds of every field
lay out their innermost thoughts about the most challenging problems in their
field on their blogs and talk to riff-raff in the comments and try to make
things as understandable as possible? Well, no one writes like that any more.
Not even Hofstadter writes like that any more. It is an artifact of its time .
. . a lingering remnant of a world where knowledge had to be protecting by
intellectual elites and a wide-ranging understanding of difficult concepts was
seen as a threat to the academic establishment, and a reminder of how recently
things worked that way.

When I was a kid violinist just getting into the completely new world of these
concepts, it was illuminating and perhaps life-changing. As a grown up now
with a different perspective, I can't see how it would have nearly as much of
an impact on a younger person in today's context, and so in my world, its
value has shifted from being the kind of book that initially illuminates a
certain set of ideas and now reminds us of the world we came from way more
recently than it feels like.

------
ptrkdy
There's a pretty big clue on page 9 that the book is supposed to be read
backwards and upside down, starting at the end of the last dialogue.

I know I found Hofstadters easter egg...

------
darkerside
It's incredibly ironic that the author mistakes the dialogue of characters for
the opinions of the author in the Tortoise and Achilles' remarks on 4:33.

~~~
kingbirdy
Why is that ironic?

------
internetman55
I don't love godel escher bach cause when i took my mathemat logic class the
most annoying students were the ones who read that book!!!

------
svat
A lot of people think that the goal of the book was to explain Gödel's
theorem. Some even think the book shows that "mathematics, art and music are
the same". In fact, as Hofstadter says in the preface (to the 20th Anniversary
Edition I think), this is utter nonsense and he intended no such thing: his
goal with the book was to build up a certain philosophical argument about what
consciousness is (and his answer was something like self-reference, or
transcending "levels").

I might be misquoting this, because, like most people, I found the way he
builds up this argument more fun and memorable and interesting than the
argument itself.

Do not read the book to understand Gödel's theorem, or Escher, or Bach. In
fact, Hofstadter is not even really interested in Gödel's theorem itself: his
interest is more in the particular trick that Gödel used to prove the theorem
(Gödel numbering), which allows Gödel to encode statements about the system as
arithmetic statements ( _within_ the system). And although the explanation in
GEB is surely not the best explanations of Gödel's theorem, it is one of the
most enjoyable musings on things "like" Gödel numbering — something you won't
find in other places that are more interested in Gödel's theorem itself.

I think if one tries to read the book expecting to learn or understand
something, one can get frustrated. But like other Pulitzer-Prize winners for
nonfiction (say _The Soul of a New Machine_ ), any learning is only
incidental; what one can enjoy is the way the book is constructed. It is a
work of literature, not mathematics. The dialogues are my favourite parts of
the book — sure they may not be realistic, but they take surprising turns,
they often have a lot hidden in them (I remember reading one half way through
and suddenly suspecting something, then noticing that they formed an acrostic,
reading the first letters down the page). Other things I most loved about the
book is the way it is self-referential, the way everything fits together,
elaborate puns seem to be set up over a course of 300 pages, etc.

All in all, it is a book just simply of Hofstadter _having fun_.

(I had the same impression of Hofstadter's translation of Pushkin's _Eugene
Onegin_ — I've read at least three other translations; Hofstadter's may not be
most literal but it's surely enjoyable and with the most outrageous rhymes:
who else would rhyme "debts" with "Till his creditors cast their _nyet_ s"!
You can read online an article he wrote [1] before starting his own
translation, then a very critical review of his translation [2] but whose
"bad" examples (and the whole first chapter linked there) show what's actually
fun.)

You can see him enjoying himself, and you can go along if you'd like to have
fun as well, forgiving a few things here and there, skipping parts that you
don't find as much fun.

[1]:
[https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/20/r...](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/20/reviews/hofstadter-
translation.html)

[2]:
[https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/12/r...](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/12/reviews/990912.12louriet.html)

------
andrzejsz
I probably asked that before but anybody knows about ebook of GEB?

~~~
1bent
As far as I know, there's no legal ebook of G.E.B.

I've this vague memory of hearing that the author regards it as a physical
work of art; plus maybe the "ambigrams" were only licensed for the print
edition, and the book won't be legally distributed without them.

------
youdontknowtho
It was an enjoyable read. I thought that it had it's moments.

------
avaku
Exactly how I feel about this book.

------
booleandilemma
People read the dialogues?

~~~
commandlinefan
I actually read just the dialogues to my son as bedtime stories when he was 5
or 6 - they actually work really well that way.

------
giantsloth
This is a perfect opportunity to whip out one of my favorite quotes by Simone
de Beauvoir:

“Proust observed with astonishment that a great doctor or a great professor
often shows himself, outside of his specialty, to be lacking in sensitivity,
intelligence, and humanity. The reason for this is that having abdicated his
freedom, he has nothing else left but his techniques. In domains where his
techniques are not applicable, he either adheres to the most ordinary of
values or fulfills himself as a flight.”

I think this quote applies to a lot of people on this site.

~~~
jkabrg
What does "fulfill himself as a flight" mean?

Is the lesson that since professors are "less free" than everyone else, they
criticize everyone else out of bitterness? Or is it that since they're so
specialized and able to make a living only in their specialty, they don't need
to practise good judgement outside their discipline? Is it that they live in
an ivory tower and don't know the difference between theory and practise? What
does that quote mean?

...

Maybe they "abdicate their freedom" when they have to teach students and
battle administration. I seriously don't know what that quote means.

~~~
prr123
From what I got from the essay (it's been a while...), people who chose a
"serious" path in life see no value in things that do not contribute to their
goal.

E.g.: If you focus too much on engineering, you stop being able to see value
in other aspect of life, such as philosophy.

De Beauvoir describes a couple of states of freedom of mind: 1\. Children who
believe in what they're told and don't think about their freedom 2\. The
serious man who chose a goal in life and do not think about their freedom
(which the quote is about) 3\. Nihilists who realize they're free but chose to
do nothing 4\. Adventurers who accept their freedom, but chose no precise
goals 5\. Passionate men who choose a goal according to their freedom and show
no concerns for others 6\. Genuine freedom (freedom + goal + concerns for
others freedom)

~~~
mos_basik
Thanks for that overview of her categories; it got me interested and searching
a bit for a more detailed version. Now I think I'll give the original essay a
shot, and I hardly ever read philosophy. Link to save anyone else 10 seconds
of googling:
[http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/philosophy/existentialis...](http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/philosophy/existentialism/debeauvoir/ambiguity-2.html)

(Also, this feels eerily similar to the first time I realized "Oh, going and
reading the source of $LIBRARY is an option if the docs are too vague.")

------
monochromatic
The critiques here are spot on. The dialogues at the beginning of chapters
were tedious and mostly unhelpful. The treatment of anything far afield from
math was pretty shallow and cursory.

That said, I still loved this book in spite of its imperfections. I think it’s
important to read it at the correct time in one’s life. When I first read it
(at 19 or so), it showed me a lot of things I’d never thought about before.
The topics it didn’t really do justice, it at least _hinted_ at things that
were new and interesting to me.

It doesn’t hold up quite so well to subsequent readings by my older self, but
I’ll always have a soft spot for it.

------
JAdamMoore
It seems clear from his own writing that he lacks the intellectual capacity to
fully appreciate the book. In his own words he describes repeatedly the
struggles he faced with simple and obvious conventions of both writing and
thought.

------
muro
tl;dr. Excellent first few chapters (which deserve the high praise and
possibly are the cause of all the hype), gets less and less interesting. At
some point, I dreaded returning to it and gave up.

~~~
lolc
Did you sum up your experience reading the book? Or did you try to sum up the
critique we're discussing here? If it's the latter you failed.

~~~
muro
The book.

Apologies, you are right, should have been clearer. I think the other comments
at the time were also about the book, not the article.

~~~
honoredb
So now we have to consider the specter of someone writing an overly verbose
review of something that reduces to "tl;dr". Someone might summarize the
review by writing "tl;dr: tl;dr". Or they might express the same thing, but
overly verbosely, so someone might summarize _their_ response by writing
"tl;dr: tl;dr: tl;dr". In general, if N "tl;dr"s is a valid sentiment, and any
valid sentiment can be expressed overly verbosely, then N+1 "tl;dr"s are a
valid sentiment, so by induction any positive integer repetition of "tl;dr"s
is valid. However, there exists some number L such that L repetitions of
"tl;dr" is itself too long to express the necessary point, and someone who
didn't read it would want a summary, the most succinct of which would
presumably be "tl;dr: tl;dr nested L times". This meta "tl;dr" itself might be
expressed overly verbosely, of course...

~~~
muro
Well done. Shame it's buried under N comments.

------
interfixus
_The_ Tortoise. Not _Tortoise_. Author doesn't seem to have delved too deeply
into this unique book.

~~~
appleflaxen
I haven't read the book. Can you elaborate on why the definite article is an
important aspect of how the book is written or interpreted?

~~~
interfixus
It's not the definite article per se. It's just that The Tortoise is
specifically _The Tortoise_ all throught the book, just as is in Lewis
Carroll. Not getting that, I don't really believe anyone could have been
getting the spirit of the book at all, no matter how all my downvoters may
feel about it.

