gödel escher bach by douglas r hofstadter

Certainly, there were many possibilities. If you already read GEB, you’re probably wondering what else is new in the 20th Anniversary Edition - other than the new preface. Despite its popularity, it is not a “popular science” book. His explanation goes on, and clarifies at least one thing: despite its beautiful playfulness, GEB is a serious book presenting a serious theory about consciousness. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?”. “In a word,” writes Hofstadter in the new preface, “ GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. Much closer (but then, I had the advantage of reading that Wired interview). It is a book that attempts to discover what ’self’ really means”. My own review of the book, the single most popular page on my web site, says that the book is about “the question of consciousness and the possibility of artificial intelligence. Hofstadter says he heard this one over and over again, even by people who read the book, and it is (in his own words) “a million miles off”. Another common definition is “a book that shows how math, art, and music are really all the same thing at their core”.

Brilliant, yes but otherwise not very accurate. The Hacker’s Dictionary (also known as The Jargon File) says it’s “a brilliant tapestry themed on the concept of encoded self-reference”. So - what is this book about? The New York Times bestsellers list originally summarized it as “A scientist argues that reality is a system of interconnected brains”. Now, twenty years after its first publication (in 1979), the author decided to clarify the matter once and for all, and added a new 23-page preface that, among other things, clarifies the issue. This seems to be a real problem, because in the new “20th Anniversary Edition” of the book, Hofstadter says that the question “so what is this book about?” haunted him since he was scribbling the first drafts, back in 1973. Yes, it talks about music and art, mathematics and zen, biochemistry and computer languages but none of these is what the book is really about. Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid ( GEB for short) complained that most people, even those who actually read the book, couldn’t tell what it’s really about. In an interview to Wired magazine a few years back, Douglas R. (A complete review of Gödel, Escher, Bach appears here.) Gödel, Escher, Bach - 20th Anniversary Edition / Douglas R.

Gödel escher bach by douglas r hofstadter