6 month read-through/discussion of Gödel, Escher, Bach starting 1/17 on Reddit | Hacker News Reader

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228 pointsqrush80 comments

I loved GEB, but since reading it (and jumping in and re-reading parts here and there when it strikes my fancy) I've come to the conclusion that it's a perfectly laid Dunning-Kruger trap which specifically ensnares people like me. I am not as smart as Hofstadter, and I know it, and so I'll never be sure I've actually understood the meat of the message.

I think I get strange loops, recursion, self-reference and the metaphor of the anthill. I still think I'm missing something with breaking the record players, but based on my understanding it's a metaphor for incompleteness.

I had the opposite reaction: I lost faith in the book's analytical process only ten pages in, when Hofstadter claimed that Bach's canon was a "strange loop" simply because it modulates to a higher key. Sure, if you keep doing this you can get to the same key, an octave higher, but that's only because pitch itself is periodic, repeating the same notes every octave. There's nothing unique or mysterious about Bach's canon in this regard; anything that modulates up a step has the same property (for example, the chorus to "Mandy" by Barry Manilow).

I think the far more interesting observation is that octaves in music work this way, where we as humans somehow perceive frequencies in a 2:1 ratio as "the same, but different." A 440 and A 880 aren't the same pitch, and we can clearly perceive the difference between them, and yet the seem "the same" to the point that we give them the same letter and think of them as the same. I find that very interesting and slightly mysterious.

Anyway, since music is my area of expertise (as opposed to the other things described in the book) I lost faith that his explanations of the other subject material wouldn't have similarly sloppy thinking. The impression I got was that, in an effort to weave an interesting and engaging narrative, he was too quick to see things as instances of these fanciful concepts like "strange loops."

He's discussing our perception of the tones, you might want to check out this entry on wikpedia to understand what he's referring to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone

This is a common concept in music synthesis, as you can create an endlessly rising 'melody' by repeating only 1 octave of some properly constructed timbres. This is the 'strange loop' he's referring to.

Bach's canon is not a Shepard tone. A Shepard tone would have been a more credible example of a "strange loop" than Bach's canon. But "Godel, Escher, Shepard" doesn't have the same ring to it.

He actually does discuss Shepard Tones and the Shepard Scale in the book, and explains how he thinks they are related to Bach's compositions.

Near the end of chapter 20, there is an example of a harmony that, when looped, creates the illusion of an endlessly rising melody.

In this harmony, the loudness of each note in the melodies rises and falls so that the lower melodies feed into the the higher melodies and ultimately fade out. In our brains, we hear this as an endlessly rising melody.

Interesting! Reminds me of the criticism leveled against Freakonomics, and it's genuinely the first time I've heard it applied to GEB. What you're saying is obvious and makes perfect sense, I wonder if we're both missing something, or if Hofstader was playing a little too merrily outside his domain of expertise.

Edit: first time until I got lower down this thread, wow!

The Bach metaphor is really bad. I believe Hofstadter referees to the canon by which Bach inscribed "Ascendenteque Modulatione ascendat Gloria Regis" ("As the keys ascend so may the glory of the king also ascend"). Bach did not mean that after going up an octave the king's glory would have returned to it's starting point.

disclaimer: I did not read the book.

I agree - I think the Bach and Escher examples throughout the book are frequently a stretch. There's plenty of value outside of these areas, however. I think that without being an expert in each of the fields, we can use our critically thinking to see through the fanciful aspects and get to the core.

I think you might be right. The most valuable thing for me from the book was the explanation of Godel's theorem, and I really enjoyed all the language play. After that, I grew really uncomfortable with the comparisons to "this could be how the brain works."

I have the firm belief that figuring out how the brain works will not be accomplished through pure mathematics, but through scientific inquiry.

"I still think I'm missing something with breaking the record players, but based on my understanding it's a metaphor for incompleteness."

The record player is a Turing Machine interpreter. The "blowing up" is going into an infinite loop, or stopping the record incorrectly when it would have in fact terminated. The record player doesn't blow up if it A: runs a terminating program or B: correctly stops the record by determining the program will never halt. The differing record players represent the fact that you can write interpreters that will detect certain cases of infinite looping, but the halting problem prevents you from catching all cases. The repeated sequence in the book is:

1. A new "guaranteed safe!" record player is produced 2. A record is produced which breaks it (a program that loops but gets past the player is produced) 3. Goto 1.

At least, IIRC, it's been a few years since I read it.

Have you ever seen Hofstadter try to summarize the idea conveyed in the book? He really is not able to, and so I think the book pretty much boils down to "hey here's a bunch of weird/cool stuff." Which is not such a bad thing. But for me, there was a point where I had to stop reading, I think when he tries to independently derive propositional logic or something like that? (It has been a while.) I just remember finding it to be a tedious retread of something everyone already took for granted.

He's pretty explicit that the idea is: consciousnesses is a strange loop, and since it's sometimes impossible to understand a system from within that system, we may never be able to understand the human mind because we are trapped within human minds.

See also: "The Emperor's New Mind" - 'Consciousness is a quantum phenomenon since they're both really weird".

...

Thank you!

This seems like one of the first great "Social" ideas I've ever heard. For me, personally of course, facebook, foursquare, social shopping, etc all solve problems I don't have.

However a sort of online book group is something that I might like and would solve a real problem I do have. It may be to niche to make a company out of. That said, what sorts of things would a site (platform?) need in order to be successful at creating guided, curated, experiences such as a book group.

I think forums have served this problem for over a decade. Voting systems on comments and nested comments like slashdot and here and reddit are just an improvement on forums. So what are these formats lacking for you?

(I agree they could probably be improved by specific changes for online book groups)

That's a good question; and is really the heart of my question... What do we need to put together to create something good for this... I would invision is as akin to a meetup group only virtual. Here's a quick list of things you might want (With no claims about whether or not they already exist):

1) Real time communication along with some async comm.

   -Real time comm needs to be archived in a readable form

2) Method for an instructor(leader) to create 'outlines' and have those bullet points contain conversations.

3) The ability to "sign up" for a book / experience.

   -When we get enough signups and a leader we schedule a start date.

4) A method for people who want to participate at a later date to feel involved and "step though" the old forum / chats at the speed they happened.

   -A way for slow people or later people to use the site without spoilers

   -A way for two groups doing the same book at different speeds to work together.

5) [random idea] Make users anonymous to each other... Except for the moderator.

6) Track books participated in.

7) [random idea] Does this idea make more sense as a specialized learning system for literature courses?

All the ideas I have right now.

Many of these things are great ways to improve forums in general (hence google wave, perhaps).

For example, integrating async and real time is an interesting problem. I've also thought about this with respect to my gmail account. Some emails are one-off questions, but others are an ongoing dialogue which start to blend with chat. There is a continuum there.

Something else I've wanted is the ability to easily, within the site, branch off a discussion with a specific person on subgroup. Sometimes you want outside input, but it can be easier to get into a deep discussion if you are both reading responses carefully and following up. However, in that way, anonymous wouldn't work.

Considering 2 and 7 - I'd love to have such a system used in any course. Blackboard tries to be this, but is clunky, and others I'm sure exist. I imagine, rather than an outline, a real-time web/map (in fact, a sort of hierarchical tag cloud representing importance and relationship) that grows as ideas are added, with more detailed discussions under different headings.

For the most part, I wouldn't worry about spoilers. The most valuable discussions I've had regarding literature have been: read the book first, then read it a second time, together in pieces, and discuss along the way.

Shoot, Google Wave probably solves/solved half of those. I always considered the platform being good for a pen-and-paper RPG, but a virtual book club would probably work too!

A starting point, anyway :-)

I thought about google wave when I was typing that. I actually use google wave pretty regularly with friends. We're setting up a server to house our personal apache Wave deployment now that google is shutting it down.

This was the last book my grandfather gave me before he passed away a few years ago, in translation to Swedish. Back then I was completely unaware that it is regarded as seminal work.

He was an engineer just as I am, but I always admired that his bookshelf was brim full of knowledge from completely different areas, spanning psychology, biology, medicine, art and music.

How do you know someone's read GEB? They tell you.

<snark> How do you know someone hasn't read GEB? They pass snarky remarks when someone mentions they have read GEB. </snark>

That aside, offering to help people with a difficult book is different from flaunting having read the book.

I've been meaning to review GEB on http://hn-books.com -- great, once-in-a-lifetime book. Kind of a cross between a college course, a game, a puzzle, and the work of a madman.

It's the kind of book you can spend a few days reading or a life time, just like "Zen and the art of motorcycle repair".

I've read half of it in 8 years, so maybe it's time to redo the whole process from beginning to end.

Just like ZMM, GED is also the kind of book that tends to split people into those that love it and those that hate it. Personally, I loved GED and hated ZMM. Similarly, I know people who find GED overrated, pompous and shallow.

Yeah, I think it's overrated, pompous and shallow. And I understand it perfectly, having studied the subject (at least the maths part) from real sources.

There are times when it would be nice to downvote a post and this is one of them.

I would reread

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Motorcycle-Maintenance-Inquiry...

before I woud crack GEB open again. In fact I discarded GEB. My belief is that the Devil himself collects these discarded old volumes and passes them out as reading material to nerds in Hell.

For 8 years you've been wasting your free time. Sell the GEB and read Nagel's "Godel's Proof" (see my other post for URL) instead.

You can down vote comments when you have a high enough karma.

Sweet, sweet, sweet. I know I'm not the only one who's "read it", but hasn't actually finished it.

It's such a shame there isn't a Kindle/ePub/PDF version. I guess I'm off to kill another tree.

What's wrong with killing trees that were grown specifically for paper? You're just taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, helping reduce global climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said "In the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fibre or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit".

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-cha...

You've got a point there, but shipping that book to where I live halfway around the world in New Zealand isn't doing climate change any favours.

I think you're overthinking it. I'm pretty sure other people in NZ are buying the same book, the marginal impact of shipping one copy must be very close to zero.

I've got a Kindle but I wouldn't trade my hardcover GEB for an electronic version.

Killing trees takes CO2 out of the atmosphere? I think you've got this backwards.

Growing trees to make them into timber, pulp, etc. takes CO2 out of the atmosphere. As long as you're not growing them to burn them, it's one of the most effective CO2 sequestration methods we have.

77% of tree usage in the US is for timber and pulpwood. Fast-growing species are planted and harvested over a 10-20 year cycle so that as each section is cut down and replanted, another section is maturing. It's both sustainable business and an effective CO2 sink.

Thanks. That makes sense. My brain farted and I couldn't make the leap after "What's wrong with killing trees? You're just taking CO2 out of the atmosphere."

[citation needed]

It's really not. If you want a citation for "growing trees takes CO2 out of the atmosphere", a high school bio book will suffice -- the carbon mass of the tree is carbon extracted from the atmosphere (and dead plant mass in soil, but the carbon there came from the atmosphere too).

If you want a citation for growing trees for timber and pulp as an effective CO2 sink, the citation is right in the grandfather post (an international climate change study by the IPCC including researchers from over a dozen countries, how much more authoritative can we get?), or just look up the paper and timber industries on wikipedia.

I was more interested in the source for the specific number you gave. Should have been less snarky, sorry!

The US tree usage statistic originally came from TAPPI (the tree pulp, paper, packaging, and converting industry assocation).

To anyone looking to purchase themselves some dead trees, I recommend that you pick up an older second hand copy. I have it on good authority that the recent 20th anniversary reprint is of a much lower quality, with crappy thin pages and less clear type.

Possessing both versions, I can confirm that the paper in the anniversary edition is thinner, but I think if anything the type is easier to read. YMMV, of course.

In my case, it's more a matter of praticality. My nook is lighter than a book and contains many books, so if I don't feel like reading one type of book I can switch easily.

Less importantly, I can hold the nook with one hand and still be able to turn pages. I travel by bus, so this is useful to me - my other hand can hold a coffee ;)

There's a pdf on tpb, so there should be a legitimate version somewhere.

I have the original as hardcover, but also wanted to be able to read on the go on the iPad, so I downloaded the ebook.

It's a scan with OCR. Unfortunately the OCR is bad on many parts of the page - random occurences of %, ' and other characters are common. Also some words are totally unreadable.

Overall, I still read sometimes on the iPad, but having to go back to the hardcover if I'm totally lost.

I just noticed that after I downloaded. Pretty unfortunate.

Oh well, one more dead tree won't hurt anyone.

Just because there is a PDF (or ePub etc.) of a book exists doesn't mean there is an official ebook. Some pirates scan books and either upload those each-page-is-one-image pdfs or (worse) they OCR these images andc upload that text.

Hit your friendly neighbourhood used bookstore.

Here is an easy way for Kindle/ePub/PDF ...

http://www.magicscroll.net

As far as I can tell this is a web-based ePub reader. How does this help reading GEB on a Kindle/...?

This is awesome. GEB has been sitting on my bookshelf for about a year but I never got around to reading it. I'll give it a shot, and it's great to know there's a community out there available for help.

If someone wants to start one for Hofstadter's most recent mega-book, Le Ton Beau De Marot, count me in.

I don't think it's the most recent, isn't 'i am a strange loop' a subsequent one? Anyway, I read it and it's awesome. It is a much more personal book than GEB though, and it's easy to grow weary of the poem tranations after the twentyeth, but it's a great reading.

I meant most recent "mega-book" since its a brick like GEB (but not sure of the size of "I am a strange loop", so maybe that's a brick too)

I can see how the poem translations can get weary, but they do a brilliant job of illustrating his ideas about translation way beyond poetry. I love how he generalizes the idea of translation into all sorts of non-language domains (i.e. translating ice skating skills to roller blading). Now to get past the current set of poems onto the next chapter ;)

Brilliant way to start the year off. I first got my hand on this book when I was in high school and was bit overwhelmed. I read it again in college, but again, I don't think I really "got it". Getting into a group read/discussion on this book would by simply PERFECT!

hah.. GEB has been staring me down from my top shelf for 5 years now. I wasn't expecting to crack it open until retirement time (20 years from now?) but hey.. maybe i'll speed this up.

I got a copy a few months ago, but I've only read some of the new foreword so far. This is great news.

careful; some ideas in this book will fuck with you:

http://www.reddit.com/r/BipolarReddit/comments/l7nij/interes...

Reminds me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which the protagonist has a similar problem.

This is such a awful book. Pure hipster material.

I finally created an account and stopped lurking to say:

I don't think this comment is a troll. GEB teaches a relatively thin stream of technical ideas through very precious, "cutesy" prose.

Is this a joke? I can only guess that you tried to read it, and didn't understand it.

Let's not dismiss the guy's opinion off-hand.. I also know people whose opinions I respect and who find GED pretentious and shallow. Personally, I found it extremely well written (although somewhat nonuniform) and extremely insightful as well. I just wish I had read it earlier, say, when I was 14, rather than after a CS education.

I refer to my previous comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3398873 I understand the subject well, so the book sounded to me like an explanation to children of something that isn't really so difficult. Also, it was pretentious (too long for the subject; for example Gödel's proof is a very short paper, I won't waste my time re-reading it in a huge tome for god's sake). I liked the effort the author put into making the book and I understood what he tried to accomplish, but it didn't work to me. After all the hype, I tried really hard to like it and I didn't think the half I had the patience to read was life changing at all, more like boring.

Why's that?

I went to the same grad school as the author did and got a PhD in physics there. Most of the professors I knew who taught the guy said the same thing to me about the book. It's just awful.

Could you elaborate? I read it this summer, and while I found that the glue between the chapters was a bit weak(I think the central theme isn't strong enough, no wonder he prefaces the 2nd edition trying to explain what the heck the book is about), it was a pleasure to read. I believe I had an intuition for Gödel's proof(which I have already forgotten), while I probably never have had the guts of trying to understand the real thing.

So, you mean "awful" like, at some level of Math/Physics the whole thing seems fuzzy and inaccurate or just "awful" even for non Physics Phds.

Fair enough, but I think you must back up your point.

I can see how it could be seen as pretentious, but not all round awful. He certainly appeals to many lofty ideas which may not be entirely justified by the technical material, but the technical material itself is certainly sound as far as I can tell. The main criticism I would make is that he does not draw a clear enough boundary between accepted mathematical fact and his own speculation.

For me, the thing I like about the book is that it is almost a total mixture of formal logic and poetry. If you don't like it, that is a subjective aesthetic judgement. Same goes for his prose style.

I suppose if you were already fully exposed to all the mathematical concepts in the book when you read it, it would have a lot less value. If on the other hand it is almost your first exposure to these ideas, it's like freebasing pure logic while hanging out in alice's wonderland. Great fun, but I agree not a formal examination of the ideas. It isn't really meant to be as far as I can tell.

If you treat the book as an experience rather than a tome containing the answer to life the universe and everything, it's quite enjoyable.

Exactly. Reading this book looking for those answers or looking for validation of notions you already hold is just going to lead to frustration.

I still can not make out whether you have read the book or not.

You went to the same school as the author(I presume you mean the OP in the reddit thread), and you knew the professors who taught the guy didn't like the book. Is that all you are basing your opinion on?

GEB isn't a physics book, so I don't see how "the professors who taught this guy" say matters - it's all too common that people don't like books that directly relate to their fields; especially so when they deeply vested in their field.

Also, opinion is divided on usefulness of other seminal works as well; to quote a few from comp. sci. - SICP, K&R, TAOCP.

I think he means he went to the same school as hofstadter.

That's correct.

I interested in your opinion - could you elaborate further?

I think comments like that kind of miss the point. The book isn't supposed to be a textbook. It's supposed to get you interested enough in the subject to want to study it further; that's when you go read the textbooks.

Are you suggesting that Jean-Yves Girard didn't understand the book either?

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?JeanYvesGirardOnGoedelEscherBach

I read it and don't like it either. It is not a very hard book to understand. Much of the concepts are CS101 material put into long-winded prose.

pats WhatsHisName on head

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