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Comment by dilippkumar | Hacker News Reader

> If you're waiting for either GEB or Ulysses to hurry up and get to the mother fucking point, you're going to be waiting a long time.

Ok, 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.

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When systems (think "automated" systems like computer programs, mathematical axioms, formal systems, etc, where conclusions can be drawn/calculated "mechanically" from a few starting points) get large enough, they gain the ability to become self-referential. That is, they become expressive enough to encode statements about themselves. A hallmark of this are "incompleteness theorems" like those of Godel or the Turing halting problem.

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.

Good summary. Examples of GEB’s “fluff” are missing from this comment section, so I wanted to jump in and add one of my favorite. Bach encoded his own name in music notes in a piece, and when discussing that, Hofstadter encodes a sentence in the first letter of each paragraph in that chapter.

Great examples buddy.(I know it's bad).

I can appreciate a book being obscure or dragging things out when it is trying to give the reader an aesthetic experience. But this point seem to be one that would easiest be communicated clearly and succinctly.

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 :)

the point of the book is to give supporting evidence and guide the reader to the conclusion through testimony of thought and historical anecdote.

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.

GEB’s point is that self-reference - the ability for a system to “talk about itself” - is crucial for conciousness and for real artificial intelligence.

I think it's a reflection on intelligence overall, not just artificial intelligence.

In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference.

— Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, p. 363

It's turtles all the way down

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