Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey | Hacker News Reader

Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey

ocw.mit.edu

19 pointsRod10 comments

I read the book first time before I was a programmer, and found it philosophically profound, but also found it hard to grasp what it actually was about.

Later I realized it was just an elaborate Lisp-tutorial.

I read about half of it in the computer. I will buy it to read the whole book.

But when I talk about GEB to my friends, I have a hard time trying to tell what it's about. "Err, well, a lot of things...". Then I send a link to the Wikipedia entry :)

I am reading the book right now - well in half hour chunks every day anyway. It's very good.

OK, I find a few of the worked examples a little overworked (if you get me) and a few of the dialogues the same - the occasional "OK, I get it, now can we move on?" escapes my lips but I am a programmer so I suppose that pre-disposes me to certain ways of thinking - so perhaps that's not a fair criticism.

I am looking forward to seeing how the plot works out though...

It's a very good book indeed. Also a little bit overrated, I would say. The book deals with deep concepts (e.g., recursion) but some people miss the "point" and try to mystify the book as if it were deeper than what it actually is.

I also found it a bit overworked at times, LOL. But then, anyone who has programmed for a while knows about recursion and other topics covered in the book, so one's way of thought is molded in such a way that many of the concepts are not that hard to grasp. I would guess that the author tried to write a book that would appeal to a vast multitude of people, so he sacrificed conciseness a bit in order to attain such goal.

I found when reading the book I kept thinking about 'How can a complex system form from a few basic parts?'.

That question has always intrigued me, and probably always will. It also always results in me thinking - how many levels of basic parts are there? It wasn't long ago when people thought all objects were flat and that the Earth was the biggest object in existence. Which then got me thinking about quantum theory - what if we are just on the cusp of discovering multiple levels in a completely different way than size?

I am sure you get the point now - the book inspired a lot of thought.

Curse you, MIT students! You lucky, lucky people.

It's opencourseware. Even though you don't have the benefit of discussions and lectures, much of the material is available.

Edit: the video lectures are available. And I bet the professor would love to open up a conversation.

> Curse you, high-school students living near MIT!

That's right, the class is a Saturday class offered to high-schoolers. MIT rocks!

Wow, that is very awesome.

"Special software is required to use some of the files in this course: .rm." When will real media die already?

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