Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
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Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
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Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#2> The high-level, slightly handwavey description of this theorem is that, for any sufficiently expressive mathematical proof system, there are more true facts within the system than there are proofs for facts, which in turn means that not every fact can be proved
No, no, no. The proof is not by cardinality. The proof is constructive. That is the point of the book, or at least a major theme of it. For example, that is the point of the record player analogy.
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#3> it hints at grand unifying patterns, but the pattern it finds is just the abstract notion of self-reference, and then it keeps bringing it up, making a few unnecessary references, showing some pictures, and asking, “Isn’t that cool? Isn’t that weird?”
That is pretty much what I thought of the book the first time I tried to read it but didn't get all the way through. The book, especially in the beginning, was super fun to read but it lost its charm for me after the first third.
One huge benefit to me from the book is a nice introduction to Bach's music. To this day I enjoy finding patterns in music.
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#4“A fun illustration of something,” is pretty much as far as the book goes: it hints at grand unifying patterns, but the pattern it finds is just the abstract notion of self-reference, and then it keeps bringing it up, making a few unnecessary references, showing some pictures, and asking, “Isn’t that cool? Isn’t that weird?”
The book is a puzzle. That's it. It's not the answer to life, the universe, and everything. It's a nice puzzle that illustrates how self-referential things relate to one another. Superficially. I'm okay with that.
Because it's a fun little puzzle, it engages people's minds in new ways. This is what has caused all of the praise over the years, not because it's some post-grad-level deep-dive into epistemology or something. I think the reviewer misses the point. The criticisms they make are actually features.
I could criticize the book as well. I struggled with it. But I wouldn't criticize it along these lines. They don't look very insightful.
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#5tl;dr. Excellent first few chapters (which deserve the high praise and possibly are the cause of all the hype), gets less and less interesting. At some point, I dreaded returning to it and gave up.
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#6I'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...
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#7I had much the same reaction to GEB as this author: it seems like I really should have liked it, but never have. To me, it always just seemed too clever by a half (or, perhaps, I am just too dull witted by some other fraction ...)
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#8Has anyone read it and not found the dialogue bits meandering and superfluous? I found the other chapters acceptable but the useless dialogue left me feeling the whole book was pretentious and babbling.
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#9I actually tend to agree with this review - the record-player analogy for incompleteness is particularly bad. But what you have here is a young man high on his intellectual gifts playing in beautiful abstract worlds, imperfectly, sometimes pointlessly. It's that intellectual playfulness that makes this book special, since books are usually either intellectual or playful but rarely both.
Not to change the subject, but Frank Herbert's work has a similarly undeserved reputation for depth, IMHO. The Dune series wants to be about so many interesting, connected things: consciousness, religion, ecology, psychology, politics and speculates about (non-scientific) connections between mind and matter. Herbert had the good taste to not describe every detail about the world, but all of his considerable artifice is a very thin veneer on what is ultimately a juvenile power fantasy. There is really nothing there, philosophically speaking, even though, to my young teenage self, it really felt like there was.
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#10I'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 con…
This.
100 times, this.
GEB is an alright book, but nobody I know has actually managed to finish it. I Am A Strange Loop discusses the exact same thing, but does so with the experience of years of writing in metaphor, and more importantly, entirely in metaphor. All of the metaphors are well-crafted in that they are both a pleasure to imagine, can be recalled rather easily, and accurately map to what the author is trying to express. IAASL also distills the main thesis of GEB, so it is not only more expressive but much more to-the-point (Which I, too think is the main problem with GEB as a book).
I do not hesitate to recommend -- for all those that struggled with GEB, or all those that wish to read GEB, pick up a copy of IAASL, and then if you still wish to read GEB, try it after reading IAASL.