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Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

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81–90 of 348 posts

Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IAASL also has one of the best (and easiest to understand) descriptions of non human sentience-when he talks about why he’s a vegetarian.

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…

I have a simple rule - I don't eat any creature that is sentient enough to choose to be vegan...

Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Caveat: I'm a computer scientist, not a mathematician) The halting problem, and universal computation itself, came directly out of work on incompleteness. Incompleteness is about being unable to prove statements in a particular system; it leaves open the possibility that a more powerful system might be able to prove that statement (but that more powerful system will have its own incompleteness, and so on). Turing go…

the question that fascinates me is - what is the property of a program that makes it undecidable? I've been playing around with the idea of trying to make a program that determines halts/doesn't halt/don't know, given some representation of a program. I'm running into some interesting implications when I incorporate dependent typing, but it feels like there must be something theoretical that's already out there.

> what is the property of a program that makes it undecidable?

That is itself an undecidable question!

There are a lot of programs for which you can tell that they halt (programs with no loops, for example). Likewise there are a lot of programs for which you can tell that they do not halt (any program whose main body is a WHILE TRUE loop in a language that does not have exceptions, for example.) And then there are lots of more complicated cases for which the answer can be found. But there are some cases where we just don't know. The best known is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture

Not only do we not know the answer, but we don't know if it is even possible to find the answer! We know (because Turing) that there exist programs for which we cannot find the answer, but we don't know whether the Collatz problem is one of them. And in general we cannot know, because if we could then we could use that knowledge to solve the halting problem itself! (We might be able to prove undecidability for particular programs, just as we can prove halting or non-halting for particular programs, but deciding undecidability for any particular program is in general undecidable!)

Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have a simple rule - I don't eat any creature that is sentient enough to choose to be vegan...

That's kind of you. I assume your coworkers appreciate that.

Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

#86

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…

> 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.

Thank you for sharing your experience, I may have to give `I am a Strange Loop` a try after all, and do the skip-300-pages trick with GEB.

I've tried to get through it multiple times, but I never managed to get far into the later chapters without literally falling asleep. I do not blame on the book; it's likely a consequence of my ADD. However, a significant portion of my friends did manage to get through it, and the summaries and explanations they have given of it were very inspiring. Another reason for me to conclude that it's not the book, but me ;)

Perhaps interestingly, I typically have no trouble with reading long, dense books. One of my favourite books ever is "The Master & His Emissary", an incredibly flawed but also very inspiring tome mixing loose interpretations of brain science, art history and philosophy (the best way to deal with its flaws is to approach any "scientific" argument as a philosophical line of reasoning inspired by a layman's (mis)interpretation of the underlying science, but that it's the reasoning itself that matters). I wonder if the difference in writing styles between TM&HE and GEB could tell us something about what kind of stimuli an ADHD person does and does not respond to?

Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

#87
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Metamagica Themas

Metamagical Themas

(You left out the L.)

Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

#88

I 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…

What's the point of, without any knowledge about him, attacking the reviewer as a poorly motivated elitist? That he disagrees with you does not mean that he is an inferior person to you.

Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

#90

This is a perfect opportunity to whip out one of my favorite quotes by Simone de Beauvoir: “Proust observed with astonishment that a great doctor or a great professor often shows himself, outside of his specialty, to be lacking in sensitivity, intelligence, and humanity. The reason for this is that having abdicated his freedom, he has nothing else left but his techniques. In domains where his techniques are not appli…

Indeed, and to Peter Thiel
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