I'm so glad I read this. I've tried to finish the book au least three times over the last 15-20 years and never made it much beyond page 200. I loved the prose sections but had a hard time getting through the Achilles & Turtoise sections. Some of them were super long and I always felt like they were clearly trying to convey some important, deep message that I'm too stupid to understand. Despite not enjoying them I actually reread some sections because I thought it must be me not getting it, although I had no problem understanding the actual explanation. I'm so happy to learn that I can skip the silly stories and dialogs without missing the value of the book. Maybe now I'll finally finish the book?!
Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
241–250 of 348 posts
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 'favorites' feature is a saved list. It's not widely used. Maybe we should promote it, or maybe get rid of it.
My humble suggestion(s) to make "favorites" more useful (and hopefully more used): 1. add the ability to "favorite" from the front page. I rarely "favorite" anything, because I grew accustomed to using "upvote" as the mechanism to save stories. I would switch, but that extra little bit of friction of needing to click through first, means I stick with my old habit. 2. Add "favorite" for comments as well. 3. (maybe) -…
You can favorite comments but you have to click their timestamp first. It's really hidden. I think most people don't know about the feature.
dang: if you get rid of it please don't do so w/o notice so that those of us who do use it can export the links first.
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#243There's a discussion in GEB about mystery/detective novels, and how the physical fact of seeing that you're near the end of the book leaks information about the state of the plot to you. He muses - what if you inserted some number of blank pages at the end, so you weren't sure where the end was? But no, that's too easy - you might flip through and see them. What about Lorem Ipsum text? Well, that's better, but still…
The Kindle version of Leviathan Wakes pulled this off. They included an entire other book at the end as a teaser for another series. I was somewhat shocked when the actual book ended suddenly around 50% in.
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#244I'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 this info. I've attempted and put down geb about 3 times never getting too far. The stories were just childish to me.
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Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#245There's a discussion in GEB about mystery/detective novels, and how the physical fact of seeing that you're near the end of the book leaks information about the state of the plot to you. He muses - what if you inserted some number of blank pages at the end, so you weren't sure where the end was? But no, that's too easy - you might flip through and see them. What about Lorem Ipsum text? Well, that's better, but still…
This is implausible. The gag about having a story trail off into badly-written nonsense was used in that dialogue, but clearly doesn't refer to the book as a whole.
The last dialogue of GEB is an excellent example of something he's been doing for the whole book, aligning a dialogue with a Bach canon. The six speakers line up very well with the Ricercar a 6, including in details such as the midpoint where the conversation changes topic and drops down to only three speakers, and everyone rejoins on a new theme.
The topic of the dialogue is Hofstadter's philosophy of consciousness, the thing which he wishes more people understood (which I don't personally believe, btw), and which he wrote most of I Am A Strange Loop to emphasize. He wanted people to read and understand that part.
It also ends with a signature "strange loop" flourish, introducing the "Author" as a speaker, who begins a quotation, the content of which (as implied by the page layout and the label "Author:" at the start of the introduction) is the entire book.
If that's not the true end of GEB, what is?
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 lit…
> "The Master & His Emissary", an incredibly flawed but also very inspiring tome mixing loose interpretations of brain science, art history and philosophy What are some of the flaws? Or what would I be able to read in order to notice them?
To give a full list would be impossible, simply because the book is so dense, plus it wouldn't make much sense without context. The "Reception" section of the book's wikipedia entry gives a good general overview of what's good and bad about it[0].
Basically, McGrilchrist makes claims about what we know about how the brain works with a certainty that we simply don't have, let alone draw conclusions from it as if they're facts. He's also prone to "start from a viewpoint and find evidence that matches it"-line of thought (Popper would not be happy...). But if you are aware of that and appreciate more how the whole overarching narrative fits together it's a very enlightening book with very inspiring lines of thought.
Anyway, in my experience it goes very well with:
- "Metaphors We Live By" and other works by Lakoff & Johnson, the book that introduced the concept of "conceptual metaphor" to the world. They are referred to a lot and having read them helps you spot when McGilchrist might be misinterpreting their work.
- "The Stuff of Thought" by Steven Pinker, who asides from writing a really fun book on language, also gives some good arguments tempering Lakoff & Johnson's overenthusiasm a bit without being dismissive of them (although in their defense, metaphors are criminally underrated in their importance to thinking).
- most books by Oliver Sacks, who is more qualified to make statements about the brain than anyone else on this list, but "Seeing Voices" especially, because it really dives into the connection between language and brain development.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary#Re...
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 lit…
I also live with ADHD. I think that's maybe why the dialogs at the beginning were so impenetrable to me without context. They are important and do a great job of illustrating what he's getting to, but for me it just felt like reading nonsense until I had some context about why they were exploring. I found myself in my initial readings not just bored but kind of offended by how wanky they were. Once I got a better und…
> I also live with ADHD.
I wonder if you would like McGilchrist's book then. It's full of associations and drawing lines between seemingly unrelated things, and with sentences containing more than seven comma's not being uncommon.
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also live with ADHD. I think that's maybe why the dialogs at the beginning were so impenetrable to me without context. They are important and do a great job of illustrating what he's getting to, but for me it just felt like reading nonsense until I had some context about why they were exploring. I found myself in my initial readings not just bored but kind of offended by how wanky they were. Once I got a better und…
> I also live with ADHD. I wonder if you would like McGilchrist's book then. It's full of associations and drawing lines between seemingly unrelated things, and with sentences containing more than seven comma's not being uncommon.
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Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#249Did I just grow up in unintelligent circles? I never even heard of GEB until I was around 28 (I only heard of IAASL today thanks to this thread/article) and I'm only now just getting around to it. Did I miss the boat here now in my 30s?
Re: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
#250I'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…
Same here. I read GEB in grad school, as a distraction from the hassles of my thesis work. And I skipped over parts that mystified me.
But then, many years later, I read IAASL. And then reread GEB. Which I could then appreciate much better.