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Comment by davesque | Hacker News Reader

I've read GEB over many years rather in the way someone would read the Bible. I pick it up from time to time and enjoy chewing on one or two chapters of material.

But I've yet to figure out if the book actually has a specific thesis. I know it's all about the power of interpretation and the way in which interpreting a formal system as self-referencing has the effect of completely blowing up the intended design of that system. But can someone sum up how this connects to consciousness beyond the obvious way in which consciousness plays the role of the interpreter? Or is that itself the thesis of the book? Or maybe that consciousness is the originator of self-reference?

Bottom line is that I think the thesis can be summed up in a few sentences, but apparently it takes a whole 800 page book to get to the point. Would love other people's thoughts on what that point is ultimately. By the way, as salty as I sound about it, I love GEB. So don't get me wrong :).

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I think of it more as a survey of a bunch of disciplines, and some hopeful hypothesis of future AI research. He writes in an accessible way and touches DNA, poetry, fractals, video feedback, topographical systems, just... a whole bunch of things.

It is for sure reaching, but his core conceit is about pattern recognition and emergent behavior and he throws everything he's got at the wall there through the eyes of his interests because he KNOWS there is something there, even if Godel could describe it in a 19 page paper decades before.

That some of this is obvious in hindsight almost 50 years later does not discredit the bizarrely singular nature of his effort, maybe the same way Seinfeld seems corny now.

Yeah, awesome way to sum it up. I think I'm suffering from the nearsightedness of someone who now lives many decades after the 1970s.

> Seinfeld seems corny now

Seinfeld holds up brilliantly.

I thought Seinfeld was corny at the time and remains unchanged. Opinions, everyone has one...

The central thesis of GEB is this: what is a self? From the preface of the 20th anniversary edition:

"GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?"

It is interesting to me that the author would start at the materialist assumption. Most people take it as a “given”, but I have softened to the idea that maybe it is not a correct or complete way of viewing things.

The author's favorite topic, as described by him in the final Dialogue, is 'indirect self-reference'. This has a double meaning. Indirect self-reference can mean what it says such as Godel numbering which is a method of referring to a self indirectly but it can also mean that the whole book is an indirect way of referring to the question of 'what is a self?' He is approaching the topic of consciousness indirectly.

I disagree that most people would take materialism as a given (I think most people in the world are at least slightly religious or spiritual), nor do I think it's necessarily a correct reading to say that Hofstadter actually assumes materialism must be true (though I believe he does), rather Hofstadter starts from the premise that it is and then tries to see if that premise can be logically consistant.

Someday—when we have all this figured out—someone should write What Is Self? as the sequel to Schrödinger’s What Is Life?

You may want to read I Am A Strange Loop, which clarifies the main thesis in the lines that self-reference is a precursor of consciousness iirc.

In the forward of which, Hofstadter says he could have called the book, "I" is a Strange Loop referring to the concept of "I-ness", but he found it too clunky.

Haven't read it in a decade (and only once!), but I'd say its about how self-reference, and roles + perspectives are consciousness. The exception proves the rule, getting into the mind-bending edge cases exposes the typical mental framing. A bit like Leonardo exploring his eye muscles with a blunt pin.

Godel, quines, the phonograph ship of theseus stuff, Bach harmonies, all the self-aware dialogues. He's looking for the vital spark, the thing that makes us greater than the sum of parts. But he can't capture the essence (who can?), and settles for running around the outskirts.

Roger Penrose supposedly wrote Emperor's New Mind as a direct rebuttal of GEB from a physics point of view. These two books, ironically, seem to form an undecidable dual. One of them is true, but neither managed to prove its point.

p.s. GEB is ultimately arguing that mind arises from complexity in structure and algorithm. ENM counters that by noting (apparent) non-deterministic aspects of consciousness, proposing quantum effects as a possible source of consciousness. (That was my overall take on the these two books.)

p.s.s. What is not convincing about GEB's argument is the lack of a reasonable explanation for meaning. What it does argue well is how meaning unfolds (self-reference, recursion, composition) but just as Cellular Automatas (CAs) deceptively look like natural phenomena but entirely ignore the extra-CA substrate that simulates the CA world, GEB too ignores the missing mind that is supposed to traverse these layers of abstraction based on self-reference, recursion, and composition. So it is ultimately a purely aesthetic argument (even though the machinery of logic and mathematics are thrown in,) just like certain branches of modern theoretical physics.

Penrose's issue is that most mathematicians have disagreed with his understanding of Godel's theorem. He basically wants to say "A computer by definition can't know that a "Godel statement" is true, and yet I do, and therefore my mind can't be a computer."

Yet Godel's theorem is entirely formal and understandable by a computer, which can draw the same conclusions about any such statement as a human.

Yes, the later editions have a foreword which explains what the book is about: Hofstader's theory that consciousness arises from self reference.

Metamagical Themas is worth checking out for that style of reading as it is a compilation of his essays. One can pick and choose any to read but there's overarching themes that bring them together too.

100%, not just the collection of columns, but that he has postscripts for it. He manahes to keep things accessible over a few columns rather than the overly sprawling GEB (which I've read a few times, and still revisit pieces) or his later personal works, which involve a lot of personal grief in the guise of discussions of cognitive studies.

He's said he wasn't great at conveying the thesis in GEB. If you want the thesis of GEB, you can read "A Strange Loop." It's a bit more narrative, less technical but still pretty good book, imo.

Others have pointed out what the core argument of the book is, so I'll point to the spot where I believe the thesis is stated most clearly (p. 709 in my copy, the 1980 Vintage Books paperback edition):

"My belief is that the explanations of 'emergent' phenomena in our brains--for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will--are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself determined by the bottom level. ...The self comes into being at the moment is has the power to reflect itself."

The book is about... should I call it golemization? the emergence of a being from a summation of non-being things.

Few people get it like that and I think it's a problem with the book. It's taken as more of a funny and poignant popular science dive into some aspects of logic and computability. Hofstadter expands on "I Am a Strange Loop" which I think you should read if you are interested into what was his take with GEB.

I think his "specific thesis" is an argument that intelligence (and he includes consciousness) are algorithmic. I think he fails to make that case; but the journey he leads us on is extremely entertaining. The book's a masterpiece.

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