Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey | Hacker News Reader

Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey

ocw.mit.edu

106 pointskydoh44 comments

I have to say I'm very surprised at how few people here seem to have liked the book. Going by my experience, I would have expected that HN readers would have thoroughly enjoyed it.

I first read it about 25 years ago, and while I didn't understand much of its philosophical arguments, I remember the experience as a sheer delight. Since then, i've read it at least twice more, and enjoyed it every time ( and understood it better):

- It's the best explanation by far (for a non-mathematical reader) of Godel's theorem and its philosophical implications.

- It's a theory about what is consciousness and how it arises, but unlike most such discussions, genuinely interesting and even playful.

- It's an argument for what is called 'strong AI'. Given the author's view of consciousness, he makes a strong argument for why he believes conscious computer programs are possible.

- It's a great introduction (again for the math-challenged) to formal systems, mathematical proofs, and what was called the Entschiedungsproblem (who can resist finding out what a word like that means?) :-)

- It's tantalizing glimpses of the world of western classical music and painting and some interesting parallels he draws between them and his theory of consciousness.

- It's a set of delightful dialogs (in the style of Lewis Carroll) about all the above.

For me, it was one of my formative experiences, and the one thing I got from it at the time was that there was more to computers than writing Pascal programs. It helped that I came to this book as the proverbial tabula rasa, knowing nothing about classical music, painting, formal systems or philosophy for that matter, but I really think most people here, even those who know a lot about these things, will enjoy and learn from it.

Gödel, Escher, Bach is a prog rock concept album: 70s, deeply focused on consciousness, indulgent, holistic/synthetic, great displays of technical virtuosity, three-letter acronym, umlaut. Even if you love it, were changed by it, hear selections from it in your head, you keep it a little on the down low because it is so far from the mainstream notion of cool, acceptable. Occasionally, you find a fellow traveller and you share some guilty passion for its awesomeness, like you would for Rush's Hemispheres or Genesis' Lamb Lays Down... Back at the farm you've got to fall in line, claim allegiance to the essentialist raw power of K&R, the baroque symphonies of Don Knuth, and the chart-topping successes on Tim O'Reilly's Top 40. When you're alone, lounging in your earth chair, you slip on your headphones, crank-up your stereo hi-fi, pop in your GEB 8-track, and you're gone...

Holy shit, you nailed it. Now I'm thinking of Metamagical Themas as an early 80's new wave album.

(And GEB is all about barouque symphonies and Don Knuth)

As Shakespeare says, "the readiness is all." It's one of those books that needs to find you at the right moment-- if you are not ready for it, some of it can seem like an odd mix of nonsense and hard work. If, on the other hand, you come to it after an advanced education in many of the topics, you might find it slight.

I re-read it, and Metamagical Themas a couple years ago, and was pleased to find how well it held up after all these years. Some books that are mind-opening when we read them as teenagers seem awfully thin decades later (yes, I'm looking at you, Robert Pirsig.)

Totally agree about GEB. But I never understood what I was supposed to get out of Pirsig's Zen and the Art of... I always felt like I was missing something that everyone else connected with. Do you remember what you connected with in it?

I was a young teenager when I read it, and had not yet read Plato, Aristotle, or any Zen, so it was a nice eye-opener, but quickly superseded.

I'm guessing "The Matrix" played a similar role for a more recent generation. If you haven't been previously exposed to Philosophy 101, I'm sure it seems pretty profound.

I agree with his argument for strong AI. However, I find his argument for its possibility pretty unsatisfying. He basically just says that since humans are incomplete (like any formal system), we should be able to simulate it in hardware or software. I do believe that, but I don't find it very persuasive. What if our minds are such a tangled hierarchy that our own minds can't ever untangle it? I don't think that's true, but I tend to cringe when he expresses such optimism, optimism which is still largely unrealized after 30 years of AI winter.

That said, I absolutely love the book.

Same here. I got it as a present from a friend. It took me about three years to read it. It's a long time ago and I really should read it again.

Same here, I've ended up buying the book about 4 times now, from random mishaps or just giving my current copy to a friend. I've tried at times to get almost everyone I know to read it, regardless of their backgrounds (usually not math/science types) and always like seeing people go a little crazy just thinking through it or trying to explain it to other people.

I bought my copy a few years ago at a used bookstore. In the inner cover there are three signatures under a simple sentence - "sign this when you can't finish it and sell it back". It's still on my bookshelf - I should sign it and pass it on.

I "read" this book, in that I passed my eyes over the words it contains, and mentally recreated the sounds of those words, parsed the individual sentences, and digested some of the paragraphs. It has had certain effects on my manner of thinking and acting, but it bothers me to know that there's a great deal more information in that hefty tome than I've managed to get out of it.

The teacher of the course himself admitted he took seven years to read the thing. Assuming it's the same lectures I'm thinking of, they are available either on YouTube or iTunes U, because that's where I saw them.

Same. I read it on Eliezer Yudkowsky's recommendation, but it was too much for me. I mean, I got a couple interesting ideas out of it, but I felt like I was barely scratching the surface.

I wonder if anyone has written a good companion guide to read along with it.

It's a combination of two things: An extended musing on the nature of Godel's Incompleteness theorem, including its practical and philosophical consequences, and a series of things as jacoblyles explains in his comment.

It's an arty/fun book, I don't think it's bad, but the "mystery" you perceive at the heart of it is simply Godel's theorem, which, to be fair, like many other aspects of computer science does indeed have more application than the immediate, raw application of the proof. I suggest spending some time with one of the more formal explanations of Godel's theorem, one that is really careful to explain how the self-referential statement is really constructed.

I get Goedel's theorem, I'd like to think. I get strange loops, and how Hofstadter would have a field day with our criticism of xkcd and of xkcd's critics. I just know there's still more.

Is there more? Well, yes. I did just try to summarize the book in about 20 words.

Are you about 90% of the way through? Yes. The book is written in a style to make it have the trappings of more depth than it actually has. I actually enjoy it that way and do not mean it as a criticism. (I also enjoyed the Illuminatus! trilogy, which is self-consciously written with somewhat similar motives.) Don't undersell yourself.

It's a Dunning-Kruger trap, carefully laid in pretty prose to catch people like me. I'll never be confident that I've "finished" it. As a consequence, I'll always think Hofstadter is smarter than I am. There's evidence beyond the scope of GEB to support that, of course.

What a beautiful way of putting it!

I happened upon the book in my life precisely when it would hold the least mystery, the second year of my graduate studies in computer science. It was fun but by that point in the category of "intellectual fluff" rather than "ow my brain". While I'm sure I have not discovered every last quirky little connection in it, every last pun or every last hidden pattern, I'm also pretty sure I didn't miss any of the main points.

But he's still smarter than me. I can read that book, I could never have written that book.

True, but to say the book is just Godels theorem is underselling it. At its most clinical it is a survey of various sciences, at its essence it is an intuitive theory. The importance of Godels theorem is that an intuitive notion can be proven true in a mathematical framework, as opposed to the piles of bullshit pseudoscience new-age stuff saying Heisenburgs uncertainty principle makes everything subjective.

Gödel, Escher, Bach is one of the most beautifully bizarre, transcendent creations I have ever come across. I wish every computer programmer that I ever heard say something silly like "I don't like art", or "I don't read that much" could be exposed to it. There is nothing so humbling as getting your ass kicked by 800 pages of a guy trying to explain an idea in the simplest terms he can.

The only things that I can compare it to are more literary, but "Breakfast of Champions", "Foucalts Pendulum" or "Infinite Jest", aren't out of order.

They are all products of brilliant, obsessive, minds making a concerted effort to explain what they can see above the clouds.

As much intellectual ego that gets bandied about between computer programmers, its nice to keep a humbling base where you can actually see that no matter how smart you think you are, that there are people who are way way way smarter than you and actually have the dedication, skill and expertise to try to help you understand what they have spent their life learning.

A comment here, which is unfortunately dead, says this:

Make sure you don't neglect its contrary twin: Emperor's New Mind. (The entire dialectic between these two books is something straight out of G.E.B.)

I haven't read GEB, but I loved reading the Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose. It's a little all over the place, going from non-periodic tiling patterns to quantum mechanics and relativity, all to argue against the case for strong AI.

Awesome book. I ran into a friend the other day who told me: "I found a very interesting book that you might like. Godel something. Actually, you've probably read it since it's a legacy book."

I think he meant a book which as "been around".

I've read it twice and found it awesome each time. You get more out of it reading it again. (One wonders: does it continue to be so? :)

What's even more cool is the bibliography in the back. The books are starred according to how useful the book was to the writing of GEB. So it's safe to say that the book and the pointers it has to other books is a treasure trove of wonderful ideas.

This could be really good; I've started reading this book twice now, and gotten about 1/3 of the way through both times before my brain starts to melt.

Also, Douglas Hofstatder's "I Am A Strange Loop" is a little more accessible and is all about consciousness, if that part of Godel, Escher, Bach interests you.

From what I remember of his work, I don't care for Hofstatder's style. He describes a bunch of mysterious things, including consciousness, and winks suggestively that they all could have something to do with each other. You feel like you have learned something, but you really haven't. His corpus consists of "mysterious answers to mysterious questions" (http://lesswrong.com/lw/iu/mysterious_answers_to_mysterious_...). It doesn't actually enhance our understanding of the world.

Also worthwhile is Hofstadter’s essay/lecture, “Analogy as the Core of Cognition”, http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.h...

"could be really"? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your use of those words - this is from 2007, and everything from the course is on that page, including videos of the lectures.

I interpret that as based on the portion that the GP has consumed. Like eating a 3 course meal, if the starter is great you might say 'this meal could be really good', you can't tell for sure because you haven't eaten all of it, hence the caveat.

We had a similar class at CCS http://www.ccs.ucsb.edu/, which really was just a book club for that book. Read a bit, discuss it, try to wrap your head around it.

I highly recommend this book for stretching your brain and doing some higher-level thinking.

This is a book which I'm currently reading. On my recessionista budget I found a second hand copy (1980 edition) with a few dodgy falling out pages. My main reasons for wanting to read this were that I say a video a talk by Hofstadter in which he talks about analogy as the basis of cognition, which I quite liked, and also I more recently discovered that his book, GEB, apparently contains steganographic content (i.e. hidden messages), after searching for steganography in the light of the Russian spy story in the media.

mp4 format here http://www.kickasstorrents.com/mit-ocw-godel-escher-bach-bun...

Not 100% sure if that torrent is legit, but I've had the mp4 files on my harddisk for a few months now. I also can't imagine why anyone would go through the trouble to fake this particular torrent so enjoy !

Alternatively, use this script to get the real .rm files:

  PRE="mplayer -playlist http://mfile.akamai.com/7870/rm/mitstorage.download.akamai.com/7870/hs/godel_escher_bach
  POST=" -dumpstream -dumpfile "
  $PRE/OCW_7.01.07_Godel-220k.rm $POST OCW_7.01.07_Godel-220k.rm &
  $PRE/OCW_7.08.07_Godel-220k.rm $POST OCW_7.08.07_Godel-220k.rm &
  $PRE/OCW_7.15.07_Godel-220k.rm $POST OCW_7.15.07_Godel-220k.rm &
  $PRE/OCW_7.22.07_Godel-220k.rm $POST OCW_7.22.07_Godel-220k.rm &
  $PRE/OCW_7.29.07_Godel-220k.rm $POST OCW_7.29.07_Godel-220k.rm &
  $PRE/OCW_8.12.07_Godel-220k.rm $POST OCW_8.12.07_Godel-220k.rm &

Any way this could be done using vlc? I am trying to watch it on vlc but cannot forward it.

just in case somebody is wondering: "These are transcoded files from the RealVideo on the MIT site"

I really enjoyed reading and re-reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach". Looking at the course/lecture page at MIT, I especially liked the following part :

   Grading
    There are no grades for this course.

You can't grade such knowledge. This is so universal...

That incredibly a propos for me considering I reading this book right now. Thanks for posting.

I'm 150 pages into the book and it's quite interesting but I've seen a lot of the stuff elsewhere. What I find incredibly cool is how he connects different subjects with concepts he's explaining.

Darn, wish he would have hidden a little play on initials as Hofstadter did in his title: GEB:EGB.

I read this when I was like 12... I really need to go back over it again

How do you know someone has read GEB? Because they tell you.

I may be wrong but what-the-heck I am going to first watch all these videos, go through the lecture notes and all other ocw and then "acquire"(because I would not be able to buy it for cheap in my country) the book and read it.

I get a feeling that GEB is about materialism (of philosophy of mind) and I am actually not very impressed by it now (through my limited reading). But may be if I am successful in keeping an open mind (I would try my level best) and digest some of it (by ocw and reading) I may change my mind.

This is a great book.

That being said, why is this on HN? The link is from 2007. The book is even older.

Yes, it's from 2007, but it doesn't seem dated and definitely would be of interest to readers of HN. As far as I know there is no preference for 'new' material here - in fact tried and true is preferred! And if it's a double, it's worthwhile just for the mp4 link above. I wanted to do this but .rm - no.

Well I've owned the book since about 1995 and still haven't gotten anywhere on it.

The .rm? I had to Google RealPlayer to see if they were even still around.

Seems to work OK on VLC, no RealPlayer needed :)

It doesn't matter how old it is, if it's interesting to hackers it's appropriate.

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