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Comment by westoncb | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a recommendation for a book that covers these topics that's technical but not necessarily a text book?

The classic popular treatment is: Godel Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter

I've read about a third of it. It's too long and too focused on other topics for me personally.

I also read the book 'Gödel's Proof' a long time ago, before I had much familiarity with pure math, and remember it describing a very interesting sort of 'architecture' that Gödel had put together—but I left still wondering about any applications other than producing the incompleteness theorems. Maybe I'd get more out of it now though...

GEB is well worth a second attempt. It's one of the very few books that completely changed my worldview.

I read GEB a few years ago, and it struck me as a book full of ideas that would have transformed me had I been encountering them for the first time. I think the book may have been so influential that its big ideas had largely filtered out into places where I'd encountered them. If I'd read it at 19, say, I think it would have rocked my world.

Note that I'm mostly talking about the book's first half (about incompleteness and canons and whatnot). The second half (ants, etc) struck me as much more dated.

I did read it at 19 and it did rock my world.

Same here. I read it just after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Rite of passage for nerds. :-)

I lost interest when certain other ideas made me think his basic project of accounting for consciousness mathematically was deeply flawed (and it wasn't Penrose's argument about formal systems!). I did find it entertaining though, so maybe I'll revisit before too long.

I'm curious what shift it caused for you, if you don't mind saying.

At least for me, it wasn't so much about computers or computer science, as it was the first time I really deeply considered what consciousness is. It's actually the book, along with The Selfish Gene that made me dismiss the necessity of any kind of 'soul', fresh out of Catholic School.

The more time I've spent reading about and considering the nature of subjectivity, the more I believe arguments from evolution or computer simulation are irrelevant. They're talking about something different.

I liked "Godels Theorem Simplified". Although it looks like it is now a lot more expensive than it used to be. Maybe get it through and interlibrary loan.

https://www.amazon.com/Godels-Theorem-Simplified-Harry-Gensl...

There's a chapter about it in _I Am a Strange Loop_ (Douglas Hofstadter) which I found very enjoyable and pretty enlightening.

I really like Peter Smith's "Gödel Without Tears" lecture notes: http://www.logicmatters.net/resources/pdfs/gwt/GWT2f.pdf

I personally liked "Godel's Proof" by Ernest Nagel. It's pretty old, but it's to-the-point and inexpensive.

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