Gödel, Escher, Bach | Hacker News Reader

Gödel, Escher, Bach

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If your background includes experience dealing with logic, you enjoy wordplay (puns, double entendre, etc.), and you're decent at math then you should have no problem sailing through this book at a steady pace. Someone without such a background will likely have a harder time with it, but if that's not you do yourself a favor and pick it up and just start reading. You just might be surprised at how non-daunting it really is.

I had to share this as people might get put off by all the claims about how it's so hard. It's really not. It requires patience, logical thinking, a good grasp of language, a "plastic" mind, and no pre-conceptions of what it should be saying. I suspect many here will find it to be a thoroughly enjoyable page-turner that they'll be unable to put down.

> I suspect many here will find it to be a thoroughly enjoyable page-turner that they'll be unable to put down.

This was not my experience at all. The first few times I tried to read this book, I blocked out a few significant chunks of time to get through it. That never worked. As soon as I set it down (a couple hundred pages in) I wouldn't pick it up again.

However, I recently succeeded in finishing it. It took me nine months of reading a few pages in bed each night. The book was enjoyable to fall asleep to. GEB was fun and thought provoking, it taught me something about mathematics and made me think about the nature of consciousness, but it was by no means a page turner.

I'd definitely recommend reading it though. And you were spot on with this analysis:

> You just might be surprised at how non-daunting it really is [...] It requires patience, logical thinking, a good grasp of language.

I'd also add that it helps you _develop_ patience, logical thinking, and a good grasp of language =).

>"It requires patience, logical thinking, a good grasp of language, a "plastic" mind, and no pre-conceptions of what it should be saying."

Or just skipping over the parts that don't resonate.

One of the things which is so marvelous about GEB is that it is entertaining on many levels (pun intended) - just looking at the pictures is thought provoking, reading the dialogs is as well, etc.

There's something there for everyone - there's no need to quine.

Probably worth pointing out that there is a coordinated reading going on over at reddit, starting tomorrow. http://reddit.com/r/GEB

For other busy people, it's also worth pointing out that the schedule is very slow and focused on understanding. For instance, we are taking the introduction one section per day. The guy running it at Reddit created a nice Google calendar for the "course." Needless to say I am psyched for this.

https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/embed?src=OXM5YnM0cjgzaX...

And it just started, so it's not too late to join in.

Not to sound like a fanboy, but GEB is one of the few books (outliers being another) that really made my critical thinking skills about the world, society, and my place in it change. I literally feel like it expanded my mind, or at least my capacity for critical thinking and awareness of such.

Probably the antithesis, also worth reading:

Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/986428.Computer_Power_and...

The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose is the other anti-thesis.

Awesome book. Read it in high school ~1985; so meme-dense I could only absorb about 3 pages at a time ... all 832 pages, with great enthusiasm. Just what I needed at a formative time. A geek must-read.

My friend, Rich, brought a copy to AP Calc. I was at the Waldenbooks in the mall, that afternoon picking up a copy...later traded it for The Complete Works of Shakespeare at university. Picked up another copy, which I still have, about twenty years ago to fill the obvious hole in my library.

It's one of those books that people should be familiar enough with to be able to talk about, even if they haven't read it.

My experience was similar to yours. I read it when I was 15 or so, a bit at a time. I didn't understand all of it, but I knew that this was something formative and that maybe a computer science degree would be a really good thing to pursue. I've read it several times since.

Unfortunately, I've found Hofstadter's other stuff to be less compelling, other than his Scientific American column, which was collected in Metamagical Themas (an anagram of Mathematical Games, the column his replaced).

>"So how do you join up a philosopher, a pencil artist, and a composer and get something useful out of it"

Into an eternal golden braid, of course.

[Utilitarian applications left as an exercise for the reader]

I picked this up last week and have been slowly reading through it. It's a great mental exercise in bending your perceptions as well as seeing new abstractions or patterns you hadn't before. Something about that makes it harder than your average writing to read through, despite the fact it isn't loaded with a grandiose lexicon inspired from a linguistic perspicacity, per se.

From the review: "It's almost like reading an Aesop's fable before the "real" chapter begins"

The dialogue form of presenting arguments is traditional in philosophy.

http://plato-dialogues.org/plato.htm

>traditional in philosophy.

It's use in GEB is a tribute to Lewis Carroll's discussion of Zeno's Paradox, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles. This is itself a homage to the platonic dialogues.

I hate to gripe, but it's kind of disappointing that I can't get my hands on an ereader/Kindle edition.

Absolutely. I read GEB in high school, and have often thought of reading it again, but it's a hefty book to carry around.

Unfortunately, I don't think we'll see an eBook edition too soon. Hofstadter describes himself somewhere (in the GEB preface, maybe?) as very picky about the layout of his books. I remember him saying that he would sometimes rewrite sentences in order to make the layout better.

He describes in some later edition how he typeset the book himself which is in itself a towering achievement (with him not being a typesetter and all).

Hofstadter cares a lot about form, and thinks it is intimately connected to function. I believe in the end of "I Am a Strange Loop" he said that he edits every single line of text so it fits evenly and aesthetically across the line. In other words, each line must stretch to the far right of the page, but the letters can't be stretched out/separated too much. This must be extremely tedious to accomplish.

Prof. Knuth made up a formula for such beauty.

...and this is also true for all the translations of the book that I came across.

Have to disagree. Given the nature of the book, preserving the format and illustrations are VERY important. It wouldn't translate at all. In fact, the author feels so strongly about that they he has insisted the original 1979 typset he prepared be used for all subsequent editions, to exactly preserve the formatting.

Not having read the book, may I ask why is the formatting (not the illustrations, that's kind of obvious) so important?

Well, for one there are a fair number of equations, which ebook readers are going to struggle with. Plus there are "structural puns" which depend on lines aligning and breaking in a certain fashion.

Here's an example page from Amazon's preview:

http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/8082/screenshot20120118at14...

Note the musical extract, the heavy use of blockquotes, etc. It's pretty much a worse case for an ereader.

PS: I'll admit I'm a bit late to this party, as I just bought my copy for the Reddit readthrough, and it's the first actual dead-tree book I've bought since my Kindle. I too was annoyed at first by the lack of a ereader version, but after reading the first few pages of the intro I couldn't imagine reading it any other way. This is a VERY dense book where I often find myself flipping back a page or two to reference earlier material.

Here's another good example of the funky typesetting: (the pencil marks obviously arent in the original)

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ksx9yp5KRO1qznraho1_500.pn...

It's also a great example of the mindbending trick-prose hosftadter gleefully employs through the book.

EDIT: Here's another: http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ksjw79NLay1qznraho1_500.pn...

Oh, thanks. One more question: Why didn't you get the pdf version? I also want to participate in the reddit collective reading, but since you've chosen a paper book over a pdf, it makes me think that I shouldn't use the pdf version.

(I'd buy the physical book, but there isn't even a Czech translation that I'm aware of, so no publishers here have it in their catalogue.)

So, none of the examples given so far convince me.

I remember a couple of bits where you get multiple levels of nested indentation, to the point where the text started half-way across the page, and those would be difficult on most e-reader screens.

You would lose something when converting to ebook, no doubt. But the convenience might also make it worthwhile.

(Stretched analogy: I have heard that Pink Floyd's vinyl album Atom Heart Mother was cut so that at the end, it just kept playing the inner ring in a loop instead of finishing, so you got the repeating sound of a dripping tap. That would be lost as an mp3, but I'd still rather have the digital version.)

Good care would be needed (and good care is what is often lacking when it comes to turning books into e-books) but to claim it’s not possible is preposterous and ridiculous.

The popular e-reader formats are all HTML subsets. I really don't think the formats actually could render the equations faithfully, without just making images out of them, which means they are either going to be paginated awkwardly and generally be hard to read.

If you had a large format reader that could do PDF properly, that could handle it though.

Nice review made me want to go back and read it again

I'mma let you finish. But I just gotta say that Gauss was the best mathematician of all time. OF ALL TIME!

I know that site's down, but hacker news isn't reddit.

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