Make sure you don't neglect its contrary twin: Emperor's New Mind. (The entire dialectic between these two books is something straight out of G.E.B.)
Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey
11–20 of 53 posts
Re: Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey
#12We had a similar class at CCS http://www.ccs.ucsb.edu/, which really was just a book club for that book. Read a bit, discuss it, try to wrap your head around it.
I highly recommend this book for stretching your brain and doing some higher-level thinking.
Re: Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey
#13This could be really good; I've started reading this book twice now, and gotten about 1/3 of the way through both times before my brain starts to melt. Also, Douglas Hofstatder's "I Am A Strange Loop" is a little more accessible and is all about consciousness, if that part of Godel, Escher, Bach interests you.
From what I remember of his work, I don't care for Hofstatder's style. He describes a bunch of mysterious things, including consciousness, and winks suggestively that they all could have something to do with each other. You feel like you have learned something, but you really haven't. His corpus consists of "mysterious answers to mysterious questions" (http://lesswrong.com/lw/iu/mysterious_answers_to_mysterious_...). It doesn't actually enhance our understanding of the world.
Re: Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey
#14This is a great book. That being said, why is this on HN? The link is from 2007. The book is even older.
Yes, it's from 2007, but it doesn't seem dated and definitely would be of interest to readers of HN. As far as I know there is no preference for 'new' material here - in fact tried and true is preferred! And if it's a double, it's worthwhile just for the mp4 link above. I wanted to do this but .rm - no.
Well I've owned the book since about 1995 and still haven't gotten anywhere on it.
The .rm? I had to Google RealPlayer to see if they were even still around.
Re: Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey
#15Darn, wish he would have hidden a little play on initials as Hofstadter did in his title: GEB:EGB.
Re: Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey
#16I "read" this book, in that I passed my eyes over the words it contains, and mentally recreated the sounds of those words, parsed the individual sentences, and digested some of the paragraphs. It has had certain effects on my manner of thinking and acting, but it bothers me to know that there's a great deal more information in that hefty tome than I've managed to get out of it.
Same. I read it on Eliezer Yudkowsky's recommendation, but it was too much for me. I mean, I got a couple interesting ideas out of it, but I felt like I was barely scratching the surface.
I wonder if anyone has written a good companion guide to read along with it.
Re: Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey
#17I "read" this book, in that I passed my eyes over the words it contains, and mentally recreated the sounds of those words, parsed the individual sentences, and digested some of the paragraphs. It has had certain effects on my manner of thinking and acting, but it bothers me to know that there's a great deal more information in that hefty tome than I've managed to get out of it.
The teacher of the course himself admitted he took seven years to read the thing. Assuming it's the same lectures I'm thinking of, they are available either on YouTube or iTunes U, because that's where I saw them.
Re: Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey
#18I "read" this book, in that I passed my eyes over the words it contains, and mentally recreated the sounds of those words, parsed the individual sentences, and digested some of the paragraphs. It has had certain effects on my manner of thinking and acting, but it bothers me to know that there's a great deal more information in that hefty tome than I've managed to get out of it.
Same. I read it on Eliezer Yudkowsky's recommendation, but it was too much for me. I mean, I got a couple interesting ideas out of it, but I felt like I was barely scratching the surface. I wonder if anyone has written a good companion guide to read along with it.
It's a combination of two things: An extended musing on the nature of Godel's Incompleteness theorem, including its practical and philosophical consequences, and a series of things as jacoblyles explains in his comment.
It's an arty/fun book, I don't think it's bad, but the "mystery" you perceive at the heart of it is simply Godel's theorem, which, to be fair, like many other aspects of computer science does indeed have more application than the immediate, raw application of the proof. I suggest spending some time with one of the more formal explanations of Godel's theorem, one that is really careful to explain how the self-referential statement is really constructed.
Re: Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey
#19I bought my copy a few years ago at a used bookstore. In the inner cover there are three signatures under a simple sentence - "sign this when you can't finish it and sell it back". It's still on my bookshelf - I should sign it and pass it on.
Re: Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey
#20I have to say I'm very surprised at how few people here seem to have liked the book. Going by my experience, I would have expected that HN readers would have thoroughly enjoyed it.
I first read it about 25 years ago, and while I didn't understand much of its philosophical arguments, I remember the experience as a sheer delight. Since then, i've read it at least twice more, and enjoyed it every time ( and understood it better):
- It's the best explanation by far (for a non-mathematical reader) of Godel's theorem and its philosophical implications.
- It's a theory about what is consciousness and how it arises, but unlike most such discussions, genuinely interesting and even playful.
- It's an argument for what is called 'strong AI'. Given the author's view of consciousness, he makes a strong argument for why he believes conscious computer programs are possible.
- It's a great introduction (again for the math-challenged) to formal systems, mathematical proofs, and what was called the Entschiedungsproblem (who can resist finding out what a word like that means?) :-)
- It's tantalizing glimpses of the world of western classical music and painting and some interesting parallels he draws between them and his theory of consciousness.
- It's a set of delightful dialogs (in the style of Lewis Carroll) about all the above.
For me, it was one of my formative experiences, and the one thing I got from it at the time was that there was more to computers than writing Pascal programs. It helped that I came to this book as the proverbial tabula rasa, knowing nothing about classical music, painting, formal systems or philosophy for that matter, but I really think most people here, even those who know a lot about these things, will enjoy and learn from it.