I've heard so many good things about Hofstadter's famous book and I'm about to begin it myself. Anyone care to share their experiences with GEB/whether reading it was as transformative as I've heard it is? Also, any suggestions for how to approach the book itself?
Ask HN: Experiences with 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' (GEB)?
1–10 of 39 posts
Re: Ask HN: Experiences with 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' (GEB)?
#2Frankly it made me feel like I'm not smart enough much of the time. But trying not to let that bother me, I plowed ahead anyway. I found quite a few things actually quite mind expanding. His exposition about infinite recursion was worth the price of admission alone. A small segment of that is here: http://amberbaldet.com/uploads/little-harmonic-labrynth.html
Another book which I did find truly transformative include "The Art of Game Design" by Jessie Schell. Also Anathem, by Neal Stephenson, is also a very worthwhile mind-broadening scientific read. A New Kind of Science by Wolfram is also quite a bit of fun.
But by far my most prized techie book is Genetic Programming, by the legendary John Koza (if you're not a Lisp person like I wasn't when I read this, then you really need to read it!). Braid and all of the books I mentioned have something in common: They are all fat, heavy, meaty, thought-provoking tomes.
Re: Ask HN: Experiences with 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' (GEB)?
#3Great book. Like most people that start it, I didn't finish. It is a notoriously underfinished book. Give it a try anyways.
Re: Ask HN: Experiences with 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' (GEB)?
#4The first time I read it straight through. I was in the middle of college, and transitioning from a dual bio/chem major to a math/cs major, and the book really hit a sweet spot for me with the nature of the universe.
If you're a programmer, then you have a big leg up on the core concepts introduced in the first half, but its still a tough read.
The biggest piece of advice: keep going, and don't be intimidated as the examples grow. There are examples that are drawn from many fields of study, and the dialogues in between chapters give a more intuitive sense of the concepts being introduced in the following chapter. Re-read those if you start finding the main discussions too dry.
There is a _lot_ going on in that book, and you will not get it all on the first read. You will have a feeling that you are missing something and you are. Don't worry about that. Some is revealed in the later parts of the book, and you might find yourself looping back to earlier passages.
Take your time with it, but get through to the end, you will not regret it, and you will find yourself picking through parts of it for a long time to come.
Also, check out Metamagical Themas, which is the opposite, a series of discrete chapters on different topics, but just as fascinating. It covers lisp, rubics cubes, the prisoners dilemma, gender roles in language and a whole host of other good things.
Re: Ask HN: Experiences with 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' (GEB)?
#5I've read it two times through. The first time, I thought it was one of the most brilliant books I had ever read (I read it the first time in the early 80's). I became especially fascinated with Godel's Proof and the thoughts of E.O. Wilson on whether an ant colony was in reality a single organism. I was very, very excited about the possibilities of artificial intelligence and especially natural language processing.
The second time I read it (somewhere in the 90's), I enjoyed it tremendously but I was surprised by how excited I had been before. The second time through, I caught a lot of additional insights but somehow, it felt less revolutionary.
I plan to read it again in a few years. It's been over ten years since the last time I read it. I have no idea how I'll react to it.
Re: Ask HN: Experiences with 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' (GEB)?
#6I made an attempt to read Hofstadter's more recent I'm a Strange Loop about a year ago and didn't make it all the way through.
After being told (a few weeks ago, actually) that GEB was a bit more accessible, relative at least to ISL, I started reading it, and have thus far been blown away.
Re: Ask HN: Experiences with 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' (GEB)?
#7I highly recommend Gödel's Proof (Nagel and Newman) as a supplement. I got a lot out of Hofstadter's book, but honestly found much of the discussion of the incompleteness theorem more confusing than it needed to be. If you're mostly interested in the Gödel part, I actually recommend you read it instead of Hofstadter's book.
Gödel's Proof is very concise, and more clearly describes the core argument.
Re: Ask HN: Experiences with 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' (GEB)?
#8I read the last ~1/3 of it while recovering from food poisoning in a Buenos Aires hotel room. The simpsons was playing on TV, in spanish. Although the context was trippy, the content seemed pretty reasonable to me. It made a lot of sense from a theory of computation perspective; my response was mainly "oh, just like turing machines." Of course, I may have missed something.
Re: Ask HN: Experiences with 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' (GEB)?
#9I absolutely love this book - I'm right in the middle, he's trying to answer the question, "Can minds be mapped onto each other?".
It's very engaging and fascinating, and I highly recommend it for all sentient beings. Admittedly I haven't finished the book just yet, but I hold the belief that I may have been better off not going to college, but instead reading GEB two or three times.
One reason I occasionally stumble while reading it is because it's such a vast flow of information. It's a bit hard to process all of his thoughts at once, as it's basically a well-organized dump of Hofstadter's brain. Reminds me of Pirsig's Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in that way.
As for how to approach reading the book, I recommend reading it outdoors in the summertime, which is a bit tricky in the northern hemisphere these days. And don't forget to have a LOT of coffee on-hand!
enjoy! :)
Re: Ask HN: Experiences with 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' (GEB)?
#10My major was Cognitive Science, so I always had to read excerpts of this book as part of course requirement, but never finished the whole thing.
Now I read it by jumping between pages and hoping the individual sentences/paragraphs could spark my own thought process (this is how I read most of the time nowadays).
For a much more concise overview on the similar subject matters, checkout this book by Andy Clark http://www.amazon.com/Mindware-Introduction-Philosophy-Cogni...