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Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
11–20 of 348 posts
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#12GEB is one of the most overrated books ever. It's a painfully long, tedious, masturbatory, self-aggrandizing collection of loosely related tales. The idea of self-similarity is somewhat interesting, but certainly not 1500-pages-of-incoherent-ramblings interesting.
I have no idea how this won the Pulitzer prize, probably the judges just could not admit that it was too tedious to finish.
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#13Has 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.
I loved the dialogues; they were really helpful in explaining some of the more technical content and I loved the little puzzles and devices he scattered throughout them. The use of metaphoric exposition followed by technical description is brilliant for making reinforcement learning fun.
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#14I'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…
Can you be more specific - exactly from what page should one start reading GEB?
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#15I'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…
I read this book when I was a kid and frequently back then, I was not concerned with reading books from beginning to end. I’d start in the beginning, skip to the middle if it got boring, skip to the end if I wanted to kill a cliffhanger, then go back and read everything in between, or eventually restart from the beginning. So this is how I read GEB. I think I never would have gotten through it from start-to-finish.
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#16For me this book was a companion to Metamagical Themas, a collection of Hofstadter’s Scientific American articles. Being a collection of articles, that book is much more accessible.
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#17I think there is a modern predisposition particularly in analytic, academic circles wherein criticizing a work is tantamount to somehow being "more superior" than the work itself. This article reminds me of such ivory tower conceits.
What I liked about Godel, Escher and Bach was that although it introduced some heavy concepts--it did so in a playful way. It opened many doors in relation to consideration of the world and the things in it that had been closed to me previously.
I am sure I could find some way to suggest that the work is somehow "not as good as everything thinks". I can do that with any literature but such articles are more like flame bait. What I have to ask is "Did my engaging with the work leave me having a fundamentally different worldview? Did it broaden my horizons somehow?" In the case of this work, yes, it did. Everything else is a footnote to that experience.
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#18I'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…
Can you be more specific - exactly from what page should one start reading GEB?
You would have to know which printing to be specific about.
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#19I'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 try…
Sometimes when my girlfriend and I are laying in bed after a long day and just aren't quite ready to unplug and sleep, we take turns reading randomly selected sections from IAASL. There's a couple other books in the rotation, but it's a fun one. The mini theater of it becomes kind of self referential as we try to mess up how the other person feels about the reality being thrown at them.
You really can't do that with GEB. It's still valuable, but I think Hofstadter covers the issues with GEB himself just fine so I won't pick it apart.
But yeah, we just pick a section at random and try to sell it to each other with a read. Sometimes we do kind of a theatrical Exquisite Corpse paragraph to paragraph. It's silly, but something about not only the content, but the context of trying to mess up each other's consciousness with the read is not only fun but after 5 minutes you're having a laugh and forget about whatever you cared about all day. Turtles all the way down. Lol.
I know it's dumb, but I just wanted to share. Works ok with Garfield comics too.
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#20Does anyone have a better metaphor, or a link to someplace with a better explanation, of the Incompleteness Theorem?