Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life (2022)
philosophygeek.medium.com
philosophygeek.medium.com
So why would you abuse your reader by making it a pain in the ass to figure out what you mean? I know there are some fancy arguments around stretching limits of language, but none of them seemed all that sensible to me. The only advantage I see to obscurantist writing is that it makes it impossible to critique the philosophers work. Any critique will just be met by the response that you didn't fully understand the author's argument. The Searle/Derrida debates are a great example of this. The upshot is that people spend all their time debating what you actually mean. Which I guess is good for the philosopher's brand, but doesn't advance knowledge much.
This isn't to say that you can't have beautiful writing in philosophy. I think Gaston Bachelard is a great example of both an elegant writer and a clear writer.
That being said, people really really love GEB, so it probably is worth reading regardless of these misgivings. One of these days I'll get to it.
I think this statement is both wrong and irrelevant.
Wrong: if you look into GEB, you notice that is has many chapters. And each chapter works on some topic --- and the chapters itself aren't a pain in the ass to figure out what they mean. Not at all. Each chapter transports its goal quite nicely and timely.
Irrelevant: this book is not an academical paper. It's a book meant to amuse you, to enlighten you, to sharpen your thinking skills. An academic paper describing just how Gödel's work works can be a *LOT* thinner --- but, usually, is also a lot dryer.
It's actually the case that this book gives you many good things that help you to understand (and accept or dismiss) such academic papers easier. But even here, mind the "many", if you expect "all" from the book, then you'll be dissatisfied.
I also wouldn't say that GEB is a philosophical book, at least not in the way modern philosophy is understood. If you see it as a book dedicated to like ("philo") wisdom ("sophie"), then it is. But so are most after books in the IT field.
A psychonaout or a shaman would argue some insights are only available on a drug infused spiritual trip.
Musicians talk of flow.
That state of discombobulation you dislike is not to meant to furnish you with answers but rather with new dots to notice and connect on your own. Not everything is a mathematical proof.
I think the real reason this sort of style isn't attractive is because many try to emulate it who lack the talent and then it truly is noise. It is a lot to ask from a reader and the value is rarely there that is well observed.
But sometimes the payoff is worth it. GBE resonates with a lot of people.
I got it, and read a portion of it. It was a meandering and badly written mess with no point. It felt like Seinfeld in science-ish form.
Yeah, that is just typical for Pulitzer Prize winning books. /s
Some philosophers should be merely forgotten and, with luck, Derrida will be remembered(?) only as the Ozymandias of philosophers.
No genius ever understands what they are doing. They create objects which take on a life of their own, and we are left infinitely mystified by them.
Details are important because they are little parts that support the likelihood of the larger point being true. If the details don't work it's likely because the theory is innacurate.
I'd argue that point. Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) comes to my mind first. Art contains and conveys truth.
Nietzsche's work is also a good example about why it's foolish to argue too much about what an author meant. He wasn't always clear in his thoughts - just like us all - and his thinking changed considerably anyway.
This is a funny thing to say about a discipline that was more or less founded by Plato, who was notably obscurantist if not outright esoteric.
In any case, philosophy is not always about making a point and there is not always a point to be made. Sometimes it's just asking questions.
When philosophy starts with words, a clear point is expected, for the obvious reasons.
But that's two completely different worlds.
i agree that the timaios is platon's most esoteric surviving work, and it's full of enormous amounts of nonsense, but i think it's still reasonably clearly written. sadly, it is a foundational text in not only western philosophy but eastern philosophy as well, and it took twenty centuries for most thinkers to reject most of its erroneous dogmas
I think the problem is a cultural conflict between sub-concious problemsolvers and "concious" problem solvers. The later expect a algorithm , step by step instruction from the former, who when this is demanded, use there subconcious to produce a plausible story. When asked for there inspirations to deduce the process yourself, you get a crows nest of shiny things, bits and pieces, not making a reasonable whole - but they infuriatingly at the end of day do.
Why not accept that there are things you can not directly communicate with and if you are hellbent on becoming such a thing, there is no step-by-step instruction.
Did you read Robert Kegan "The Evolving Self"? It was pretty popular at HN some time ago. Robert Kegan stretching limits of language and he's got a reason: he introduces some notions like "culture of embeddedness" that you just can't define in a way like dictionaries do, one cannot simply get to a point. Kegan uses another approach, he gives his reader an experience that makes her to understand "culture of embeddedness".
Philosophy by definition deals with uncategorised (or poorly categorised) aspects of our world, with aspects that have no good language to talk about them. Anything that was categorised to a point when there is an accepted language to talk about it is not a philosophy, it is a science or something. Philosophy makes first attempts to categorise and when philosophers found a way then a new branch of science emerges.
When you try to talk about uncategorised things, you just can't talk about it. For example, lets assume that there are no widely accepted categorisation of colors, but you've developed one including names for colors like "blue", "red", "magenta" and so on. How you could communicate your ideas to others? The only way I know is to point to different examples of blue and say "blue", point to red and say "red". You need to lead your audience through experiences of blue/red/magenta while they train their neurons to classify them and only then you can refer to their experiences with words "blue", "red", "magenta" to convey the idea that they always appear in a rainbow in the same sequence. While you keep pointing at different colors saying their names, your audience will probably think, that it takes too long for you to get to a point.
I didn't read GEB, so I cannot say how this reason to "stretch limits of language" relates to it, but you've sad that you know no good reason for such stretching, and I hope that now you know at least one reason for it.
The point of a book is to get the reader to reach a certain understanding. Every brain is different and while one literary path might get some readers to that destination, other paths may be required for others. But there is no singular point of understanding that exists solely at the end of that path. The path itself is what builds that understanding.
Part of the art of writing is covering a large enough space of multiple paths to get most readers there without too many of them getting lost.
Often, writing is like a connect-the-dots drawing where those points are the written details and the point is the overall shape. Yes, there is a "main point" that is not those details. But it's the details that convey it. Subtract all of them, and the shape disappears.
For any given reader, some of those detail points won't resonate with them and will be basically ignored. But as long as there are enough other details, they will still trace the right shape and get the overall point.
A big part of the art of writing is figuring out which constellation of details will lead to the right shape being traced in the minds of as many readers as possible.
I was always apprehensive of reading Ulysses… until I did. And then I read some basic analysis of it and then read it again and now I’m slightly baffled why people find it _that_ difficult. Yes it’s not at all typical but it’s really not that hard and it’s definitely no Finnegan’s Wake. Now that’s a challenge!
If your ideas about cooking come from watching Masterchef (analogously), you might treat the idea of making a beurre blanc as a similar act of conquest, triumph in the face of splitting adversity whilst a thousand-voice choir crescendos in the background as you whisk. But a million french housewives happily made it for decades having never been told it’s impossible, and indeed knowing better that it isn’t.
To be sure, you certainly didn't mean it this way, but for the sake of the poor guy who has seen GEB touted as one of these books that "every programmer/computer scientist/CS major has to read" and sees your post in the same light:
You don't have to read GEB. You will be a fine techie without reading it. And you'll be a fine person in general without reading it. There is no spiritual revelation you can only get from GEB or some important technical knowledge that you'll get that you wouldn't get from a normal CS degree program. Try it out and see if you enjoy Hofstadter's writing - if you do, you might be in for a really enlightening and enjoyable experience. If you don't, no worries - your time is better spent elsewhere - there is no need to put yourself through the pain of slogging through a >700 page book that you don't enjoy. There are many other perfectly fine entry points for learning about topics in computer science, cognitive science, or philosophy of mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92WHN-pAFCs
And it's an absolutely brilliant - and very direct - exposition of Alan Turing's Halting theorem.
(unfortunately I can't find analogues of this for many other related subjects)
Some people are saying that GEB is too convoluted, but the base material absolutely doesn't need to be.
So of course, there are more to-the-point resources for the technical concepts that Hofstadter employs. It's an understandable misconception to have when people so often say GEB is a must-read for techies and when it has a name that includes "Godel". So remember - GEB is about Hofstadter trying to argue for a point about a particular thesis (how the mind ("I") arises from the brain), and to that end, he employs many different concepts (many of which are from computer science) and explains them poetically (at least, a lot of people think so). But teaching you these concepts is just a secondary, even tertiary, goal of his. If you find his writing engaging, it might be a more fun way to learn about that stuff - but if not, don't worry, GEB wasn't primarily written to teach you anyway. I'm sure even the biggest GEB fans will agree.
I'd argue the plot is entirely about Godel's incompleteness theorem. It's not just "mentioned in passing", the entire book is centered around a series of increasingly complex explanations that culminate in explaining the actual theorem itself.
But just like a good novel is way, way more than just the plot, GEB is way more than just the Godel incompleteness theorem.
Personally I didn't really find any other thesis or theme that compelling. However, I absolutely loved the clever ways in which he illustrated each concept. Others may have appreciated other aspects of it, and that's great too. Many people can enjoy the book for different reasons.
The Godel proof chapter feels like the apotheosis of the book. The rest almost feels tacked on, e.g. the whole dna-computing ... , even the "strange loops" part, which I would not think is the main crux of the book.
But anyway - you and anyone else of course are free to enjoy Hofstadter's explanations of Godel's incompleteness theorem - maybe you even think that it is the best/most interesting/most fun/most insightful explanation. I just mean to say that Hofstadter isn't writing this book primarily to explain technical concepts - his explanations are a means to an end. So someone who struggles to get through this book shouldn't feel bad - its main goal was never to be a "must-read for programmers" anyway.
The binary requirement comes from the question, not a failure to think differently. The consequences of binary requirement with completeness (correct output for every input) is the point.
If you modify the question as you suggest, to output UNRESOLVABLE in exactly the cases where the input is a paradox, that doesn't work either. It is not possible to reliably detect every self-referential paradox, for reasons analogous to (but more complicated than) it not being possible to reliably say for every program if it will eventually halt.
Even so, it is possible to write a program which outputs UNRESOLVABLE in cases where that particular implementation of a halt-test program gets stumped and gives up despite there being another correct answer it hasn't found, or when it detects specific patterns. But that's more about hitting arbitrary limits of a particular implementation, so not as interesting theoretically. It is what you'd do in practice, if someone asked you to write a halting detector in the real world.
The halting problem computation model has unlimited memory. Sometimes people say this means you can "solve" the halting problem in practice because real machines have bounded memory, therefore finite states, which must eventually repeat if a program does not halt. But this isn't really a solution, because the halt-test program needs exponentially more memory than the input program would be allowed if run. However you look at it, that is not "in practice", it is prevented by computational inaccessibility, and it also doesn't satisfy the principle of the halting problem, which is to ask if halt-test can be written in the same kind of universal programming system as the programs it analyses. (Besides, you can run programs with unlimited memory, by always being willing to pause, upgrade machine, and resume, whenever current memory is filled.)
When analysed with denotational semantics, there actually is a third output called "bottom" (⊥) which means "mathematical value representing doesn't terminate". But even using mathematical approaches, there is no way to calculate when that's the output for all possible inputs to a correct halt-test function.
In fact, this unboundedness is a core part of what makes these models of computation so expressive. In the Gödel's incompleteness theorem analogy, you can say "there is an integer such that ..." or "there is no integer such that ...". In the Turing machine model, you can write programs that search for counterexamples to mathematical claims. Because these programs are written to try every integer, you can only tell if they eventually halt by yourself resolving the mathematical claim.
For example, we can write a program that tests the Goldbach conjecture or the 3n+1 conjecture by brute force. Determining if these programs' search through all integers will halt or not is equivalent to resolving the status of these conjectures!
start = i = 1
visited = []
while True:
if i in visited:
if 1 not in visited:
break
else:
print(start, visited)
visited = []
start += 1
i = start
continue
visited.append(i)
if i % 2:
i = 3*i + 1
else:
i //= 2
(You can make a considerably more memory-efficient version of this which should be able to search much further before hitting a MemoryError, but I don't expect it changes the ultimate fate of the program when run on a real physical computer.)
while true:
n += 1Ok, for us the lazy, what is mother fucking the point of GEB? A single HN karma point from me is on offer for the honest answers.
The book argues that these "strange loops" (of a system onto itself) are behind the emergence of intelligence and consciousness, because physical matter itself gives rise to human intelligence, albeit being a mechanical system.
Or is the point "there is so much mystery in these systems that perhaps there is room for an explanation for consciousness"? Maybe then I would be more sympathetic.
Or perhaps I should just read the book before condemning it :)
in other words, GEB tries to coax the reader into a eureka moment, which is exactly why it has so many fans; it convinced each and every one of us that we were genius for just a split second.
— Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, p. 363
I read it in Italian as a teen, the Italian edition is beautiful, and incredibly well translated (the book includes many puns and language tricks.)
Unrelated: Does anyone know of how to get an epub etc of this? Unavailable through Amazon etc.
Actually, the original article did that. I just followed the author's lead here.
I can also recommend Metamagical Themas from Hofstadter. It's a collection of articles he wrote for Scientific American.
ps. Haven't read the novel yet, it is in my queue.
That's the "problem" right there. It wasn't a pop sci book. TBH while Gödel's incompleteness theorem might be seen as "science" subject, it is actually squarely in the realm of meta-mathematics, a branch of philosophy.
The "writing style" is what most would call "literature", which includes prose, poetry, stories, etc. It's not for everyone, for sure, but some people do enjoy it (I occasionally do, but I lose patience.) Calling it "pretentious fluff" sounds a bit extreme.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. For many people, this book is their first encounter with much of this material (as it was for me, so long ago.)
For you, it's like reading a tour guide of your home city. You're not the intended audience.
That's the usual refrain around hyper-preventious navel gazer books. The moment you criticize, your intellect is up for question, because "you didn't understand it".
This form of logical fallacy is the worst in economics and philosophy.
> stuntkite on July 5, 2018 | flag| favorite | next [–]
> I'd owned this book for many years and had a similar experience to OP. But one day someone gave me I am a Strange Loop, which I started reading and enjoyed way more. After getting in a little bit Hofstadter makes some apologies for GEB saying it was the sum of work of a very young person. I think he was 24? I think it's pretty incredible considering his age. The things that lead him to thinking critically about consciousness because of his disabled sister I found to be something that changed not only how I interacted with people that were differently abled, but also changed how I saw my own disabilities. Sure it's more than a bit full of itself, but I can't for the life of me think how I would edit it any differently. It's honest from the place he was standing. With a lot of thought, a desire to share, and a perspective that no one else could just stumble on. IMO, it really does kind of have to be what it is.
> 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 may try the "skip that bit" trick and tilt at this windmill once more.
(NB: I hated "The Three Body Problem" when so many seem to love it. I wonder if there's any correlation there.)
and they're under a cc-by-nc-sa license, so share and enjoy; piracy is always an act of benevolence, but in this case it's even legal
(the mind you save could be your own)
I got this book when I was at the first semester of IT. Back in my university town, most students of IT or physics had this book, or lented it from a friend. And we discussed a lot about what was inside.
So I wasn't a seasoned academic, but the new-kid-on-the-block. And my goal while reading was never to understand Gödel. Or to like Bach's music (I actually dislike most of his music). Or to get into arts -- but hey, Escher I like.
My goal was to train my mind. To get into thinking models new to me, because they aren't taught in normal school.
Also, for me this book was an extension. Even while still in normal school, I went to the university library to read "Spektrum der Wissenschaft" (the german version of "Scientific American", but without the nationalism in the title). Many articles were over my top ... but the "Metamagicum" articles I deeply enjoyed. So when this book come out I expected some extension of these articles ... and I was not disappointed.
Yup, exactly my thoughts. But for some reason, the HN crowd keeps recommending it. Its gotten previously-- 5-10 years ago, it would be recommended in almost every book recommendation post
For me this was one of those books that was more about the journey than the destination.
2001: A Space Odyssey could easily be trimmed to 25 minutes or less if all you care about is the plot. But should it?
GED (in my humble opinion etc), doesn’t really need some of the fluff. It’s a large book that’s easy to spot on the shelf, and it’s hard to avoid thinking that the publisher (and some readers) like it that way.
Yes. Tell me that you just sat there watching it without being distracted by your thoughts at all. Being able to handle torture doesn't make torture good.
I'm more of the opinion that 5 minutes of graphics that were probably impressive at the time could be cut.
No, but it probably means you're forcing yourself to watch/like it.
I never suggested expunging the movie. Regardless, excessively long movies/books expunge themselves unless they're famous enough to namedrop.
Now, tell me you sat there watching it without being distracted by your thoughts.
The thoughts were about the movie and its themes: evolution, violence, and yes even "how the f did they do this in the 60s"
At some point in life one realizes that there is important stuff in good taste. “I just couldn’t call a bad book good.” To quote Dorothy Sayers.
I read it in the early 90s as a teenager at a community college in the suburbs, along with the Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, at a point in my life when I was struggling with having a lot of doubt about Catholicism, and the _one_ thing that was keeping me from just giving up on religion entirely was that I just couldn't understand how the experience of _being_ could be anything but a spiritual soul, and those two books gave me the intellectual tools to basically completely rebuild my entire conception of what and who I was -- which is to say that I could finally see consciousness as the an emergent property of ordinary matter, and the relationship between consciousness and computation.
It's an experience you can only have if you read the right books at the right time in your life. You can only be exposed to any particular idea for the first time once in your life, and if they ideas in those books are not new to you, I'm sure you'll find GEB pretentious and ponderous or whatever, but for me it was like fireworks going off on every page. I read it and reread it and took notes on it and used it as a launching point for more reading for years afterwards.
edit with some extra thoughts: Keep in mind this book was written in 1979, when vanishingly few people had access to computers, let alone the internet. There was no wikipedia you could go to to scratch an itch about some topic. GEB is encyclopedic in scope and meandering because it _had to be_, he couldn't expect an audience who were familiar with _computers_ let alone artificial intelligence and set theory. It's really extraordinary that it's accessible as it is, given the breadth that it covered.
Today, given the advances in all the things he was talking about, I would think it's mostly interesting to read for historical reasons.
There are questions about conscience, the origin of the universe, the ultimate nature of reality, etc. that we haven't answered yet and perhaps never will. We have theories and we have models. We don't know which theories are correct yet and, if we eventually find a model that seems to work, we might not even be sure if it reflects reality or simply predicts it (like Newton's equations).
Furthermore, not all questions can be answered in this way. Every ethics system is grounded on metaphysics in one way or another: on concepts which are completely human-made, culturally-dependent, non-observable. Even the most Darwinian doctrines do this: genes don't actually "want" to be preserved and passed on, any more than rocks "want" to fall. Religions are simply more explicit about this than other belief systems.
Finally, it certainly doesn't help Dawkins and his followers that, despite claiming to be on the side of reason and truth, systematically let their judgements be influenced by their prejudices and preconceived notions. A more informed and grounded view of history would understand that a notion of the transcendent and the divine was the foundation for much of the progress of humanity.
Or one could speculate that consciousness arises from as-yet-undiscovered noncomputable laws of quantum gravity operating within brain structures called microtubules, as Sir Roger Penrose did in his 1994 book *Shadows of the Mind*
The Lucas-Penrose argument is not generally accepted among philosophers. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean it fails - truth isn't a popularity contest - but it does indicate there are some subtleties at play here; it's not so obvious Emperor of the Mind/Shadows of the Mind succeeds in its argument.
However, Richard Dawkins has become a very detestable person, cringeworthy culture warrior, rage beneficiary. So, make what you want with that info. Maybe consider a library or pirate the audio book.
He got a bit more upbeat in later books. I'm not sure Dawkins is detestable but he's a bit humorless at times. The Telegraph has quite a good article on his culture war stuff https://archive.ph/kNJXN
I think, his proposed theoretical framework about genes as the sole target of selective pressure, seems to be widely rejected by evolutionary scientists, these days. Anyway, the way he argues and illustrates evolution on the "atomic" level, that's what I consider extremely valuable. He inspires an intuition for evolutionary processes transcending "living matter". At least in me.
> The Telegraph has quite a good article on his culture war stuff
In what way do you think this is a good article? Do you think it's a very sincere and thorough representation of the extent of his activism?
This is a culture war piece itself, white-washing Dawkins as someone who is "just concerned" about debate and free speech, when in fact he seeks the legal abolition of transgender people, all the way up to the UN's declaration of human rights [1]. Not quite the neutral portrait, full of journalistic integrity, you linked there.
Now, I don't want to get into that argument.
However, should be no matter your political opinion on the issue, if someone in a position of power uses his influence to kick down massively at basic legal protections of a tiny, tiny, tiny and weak minority, without need, just to stay relevant ... that should classify as detestable in my books.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Declaration_Internat...
Side note: A move, by an outspoken and activist atheist, celebrated by various christian think tank outlets. Can't make this up.
Then again, WDI founders themselves collaborated with United Families International, The Heritage Foundation and similar before [2]. All natural allies... lol. But hey, guess that 0.5% of the population, disproportionately affected by precarious living situations and suicide risk, certainly poses the greatest threat to civilization right now, so women's bodily autonomy has to take the L. Totally organic outrage Dawkins is participating in...
[1] https://womensdeclaration.com/en/resources/wdi-newsletter/1-...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210315233629/https:/static1.sq...
Yeah.. My personal introduction to Dawkins was actually some TV documentary he made that covered about the same topics as the God Delusion, then I read the book itself. Only after that I read the Selfish Gene, which IMHO philosophically was a much more interesting book.
I did sort-of follow the "new atheism" movement for a time, the "four horsemen" and all that [1]. But it seemed to pretty quickly spiral into the cringy culture war thing you mention, so I stopped.
[1] I don't agree with many of the things Christopher Hitchens said, but damn he was a good orator and public debater.
Dawkins is an old, old man, his days are counted. I hope with time The Selfish Gene will get a life of its own, with the person Dawkins becoming nothing more than a short side note, on a great educator falling victim to his ego. This book will endure, his Tweets won't.
I believe Hofstadter does as well and he's become critical of his earlier work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Palmquist
Here's the free online book you alluded to:
There's also HK Skeptics in the Pub. [2]
There was a Café Scientifique, but it closed down.
Then there's some Book groups that tend to discuss non-fiction. [3]
Hope to see you!
[1] There's a WA group, but I don't have the invite link. Meta: https://www.facebook.com/groups/6834551586589131/ and https://www.instagram.com/hkpc2023
[2] Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/skeptics-in-the-pub-hk/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/hkskeptics
[3] Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/byobook-meetup-group/
If Hofstadter's book were right, it explains only consciousness. To put it another way.. he may really truly be a strange loop but what is the feeling of being a strange loop?
The best response to someone bringing up GEB in casual conversation is to look them dead in the eye and simply say “I have also read that book.”
This will instantly create palatable tension and a change of topic
When someone enthusiastically mentions something they liked and wanted to talk about and you immediately take a shit on it, it's not really a surprise that this creates "palatable tension" and a change of subject (and likely a longer-term wariness to share when talking to you). If you really dislike discussing related topics, there are surely less condescending ways of expressing that.
I don't often get to meet people IRL who have read the book and wish I had more opportunities to discuss it. One (of the many things) that stuck out to me was the idea of foreground and background. Prime numbers to me is background that remains when you construct all the composite numbers, so technically they're 'non-composite' lacking the property of being a product of distinct numbers.
Ouch... Why would you assume that the other party's goal is to appear "superior", and not that they are legitimately passionate about something? Do you dislike when people are passionate about topics that don't interest you? Or do you just believe that it is fair to assume that everyone who outwardly likes this book is secretly doing so because they want to seem smart or something? Or something else?
GEB was a frustrating read. I mean, it's interesting in places, but it's just all over the place, jumping between many different topics. The central theme is meant to be the strange loops, but it's IMHO not very interesting concept and his application on the cognition is just author's personal conjecture.
"Reading" all of TAOCP would take literally years of intense effort even if you set aside all other activity. There are a lot of great problems inside, and plenty of dry humor, and I would recommend people try to at least skim sections of TAOCP which seem interesting or relevant to their work, but very few people are going to even nominally work through the whole thing, and the people who might are professional scholars of the topic.
Reading GEB can be done leisurely over the course of a few days or maybe weeks, depending on how much time someone spends reading every day. It's not quite as easy a read as a pulp novel or comic book, but it also doesn't take any inordinate amount of work to make basic sense of, or require any special skills or background understanding to start on. It's a fun book to hand to a ~13–16 year old.
I've often read the hate on this site for this book. At least for me, I find the discussions and analogies to help me in thinking about, and eventually understanding the material. I contrast it with a graduate intro to Recursion Theory which can leave a reader feeling that they followed all the precise arguments but still somehow missed a lot.
Again, if you do any work with computer algorithms, it's worth checking out TAOCP at the library and skimming the sections relevant to your work. If you might need it as a reference, it's not a bad source to have at hand; I look things up in there maybe a few times a year for the past decade. Some parts are now a bit outdated in this fast-moving field, but it's still the best available survey source about some topics, and there are some nice explanations and a lot of great problems in there. Knuth is a pretty funny writer if you enjoy dry humor.
Or bragging rights to "The Anatomy of Lisp"!
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
https://github.com/spb59h2/spb5
Once you grok it for what it actually is (C++ pure virtual classes), COM is really pretty beautiful. Until you get to the DCOM stuff...
To quote one of my professors from back in the day: “Life is short and you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to”
That said, I don't think it was life-changing in the sense that it gave me any interesting perspective on life in any way. I didn't find any of the philosophies to be useful in that sense.
However, what the book does do, is manage to explain an incredibly complex, deep mathematical theorem while using almost no mathematical notation. It does it all mostly through similes and wordplay and art, which is quite brilliant.
One of the great things about the book is that even if you give up on the math, you can still appreciate each chapter as clever writing in its own right.
Too bad about the misogyny. Might even have been racist, but I don't remember that.
Sounds a little like “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand” have you read that one?
Also,
> In my teens it didn't hurt that it had some pretty intense pornographic sex scenes
For me, that book is Lockpick Pornography - it’s a fairy horny story, but the main character struggling to figure out what to do about gender and sexuality, and the way that struggle starts out seeming like it’s about systemic oppression and heteronormativity but quickly spirals into the character just having a series of self destructive meltdowns is so so compelling. It even manages to have a bit of a happy non-ending.
Maybe I should give it another try...
I don't mind books that explain concepts in fun ways, but I do find it jarring if I'm being treated like a child with an overbearing parent, telling me why I should be excited about something instead of just telling the story and letting me feel how I want to feel about it.
(Edit: As an aside, Hofstadter's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is similarly self-indulgent, and a joy to read. Of course one ought to read a couple of other translations first and keep them nearby, to become familiar with the content, but in terms of sheer wordplay and outrageous rhymes, it tops anything.) (Edit 2: Ha, a search reveals I posted a similar comment a little over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32830008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32878471)
This is a very good introduction to the book.
The goal of the book/lecture is to show how meaning emerges from not-meaning. So cool!:-)
Also at the end of the lecture 1 he says that the book was written like Bach’s works - like a piece of music with theme, repetitions, inversions etc.
Going to read it asap:))
I will freely admit I am one of those who tried to read it multiple times, but couldn't grok it.
It is meaningful, reading it is something that is shared with others, but it is an event in time and is unrepeatable, and it's somehow unable to be fully communicated about to others who were not there.
For some it seems foundational because it was encountered at a certain time in their life without really elucidating how their life actually changed (it's understandable because if it was done at their start of their life.)
Is this accurate?
Not because I didn't like it: I enjoyed it a lot, I learned things from it, it was one of my favourite books, etc. I still think it's an impressive piece of work. But there was nothing particularly ineffable about it.
So let me try to summarize some of the perfectly effable things that people who like GEB tend to like about it, which might (or might not!) make it worth reading for you.
1. It's a playful book. Hofstadter is having a lot of fun as he writes. (I think this is one of the things that people who don't like the book tend to really dislike: if you don't happen to enjoy the same things Hofstadter does, it can just feel self-indulgent.)
Here's a fairly typical example of the sort of thing he does: the book alternates between ordinary chapters, where Hofstadter might explain some bit of mathematics or talk about an incident in the life of J S Bach or whatever, and dialogues between some imaginary characters. Each of those dialogues is named after a particular piece of music by J S Bach. For instance, one of them is called "Crab Canon", after one of the little pieces in Bach's "Musical Offering" which has the amusing property that it's the same forwards as backwards. So Hofstadter's dialogue is also the same forwards as backwards, and he's constructed it so that the conversation makes a reasonable amount of sense both ways around.
That's a fairly superficial sort of play -- it doesn't have much to do with the deeper underlying ideas Hofstadter is trying to explore, it's just a bit of fun. But he does play around with the deeper ideas too.
2. It brings a bunch of apparently different ideas together and relates them to one another. The "psychedelic" aspects may come from this -- there's something of the "wow, I never realised before, but everything is, like, one thing" to it. And this is another thing that you might either really like -- he's made a bunch of unobvious connections between things you mightn't have seen links between, and connecting things better enriches your mind -- or really dislike, if you feel that the connections he's claiming to make are bogus.
For instance, Hofstadter is very keen on what he calls "strange loops", in which category he includes (1) indirect self-reference, as in the machinery of Goedel's incompleteness theorem or "quining" (copy this down, first without the quotes and then again, after a colon, with them: "copy this down, first without the quotes and then again, after a colon, with them") and (2) what happens when a person thinks about their self and (3) Escher pictures like "Print Gallery" or "Drawing Hands" that somehow show something containing or creating a representation of itself and (4) the way in which DNA codes for proteins which make cells with machinery for converting DNA into proteins which etc. and (5) rather more tendentiously, one of Bach's canons which ends a tone higher than it starts so that if you kept on playing it the key would keep rising and rising. The common theme is something about traversing levels of a hierarchy and somehow coming back to where you started. If you agree with Hofstadter that this is an interesting and important general phenomenon (he thinks it's essential to how conscious minds work) and that all these diverse things are cases of it, then you'll find this enlightening, maybe even exciting. If you think he's just grouped together a bunch of things with little in common and convinced himself they're all the same thing, then not.
3. It talks about some really quite exciting mathematics (at least, for those who are able to be excited by mathematics): Goedel's incompleteness theorems. If you just want to learn about how Goedel's stuff works, you can get that more efficiently and probably more clearly in other places. But Hofstadter's explanation isn't so bad, and he intertwines it with all those other things he's interested in, and once again you might like it or hate it. In any case, for many people GEB was their first exposure to the idea that some statements that are just about the properties of the positive integers might be provably neither provable nor disprovable, and to the neat techniques Goedel cooked up by which, in some sense, statements about properties of positive integers can "really" be "talking about" mathematical statements and proofs and whatnot, and these are (again, for some subset of the population) exciting ideas.
4. Escher made some really cool pictures. Bach made some really cool music. If you happen not to be familiar with them before reading GEB, then being introduced to this cool stuff is a pretty valuable service GEB can do you.
5. Chunks of GEB are about artificial intelligence. The world of AI has changed a lot since GEB, of course, and today's AI systems don't have at all the sort of structure I think Hofstadter expected them to have. (It may be that they have some of that structure "hidden inside" -- artificial neural networks are mysterious and inscrutable in something like the same way as brains are -- but I think Hofstadter was expecting that structure to be in the code.) I haven't read GEB in a while and won't try to pronounce on how much value his thoughts-from-way-back-then have today. But I think one thing some people have found exciting about GEB, especially when reading it early in life, is that it was the first thing they read that took seriously the possibility that computers might be able to think in something like the same way as humans, and tried to think about how that might work. The ideas of AI are much more "in the water supply" these days; I doubt anyone will first hear about them from reading GEB any more.
6. (Same theme as 3, 4, 5.) There are just lots of interesting things in GEB. Zen koans. Fractals. Winograd's "SHRDLU" AI system. Bacteriophages. Non-euclidean geometry. Srinivasa Ramanujan. Etc. You won't learn much about any of these things from GEB, but encountering them at all is delightful if one happens not to have seen them before. So the experience of reading the book, if one happens not already to know everything, is one where at any moment you may suddenly encounter some fascinating new thing.
I am not claiming that you should read GEB. It's pretty long. All the individual things you could learn from it, you could learn another way. If you're a generally-well-informed adult, you probably already know a lot of the things some people first encounter in GEB. You might not share Hofstadter's taste in wordplay and the like. But it definitely has merits that can be described.
I never had a psychedelic experience but I wouldn't object to this way of framing my experience with the book.
I would say there's something more "profound" than what you'd get from reductionistically learning the concepts introduced in the book one by one. It feels as if the author had a powerful transformational psychedelic experience and afterwards he wrote the book to share what he learned about consciousness and its relationships with self-referential computation.
While it seems the crowd here is focused on the "Gödel" part, the book actually dives deep into a lot of auxiliary topics, for example (from memory having read it 20 years ago) - ideas about Zen, tensions between reductionism and holism, how DNA replicates itself, contrapuntal music etc. And while GEB isn't necessarily a great introduction to these topics, the concepts are indeed related in some way towards the philosophical question of consciousness, and IMHO the reader benefits from having been introduced these concepts in such a context.
So if you're just trying to understand Gödel's theorem there are better books. And the mismatch in expectation is probably much of the frustration by those who didn't like the book that much.
All that said, just try reading a couple chapters and see if you like it. The "psychedelic experience" isn't for everyone, so just try it and see for yourself if it vibes with you.
I quite enjoyed it, but there's something of the Young Adult Reader about it that sat ill with me. One of those books where (once I'd read it) I found myself slightly wary of anybody that would bring it up. Same goes for Atlas Shrugged, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
The dice man book is played too clearly for laughs IMO, but perhaps that one as well.
I've got all three of these on my bookshelf behind me. Seems like we have similar taste! Any other recommendations? One I'd add to the list would be Unsong(can find it free online).
howard anton's textbook calculus was foundational for me because it was the textbook i learned the integral and differential calculus from. reading an introductory calculus textbook for me today would not be the same kind of transformational experience because i'd be brushing up on particular integration techniques and theorems rather than encountering a wholly new way of understanding the world for the first time, then struggling to assimilate it into my worldview and skillset. want to know how it changed my worldview? well, if you don't know calculus, i could fully communicate it to you if you make enough effort, but communicating it to you would involve teaching you calculus, and either writing a calculus textbook or persuading you to work through an existing one. you aren't going to understand what i'm talking about after reading a comment on here
and geb is the same way. it was my introduction to the following ideas: formal axiom systems, baroque music theory, symbolic ai, gödel's incompleteness theorem, the foundations of mathematics in general, the formalist conception of mathematics in particular, hilbert's program and the entscheidungprobleme, mathematical isomorphisms, the art of magritte, the music of john cage, the central dogma of molecular biology, the concept of holism, the artistic difficulty of linguistic translation, non-turing-complete programming languages, lucas's flawed argument against the possibility of ai, tarski, quines, and shrdlu. there are probably numerous others i've forgotten. some of these he carefully explains in detail; others he just touches on. about a third of these topics have formed significant parts of my intellectual life in the ensuing decades
quite aside from thus broadening my intellectual horizons enormously, it was a pure delight. the author's enthusiasm for playing in these fields of thought was contagious, perhaps because i was not yet the bitter, jaded cynic i am today. the aesthetic experience of being led through this gallery of wonders is of course not communicable, any more than the experience of listening to bach (or cage, or king crimson, or icp, or system of a down, or myrath, or the beatles) or watching the sun rise on a partly cloudy day
probably if i hadn't run across geb at puberty i would have eventually encountered most of those ideas anyway, and probably encountering it later wouldn't have been nearly so delightful, because explanations of ideas one already understands are rarely as exciting as explanations of utterly novel mind-expanding ideas
so in that sense it's true that 'it is an event in time and is unrepeatable', in the same way as learning anything is unrepeatable. it's true that 'it's somehow unable to be fully communicated about to others [who haven't learned it]', in the sense that you can't fully communicate concepts within any given field of knowledge to people who aren't familiar with its basics. if you don't know what a derivative is, nobody is going to be able to communicate stokes' theorem to you. if you don't know what money is, nobody is going to be able to communicate why microsoft europe is headquartered in ireland to you. and, in the same way, if you don't have any idea what string rewriting systems have to do with mathematical provability, gödel's theorem will sound like crazy moon language to you, though of course geb isn't the only way to become acquainted with those notions
i think the major difference from psychedelic revelations is that many of the things you'll learn from geb are actually true, in an objective, scientific sense, though not some of the 01970s conventional wisdom about how artificial intelligence could be built
hopefully that helps to clarify things for you a bit
No thanks. I'm not reading a book that even its fans can't adequately explain.
GEB is a love letter to some beautiful elegant ideas, but it’s expressed via a confusing assortment of record players, tortoises, and puns. One StackOverflow answer made the incompleteness theorem more clear to me than this whole book.
Dusted it off and after only a few pages, it's already a completely different read to when I read (a fraction of) it a decade or so ago.
Just like (some of) Joyce's work, GEB seems to me a puzzle who's main prize is the satisfaction of having understood it - obfuscation and abstruseness for their own sake.
For actually understanding Godel's work I would recommend Gödel's Proof (Nagel, Newman, somewhat ironically, prefaced by Hofstadter) or Philosophies of Mathematics (George, Velleman).
That's not quite true. As an example, take differential calculus. It is hard to see how that would have been an idea to arrive at automatically by an algorithm, but a few geniuses (Newton/Leibniz) got there anyway. Similarly, even when a theorem doesn't follow from the usual axioms (and neither does its negation), maybe another genius comes along with an axiom that is quite obvious, and allows us to prove the theorem (just like peano axioms are axioms we would just accept as being obvious).
So it is not that we cannot know everything, it's just that there is no guarantee and no obvious way of doing so.
I don't understand his theorems well enough to pretend to explain them to this audience. But, this is my understanding of them.
Nope, all he proved is that there is no automatic and purely formal way of arriving at truth. Doesn't mean that for any particular truth we cannot stumble upon a way to understand it anyway.
For example, we cannot write a program (= automatic and purely formal way) to determine in general if an input program halts. But for a particular input program, we might be able to understand whether it halts anyway. There is just no a-priori guarantee that we will.
What Godel also showed was that we can expand our a prioris, e.g. add another truth that "feels" intuitive to the axioms, and then we can understand some theorem or truth (ie. look under the hood, understand its mechanics). But that means expanding the system by some sort of oracle, some sort of "genius intuition". Fair enough, mathematicians will agree by consensus if it's the right think to do, but it's also infinitely regressive. So I'd agree with corysama here "we won't be able to get past regardless of how much time and cleverness we apply to them".
If by proof you mean using a fixed formal axiom system, then yes, you are right. But let's look at one particular such thing that cannot be proven formally within itself: The consistency of Peano arithmetic. But, I don't need a formal proof for that: It's obviously consistent, because the natural numbers form a model for Peano arithmetic. So I just gave you a proof, but it is not a formal one. Yet, I don't see how anyone of sound mind can reject this proof.
So Peano arithmetic is obviously something we can assume when proving other, more complicated truths. And nobody can say, not even Gödel, that we will not keep finding similarly obvious truths for the more complicated truth we otherwise care about, but which might not be provable from the currently established axioms. Given that Gödel is a Platonist, he would probably agree with me on that.
Even the GP's claim is problematic. The Gödel's theorems don't prove that some truths cannot be proven. It only proves either ZF is inconsistent, or some truths in it cannot be proven.
Ironically GP's implicit assumption that ZF is indeed consistent mirrors your response in which you claim Peanno is consistent... :D
That said, if you somehow proved that "some truths cannot be proven within a fixed formal axiom system (that is sufficiently powerful)", and then you also take into account the Church-Turing thesis, i.e. that Turing machines can fully model our thoughts, then the proof of the claim about "some truths cannot be proven" is more or less complete.
Of course you can always posit the existence of some "unknown unknowns" that are outside of our wildest imaginations and thus invalidating whatever we thought we have known. But that's outside of our current ability to reason.
I could go on and talk about what I understand about divine inspiration and knowledge, but I suppose those topics are a bit too speculative for the crowd here...
1. it's subjective and culturally dependent. most people intuitively reject peano arithmetic in their childhood; until they have been repeatedly told otherwise, they intuitively believe that there must be some biggest number. often in english-speaking countries they think that number is called 'infinity'
2. common sense is also what tells us that the earth is flat, the sun goes around the earth, it's impossible to create a vacuum, things only keep moving as long as there's some force impelling their continued motion, people can't fly, if a vacuum did exist rockets wouldn't work in it, and so on
it turns out that once people stopped relying on common sense so much and started using formal axiom systems, they were able to learn a lot of things in only a few centuries that not even their smartest ancestors had ever been able to figure out during thousands of centuries
I think we are in violent agreement. This is an example of what I meant by "unlimited for practical purposes, but still there."
if, on the other hand, you mean classical athens (platon and sokrates and all those dudes) then, no, they weren't, archimedes wasn't even born until like 180 years later
a man struggling with mental health issues, struggling to discover and decide who he actually is and who he actually wants to be - while also being responsible for his kid, and of the kid not understanding what’s happening to his father… that part I loved. The ghost story of Phaedrus.
The scene towards the end when he finally sits down with his kid and tries to explain what’s going on and what’s going to happen next, and his son’s response just gutted me. Never expected to have that emotional of a story from the way the book had been sold to me.
maybe you should introduce me to your ex, or at least tell me what other books she liked
Nah it was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Lehrer
I heard Murakami has some good stuff and I know my wife has some on the bookshelf. But I'm more commenting on the particular milieu, if you will, of a particular pretentious type of literature that I could never really get into. Perhaps if I went to class naked when I was in college I'd understand better.
i think what these authors have in common is not so much pretension as giving free rein to their very active imagination: caring as much about what could be as about what is. in the case of gladwell and lehrer, they've let it blur the lines between fiction and reporting (to everyone's detriment), but i don't think that's really the case with hofstadter, pirsig, and murakami
This repeats an very old, popular pop-philosophy misconception about Godel's theorems and GEB seems to have done nothing to help with this category error.
This seems a little wishy-washy to me. I don't see this as a good counterargument against Searle's argument that syntaxx alone is not enough to give rise to semantics. (I find Dennett's argument about intuition pumps a more convincing counterargument.) Maybe my understanding of Hofstadter's argument is too simplistic - I'm happy to be educated (I wasn't able to make it through even half of GEB after all).
And of course, that's not to say that GEB isn't a valuable book - it seems like most readers really enjoy it and learn a lot, even if they don't much care for the ultimate cognitive science/philosophy of mind position Hofstadter is trying to defend.
I think it's one of those books which most people actually don't enjoy that much, but don't want to admit it, because it has such an intellectual aura around it.
Anyone read the Phenomenology of Spirit and notice the same ideas?
Hegel wrote a very famous book called the “The Experience of Mind” (or, in obnoxious philosophy language, “The phenomenology of Spirit”). In it, he details how he thinks the mind is made up of successive levels of distinct programs, each of which builds on what came for it in a very specific way he calls “dialectic synthesis”. In this way he goes through all the perceived capabilities of the mind (the big four in order roughly being sensation, understanding, awareness, and reason) and ties them to specific steps in this synthetic chain.
I hope it’s obvious from that how this argument mimics GEB (which I understand as roughly “the human mind is a collection of looping programs with these characteristics”).
uh ... the center of Hofstadter's worldview, which he re-enunciated later in "I am a strange loop" is almost precisely the opposite of Hegel's persepective. Hofstadter came to see the idea of "heterarchical systems" as central to creativity and, in his opinion, consciousness. These systems are precisely not what Hegel describes, with "each level building on what came before it", but instead the levels are functionally and physically entangled so that "higher level" ones can intimately and profoundly impact "lower level" ones and vice versa.
I’ll definitely have to look more into that. I guess my conception of Hegel has room for such “looping” — Kant explicitly says that high-level Reason produces ideas that directly impact the nature of our low-level Understanding, and I sorta assumed Hegel would agree. He’s obviously much more into the Synthesis as a means-onto-itself, not to mention much more dramatic, so it wouldn’t surprise me if the last chapters of PoS made no mention of the lower faculties.
Thanks again, if you ever scroll back through your old comments and see this :). A helpful response indeed
The Collapse of the Hilbert Program: A Variation on the Gödelian Theme* Saul A. Kripke
Some twenty years ago I was operating a muni network and was up at stupid hours due to a maintenance window. The people I normally talk to were all asleep, so I made a script that searched people on live journal that had similar tagged interests and added them to my aim buddy list-- then if they were online I messaged them.
She was awake at an odd hour because someone had pulled a fire alarm in her dorm.
I later went back to see why my program had added her, and there were a number of overlapping tags but it turns out there just weren't many people that listed "douglas hofstadter" as an interest on LiveJournal-- maybe 8 in total at the time-- so it had a lot of weight.
There are puzzles and problems inside that could really extend how long you spend in that book.
I do not know math well.
Most of GEB just has this weird vibe of Hofstadter trying to come off as smart and trying way too hard. It's not that the ideas in the book are bad but they're also not really that interesting or deep or at least weird enough to justify all the flourish around it. It's very similar to Infinite Jest which to me also felt like the "young, overeducated man namedrops everything he knows without saying much" kind of thing.
Sweeping that one under the rug, are we?
Hofstadter's law is a self-referential adage, coined by Douglas Hofstadter in his book GEB…:
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
**History**
In 1979, Hofstadter introduced the law in connection with a discussion of chess-playing computers, which at the time were continually being beaten by top-level human players, despite outpacing humans in depth of analysis. Hofstadter wrote:
In the early days of computer chess, people used to estimate that it would be ten years until a computer (or program) was world champion. But after ten years had passed, it seemed that the day a computer would become world champion was still more than ten years away... This is just one more piece of evidence for the rather recursive Hofstadter's Law.Still, Hofstadter's law has held true for me more often than it has not!
The math was insufferable, however. And I say that as a mathematician and programmer... I wonder if musicians and poetry translators will find "their" parts correspondingly unbearable?
We might, but we'd be mistaken.
Why bring incredibly complex topics into a general discussion unnecessarily? Why not even bother googling a correct explanation of those topics first? (I could guess why, but I don't want to ruin the article with spoilers.)