Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* 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).

(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

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)

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

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.

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.

https://altreason.com/i-am-a-strange-loop/

> 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.)

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I know I found Hofstadters easter egg...

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 nyets"! 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...

[2]: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/12/r...

“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.

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.