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I "know" I "should" work through it. I "know" I "should" enjoy it.
But I never follow through. This review gives me hope that maybe I'm not just a ludicrous failure, but that there are different ways to go.
Obviously, I do believe that, and I don't believe I'm a total failure, but still, I can't deny the nagging voice in the back of my head sometimes.
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> think he was 24? I think it's pretty incredible considering his age. This makes sense. I read the book at age of 20 or so, and it made me to change my life and change my career path. It's very playful, it informs, connects and educates. I think older and more cynical me might not have enjoyed it so much. I think "Metamagical Themes" and the "Fluid concepts and analogies" are his best books although GEP had the larg…
> Metamagical Themes It's Metamagica Themas, I think - an anagram of 'Mathematical Games'; the Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American which proceeded it. A lovely book.
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I am not a vegan, but his consciousness cone is something I seem to bring up frequently with people. Usually by the end of the conversation I don't quite know why I'm not vegan aside from habit. Last time I brought it up I was eating sushi and talking about how I had decided to quit eating cephalopods because they might be smarter than humans... But then ate pork belly and just didn't really know what I stood for any…
Consider that cephalopods are on the menu of other cephalopods despite their mental powers ...
If I have that knowledge, potentially I have moral imperative to use it. Compassion for things that I don't have to have it for might be something I'm supposed to do with my time piloting this homunculus.
A couple of comments: 1) The author complains that the Socratic dialogs are contrived and largely consist of one character explaining something and the other saying "I see" and so on. Well, that's true, but that's kind of how the format works. You could make a similar complaint about Plato's _Republic_. 2) I think the author totally misses that the reference to not hearing the silverware during 4'33" in a cafe is a j…
Plato is widely criticized by philosophers for doing just that. We cut him some slack, however, as he was one of the first to do so. Hofstadter, by contrast, was reusing a well-worn technique and had 2500 years of critiques of Plato and literary innovations to draw on.
Socratic dialogs do not have to be so one-sided. It's not difficult to make both sides of the dialog raise relevant, interesting, thoughtful points, and many Socratic dialogs post-Plato do this. It's sheer lazyness, incompetence, or intellectual dishonesty to make them one-sided.
> 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…
If I recall, the point is that if you have a record player that can play _every record_, then it can play _a record that breaks it_. I think the piece's statement is supposed to relate to the "enumerating all deductions" bit of the Godel-numbering
I read and finished GEB first, and then read 'I am a Strange Loop'. I think the trick to reading GEB is to not take it so seriously. You can skim sections, you can skip parts, you don't have to understand everything, not everything has to make sense. I think the author here misses that when he complains such about the quality of the metaphors. They're not meant to help understand, as much as being there to give a vag…
Theorems have characteristics that aren't obvious to non-mathematicians. Hofstatder's goal was to convey some of these characteristics. A metaphor that says "if a theorem were a record and a mathematical system were a record player, here is what would happen to the record player when it played a self-referential theorem record" is an excellent way to show how theorems are different than anything we normally deal with.
A more modern book would have been able to rely on the metaphor of a program "crashing" which would have been sad and inept. There are a thousand ways a program can crash and very few of them reflect any aspects of Gödelian incompleteness. They're just poorly made, like a record with a big hole in the track that breaks the record needle.
There are essays in Hofstadter's collection "Metamagical Themas" that expand significantly on his idea of what metaphors and analogies actually are and what he thinks they're capable of doing. Reading those makes it very clear why he'd use broken metaphors in GEBEGB.
I think GEBEGB is most useful in exposing people who don't yet have any formal training in mathematical theory to some deeper concepts and inspiring them to find the subtle edges of these systems. I read it at about 12 and it changed my life by exposing subtle fripperies of thought. If I'd read it at 20, as the author of this article did, I too would probably have experienced these little amusements as lack of rigor. Instead I experienced them as mysteries, and now as an adult I experience them as very dry jokes and thought prompts.
My first GEB, I traded for a complete works of Shakespeare. The second is sitting on a shelf alongside Fluid Analogies . Thinking about the GEB phenomenon today, boggles my mind. Sure it won a Pulitzer. But it was a best seller. That's how different the world was...non-fiction could be thick and highly technical and sell in volume to the general public...it didn't need to be a new journalistic summary or popular hist…
If I recall correctly, at some point there were copyright protection measures on some audio CDs got so aggressive that they would actually brick your CD-ROM drive if you were foolish enough not to have autorun disabled (I'm not even talking about the Sony Rootkit scandal). That's a quarter century after GEB was written though.
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Did you sum up your experience reading the book? Or did you try to sum up the critique we're discussing here? If it's the latter you failed.
"tl;dr" here actually means "Too long; didn't read", as in, GP's result of reading the book, and not the "here is the summary" we usually tend to associate with the abbreviation.
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 con…
Thanks for sharing this course, very interesting. I wish HN had an easy way to save comments like Reddit, but this reply should do the trick :)