So, I decided to put down IAASL and try to really get through GEB first.. like for real this time... and found an Open Courseware[0] on the book to follow hoping that would help me really cut through it. It did! The trick that did it for me was the prof's suggestion that you just skip the first 300 or so pages and he picked up from there.

I'd thumbed through it and much like op had "looked" at every page, but once I skipped the first 300 and followed along with the course, it was like butter. There is something funny about all the intro dialogs that can fatigue by the time you get to the meat.

That said, I really enjoyed his reflection on GEB in IAASL and enjoyed the read of IAASL a lot more. Regardless of what you think about what Hofstadter proposes, I think his contribution to critical exploration of the consciousness is artful and invaluable. I think it's fun, compassionate, and beautiful, and it really changed how I see myself and my environment.

It sticks with me and I think about it a lot and it makes me happy to share it with people.

[0] https://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/humanities-and-social-scienc...

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 largest impact on me. They are more refined explorations of ideas.

The value of Hofstader's life work is his single minded exploration of one of the hardest problems in cognitive science. Unlike conventional AI/ML research he is tackling the problem beyond the reach of the state of the art and refusing to pick easier problems to solve even when he can't make progress.

Hofstader's main proposition is that analogy making is the core of human cognition. He has made repeated attempts to pin it down into something that is formal using toy examples and programs (copycat, letter spirit). I think his approach has been very insightful even if nothing comes out of it.

In my opinion the "Fluid concepts and analogies" is the culmination of his work. GEB and "Metamagical Themeas" are the predule, what came afterwards is more like prose and and maybe reflection of his personal tragedy.

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.

Metamagical Themas

(You left out the L.)

I still think Hofstadter's "old school AI" thought processes warrant more attention in today's DL frenzy than they get. His books have been a great source of very interesting questions including style transfer (he dealt with fonts in "Letter Spirit"). It was also the inspiration behind some early experiments using n-nets [1] (shameless plug)

[1] https://blog.imaginea.com/deep-type/

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?

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.

Writing style is important for me too. I can complete a narrative, story-style book in 2 days. I can't complete a non-fiction book in that time that's half the size. My favourite books are ones that set out to teach something practical in the form of a story (like The Goal).

I have finished non-fiction books. They tend to be fast paced and immediate with what I want out of them. To the point.

In general, that fits with the ADHD type i.e cut the bullshit and get the point!

What are some of the flaws? Or what would I be able to read in order to notice them?

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...

100 times, this.

GEB is an alright book, but nobody I know has actually managed to finish it. I Am A Strange Loop discusses the exact same thing, but does so with the experience of years of writing in metaphor, and more importantly, entirely in metaphor. All of the metaphors are well-crafted in that they are both a pleasure to imagine, can be recalled rather easily, and accurately map to what the author is trying to express. IAASL also distills the main thesis of GEB, so it is not only more expressive but much more to-the-point (Which I, too think is the main problem with GEB as a book).

I do not hesitate to recommend -- for all those that struggled with GEB, or all those that wish to read GEB, pick up a copy of IAASL, and then if you still wish to read GEB, try it after reading IAASL.

You really can't do that with GEB. It's still valuable, but I think Hofstadter covers the issues with GEB himself just fine so I won't pick it apart.

But yeah, we just pick a section at random and try to sell it to each other with a read. Sometimes we do kind of a theatrical Exquisite Corpse paragraph to paragraph. It's silly, but something about not only the content, but the context of trying to mess up each other's consciousness with the read is not only fun but after 5 minutes you're having a laugh and forget about whatever you cared about all day. Turtles all the way down. Lol.

I know it's dumb, but I just wanted to share. Works ok with Garfield comics too.

I read it again in next six months in small pieces afterwards.

Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by "finish it". Like the blog post guy says, he "looked at every page", but he's not sure he actually absorbed everything about it there was to absorb.

I’ve read it cover to cover, twice. It’s not a bad book, but it would have helped if he had used the Lambda calculus. YMMV.

(Maybe you know of something I could read that would fix that?)

I read the book entirely from first to last page, including bibliography, five times in five years. I was at the age of appr. 19-24 and I did not read many other books in that time. Everytime I read it again, it felt like a new book. I keep casually reading random parts of it until today.

I like Getty's review, although I do not share it at all. I learned many years ago, from a very wise friend, that when I struggle - for example with certain habits of my partner - that the root of my struggling is most likely not within the other, but myself. It points to some personal deficit. This friend taught me to explore myself, before I demand any change from the other. Why is it bothering me, what would I have to change in myself to get over it?

Applying this rule, in Getty's place, I would ask myself: "how comes, that so many people are appealed by this book in a way that I am not? What makes those readers, that share my criticism and those that don't, different?". This sort of introspection is very difficult and sometimes impossible. But in the case of Getty's cognition of GEB I might give some clues:

The parts of the book that receive most criticism in Getty's review are those parts, that I would consider the entertaining sections. For example: never did I perceive the dialogs in the book as didactic. I always perceived the dialogs as a rest period, an intake of breath. After long didactic and sometimes hard to swallow scientific passages, the dialogs in their playful and sometimes childish style would allow my brain to settle down, relax and get ready, very softly, for the next topic. Like you would shake your arms and legs between sportive excercises. The dialogs were always welcome intermissions for me, but I did not take them very seriously and I did not, at all, expect them to be an essential part of the didactic mission of the book.

The second major element of criticism in Getty's review are topics in the book that do not belong to the core themes (Gödels proof, logic, formal systems), but are brought in by the author in a way that does not properly embrace them for one and which he should't refer to in the first place, as he has no sufficient proficiency in those topics (according to Getty).

The expection of Getty obviously is, that GEB is supposed to be a very serious scholarly and didactic work, that must not deviate from its core topic. And I believe that is a mis-expectation: Getty expected a textbook, but got a novel. In MY perception GEB is the novel of Gödels proof and as such it can play and entertain and experiment to any degree that the author desires. Of course the author can make fun of Cage and completely miss Zen buddhism. For me, it was absolutely clear and obvious in every paragraph of the book, whether the author was didactic or playful or personal at any point. The mixture is the essence of the book that makes it so appealing to me. Textbooks are often too dry and hard to swallow, novels on scientific topics almost never go deep enough for me. GEB is an experimental format that hit the sweet point for me.

I want to make clear, that Getty is not "wrong" in his perception - it is his view and it is absolutely legit as such. I believe, though, it is a very big error to blame the author for not fulfilling one's own exepctations or try to convince others, to adapt their perception to one's own - there is no point in this. If Getty is really interested what makes him tick differently than others, he should introspect his indisposition with the "soft", playful, not so scientific, didactic aspects of the book. Why is he upset with those parts, where the author deviates from his views? Why is he unable to distinguish between the serious and the playful parts of the book? It might point him to some revealing aspects of his personality. There is no outcome in the sense of right or wrong!

I liked Getty's review - not for what it was proposedly written for: revealing to me weaknesses of the book I haven't discovered yet, or convincing me, that the book that I so much love, is actually not loveable - but for taking the courage and providing me with an insight in another type of brain and perception, and therefore another aspect of personhood, that I found very interesting and entertaining to learn about! This comes with absolutely no assessment from my side!

If only more people would think like that! (Not thinking of me here ... ;-) )

27, but equally impressive nonetheless

I honestly think it's kind of an important feature of the book. Since it's about the evolution of one's consciousness. At least for me being able to place how old he was as he found himself making the thing helps the parts that can feel sort of strange have the right contextual... extrusion? I recall what it was like to be in my mid 20s, I was thinking a lot about what it meant to be alive and people started suddenly around 25 treating me like what I thought was an adult.

The content of the book being about the procession of consciousness and all, yeah, it's a different book if you know he's 27 than if you think he's 60.

I’m convinced to pick it back up.

I'm going to try this mit course, I think will help motivate me to get through the rest of the book finally.

If you're trying to extrapolate his age from the publishing, someone below corrected me. He was 27 when he wrote it. A few years between writing and publishing the first edition lines up.

Found this after many years of sort of doing something similar without knowing it was a thing. It honestly felt like cheating sometimes for some reason?

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

I've yet to see why people think this book is so life changing.

I wish HN had an easy way to save comments like Reddit, but this reply should do the trick :)

For now, I have a bookmarks folder for stuff like this.

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) - consider renaming "favorite" to "save"? Possibly people who are used to seeing the "save" link on Reddit would find that more intuitive.

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.

Heh, there ya go. I'm one of the people who uses the favorite feature (albeit sporadically) and I didn't even know you could do that.

Yeah, surfacing the UI element for "favorite" to make it easier to find would, IMO, make it a lot more usable.

I noticed over the years that my use of Pinboard is very asymmetrical: I save several URLs every month, but retrieve at most a handful per year. But knowing that my memories are safely stored gives me peace of mind (and, just to be safe, I make a backup every year or so).

[0] https://pinboard.in

It's better to have a URL and not need, than to need a URL and not have it :)

[0] https://github.com/alphapapa/org-protocol-capture-html

But then, many years later, I read IAASL. And then reread GEB. Which I could then appreciate much better.

Also once you get through the other parts, the Socratic discussions are easy to come back to. You just don't end up in nowhere taxed with his presentation before you really find the book.

I couldn't do the dialogs until I got through the rest. I also enjoyed IAASL a bit more than I enjoyed GEB. Definitely not saying what helped me figure the book out is what everyone should do.

Hofstadter, introducing IAASL, said something like: "I wrote this book because people got so distracted by the form of GEB that they didn't get the point I was making."

My reaction: "I understood the point, I just didn't care about it as much as everything else that was happening in GEB."

Kind of similar to my appreciation of Bach himself, in fact. The content of Bach's compositions is frequently about praising God, which has no particular relevance to me. But the form and aesthetics of Bach are wonderful.

I agree, except make sure not to skip the SHRDLU [1] one, which isn't actually Hofstadter's writing at all, but a demo of the SHRDLU system which is fascinating and should not be missed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU

Maybe Chapter X, "Levels of Description, and Computer Systems" on page 285. Or Chapter XI, "Brains and Thoughts" on 337.

I think the trick to reading GEB is to not take it so seriously. You can skim sections, you can skip parts, you don't have to understand everything, not everything has to make sense. I think the author here misses that when he complains such about the quality of the metaphors. They're not meant to help understand, as much as being there to give a vague idea about what's coming in a fun way.

If you still don't enjoy GEB, then it's not for you, and that's OK too.

I found 'I am a Strange Loop' a more dry and less enjoyable read than GEB, but it was certainly a lot clearer, and better written in many ways. I would probably recommend it before GEB for most people.

Theorems have characteristics that aren't obvious to non-mathematicians. Hofstatder's goal was to convey some of these characteristics. A metaphor that says "if a theorem were a record and a mathematical system were a record player, here is what would happen to the record player when it played a self-referential theorem record" is an excellent way to show how theorems are different than anything we normally deal with.

A more modern book would have been able to rely on the metaphor of a program "crashing" which would have been sad and inept. There are a thousand ways a program can crash and very few of them reflect any aspects of Gödelian incompleteness. They're just poorly made, like a record with a big hole in the track that breaks the record needle.

There are essays in Hofstadter's collection "Metamagical Themas" that expand significantly on his idea of what metaphors and analogies actually are and what he thinks they're capable of doing. Reading those makes it very clear why he'd use broken metaphors in GEBEGB.

I think GEBEGB is most useful in exposing people who don't yet have any formal training in mathematical theory to some deeper concepts and inspiring them to find the subtle edges of these systems. I read it at about 12 and it changed my life by exposing subtle fripperies of thought. If I'd read it at 20, as the author of this article did, I too would probably have experienced these little amusements as lack of rigor. Instead I experienced them as mysteries, and now as an adult I experience them as very dry jokes and thought prompts.

Also adding to this. A main point of the book is also that there is no logical system that can be complete, so someone trying to get the real big picture needs to be able to live outside logic comfortably as well.

A little bit like Zen thinking. You cannot make a clapping sound with one hand. But you have to accept that the question can exist in a space with zero answers.

I can't recommend that course enough too. I guess I couldn't find the book on my own. So anyone that can, great! But having someone who knows the book take your through it, at least for me, made it a lot more fun. It was, in my experience, kind of a rare book in how I wanted to share what I was looking at with someone but didn't have anyone to share it with really. Having the prof giving a breakdown made it a lot more digestable for me.

0. The Mind's I

1. Metamagical Themas

2. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies

This was very true of the first (several) times I read through the book. I pulled the book off the shelf of my Dad's library at the age of maybe 10-12 (it had the coolest cover), and couldn't make head nor tail out of most of it. It did have a bunch of interesting pictures and I skipped most of the prose to read the funny and intriguing dialogues.

Each time I re-read the book I felt like I got more out of it, I think I'd read it more than ten times over by the time I was 20.

Having been through GEB a few times made Metamagical Themas easier too, and the same rule of "skip to the next section, or just take a break if I'm not getting it" worked well there too.

GEB is not a book for consume only once. I came back again and again. The profound meaning of the book and Godel theorem goes beyond many people can imaging. GEB itself is a metaphor.

I need to double down on meal planning and just really quit it.

Here is a refresher: https://www.varsitytutors.com/hotmath/hotmath_help/topics/co...

Also, who says the intellectually disabled can't be vegans?

If I have that knowledge, potentially I have moral imperative to use it. Compassion for things that I don't have to have it for might be something I'm supposed to do with my time piloting this homunculus.

However I suspect we agree some lives are so filled with suffering that the compassionate choice is to not breed a sentient being into that life. Imagine choosing to get pregnant if you had certain evidence it'd damn your future child to a life of physical and mental anguish -- you'd refuse. That's the life of pigs and chickens on modern farms: too much suffering[1], below the threshold of "worth living."

Moreover, the state of the animal welfare movement is bleak[2] compared to the scope. Farm animal advocacy is a niche and regularly ridiculed. Progress is constantly on shaky ground: recent initiatives in MA and CA prohibiting animal products from animals raised in cages too small to turn around in is at serious risk of being overturned by the federal government's "King amendment," which would prevent any state-based welfare reforms. I'm passionately in support of this work, but under no delusion we're near the end of it.

Given that, the strategy I advocate for is both improved treatment of farm animals and reduced breeding of them -- at least until farm animal treatment improves. Hoping that treatment will catch up soon so that it'll obviate the need for dietary change is unrealistic today, though I sincerely hope (and will support those trying) to get there[3].

[0] Caveat that slaughter today is not always humane, in particular for chickens and fish.

[1] E.g. gestation crates and lifetime of small cages, genetic breeding that causes chickens to grow so fast they break their own legs, debeaking practices, and more.

[2] Progress is happening, and in fact the wins we've had are hugely beneficial to animals -- but I suspect decades before we're at "enough" of an improvement. Within that time billions of animals will be raised and slaughtered for food; the scale is hard to fathom.

[3] And frankly, I expect cultured meat and sophisticated plant-based meats like Beyond Burger to gain wide adoption before that.

I mean, c'mon. The only way for there to be something good, or great, from a first-person experience, is for there to be a first person to actually do the experiencing.

Caveat, of course, bringing something into an existence that is only suffering is probably not so great. This is why we need to treat our food animals well (not to mention our kids!)

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

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

Edit: though several weaker views are more common in animal rights advocacy, for instance that being born in order to be raised for food is not a benefit to an animal, that being born in order to be raised for food in a factory farm is not a benefit to an animal, or that being born is a benefit but that conferring a benefit on an animal doesn't make conferring harms on the same animal legitimate or appropriate even if the benefits and harms are structured as a "package deal".

> Simple teleology defeats it, in the sense that everyone who holds this view will probably die childless, and will not be very successful at spreading their views generationally.

This seems like a particularly raw invocation of

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

The same reasoning would seem to suggest that religions that successfully encourage people to have many children are most likely to be correct because they provide one method for spreading their views (that is, having children and then teaching them to believe in the religions' doctrines). This is one way that religious views do get spread in the world and one demographic factor in religious belief, but it's hard to see the connection between this and the correctness of each belief as we might otherwise understand correctness.

This is very silly, it plainly conflates truth and popularity.

> As for the animals - hey, I said I want them treated decently.

Suggests "decent" treatment of animals is preferable to "indecent" treatment; this is broadly accepted.

> I don't extend them the same courtesies as I extend to humans because they're not human

Suggests animals/animal suffering are/is of less moral importance than humans/human suffering. This is also broadly accepted.

> I don't shed a tear for their deaths because to do so is to anthropomorphize them, a quintessentially childish way of viewing the world.

Suggests anthropomorphisation of animals is undesirable because it is stereotypically childish; childishness is bad. Seems like quite a silly argument, kids are also fond of breathing etc.

> Said animal wouldn't exist otherwise, and could not benefit from not existing, so the potential for benefit is always higher on the existence side, even if the probability is very low - it's still higher than a guaranteed 0.

You care about the expectation, not the "potential for benefit".

In any case, the way in which you've presented these ideas suggests that you're a consequentialist maximiser (eg think that it's the outcomes of actions/choices/rules that matter, and that there exists some partial order of the desirability of possible worlds). I'd suggest that if you keep thinking about animal welfare and how to balance the lives and living conditions of animals against your own social and dietary needs, you may well decide that you want to reduce your meat intake. Peter Singer's "Animal Liberation" is fairly classic, "The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe "[0] is much more general but pretty great.

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10677-015-9567-7

The bigger issue is not that nature of the math but the notion that you believe you can subject the matter to it like what is the answer to 42 + banana.

The simpler answer is that we ought to do less immoral things not to find interesting justifications for doing so.

Maybe your life. I feel pretty good. Have you considered doing things to reduce your suffering? There are a lot of great options. Take a few deep breaths and consider whether it's really as bad as all that.

Suffering in the human context is also very relative to tolerance. Experiencing the occasional great suffering (whether physical or emotional) puts your daily aches and pains and disappointments into proper contrast so you can tell that you should learn how to not take them very seriously.

Ahem, what?

i live with my own temptations in this realm, so i'm not coming from a "i've done it" POV, but from a "this is where i lean when i'm pretty sure i need to give it a real go" one.

Out of curiosity I wandered through Amazon's 1-star reviews of this book to see what other people had to say. "Obtuse and impenetrable", I can certainly understand. It takes a certain bent to put the effort into reading it, and a certain level of interest to sustain that effort.

The bulk of the critiques, though, including the OP, seem to be that it's too shallow in some specific area. How could it possibly dive any deeper into a fraction of the topics covered without being split into a multi-volume set? Perhaps more economical prose would allow for deeper dives, but personally I think it serves as an excellent layperson's introduction to a huge number of topics in logic, philosophy, theology, biology, music, art, language, etc.

Years back, I scanned through a few pages and realized it needed effort as you mention.

OTOH, I think there are 2 kinds of great books: one which just suck you into their world and other which demand effort/tax to pay to immerse in that world. The former are incredible books, while the latter are still great.

I found `On Lisp` by PG in the same latter category though GEB and OL tackle different subjects.

I think it is interesting you say the one end is incredible but the other end is "still great". Does that mean you enjoy them less?

Enjoyment is not the point. I am a different person because of reading GEB, and my coding style changed because of reading On Lisp. With internalisation and comprehension, the first kind of book will change the way that you think forever. This kind of book is going to be a boring if you are unable understand the concepts that it is trying to communicate.

If these concepts are going to change you forever it might take some reflection (i.e. if you continue perusing the entire book at "reading speed" you will hit a point where you no longer understand what the author is talking about due to not sufficiently internalising the earlier material.)

No, no, no. The proof is not by cardinality. The proof is constructive. That is the point of the book, or at least a major theme of it. For example, that is the point of the record player analogy.

I think the piece's statement is supposed to relate to the "enumerating all deductions" bit of the Godel-numbering

As if there can only be one. (And it seems OP is describing the theorem, not a proof)

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 and the things in it that had been closed to me previously.

I am sure I could find some way to suggest that the work is somehow "not as good as everything thinks". I can do that with any literature but such articles are more like flame bait. What I have to ask is "Did my engaging with the work leave me having a fundamentally different worldview? Did it broaden my horizons somehow?" In the case of this work, yes, it did. Everything else is a footnote to that experience.

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 obvious.

What you really need to do is pad out the book with text that looks as much as possible like the real book, but isn't.

And then one reads the latter parts of GEB, and you start wondering...

Cloud Atlas employs the same structure deliberately, with wonderful narrative impact. You have to climb up the mountain in order to climb back down.

I do think GEB is the same way. The first half of the book is the climb. The second half is merely the question, what can we see from way up here?

One of the best things I've seen in that regard (although I doubt this was the reason for it) is simply the old "preview of forthcoming novel FOO by $AUTHOR" section.

I noticed this when watching mystery tv shows. When I find myself wondering "wait is this the real culprit?" I just look at how much time is left till the ending...

The internet has made explanations hyper competitive. At this point I can find dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of explanations of Godel's theorem.

But in the pre-internet days I could go to the library, or have my friend Kent explain it to me. (He had to explain first that languages were either complete or true -- he called it sound if I recall. soundness was the property -- and then it was demonstrated that these formal languages were sound, therefore incomplete.)

Back then you couldn't just google Godel and say "oh, that reminds me of music returning to the tonic" or whatever and then google that.

I think because a lot of the ideas have sort of spread out into culture, and been re-explained over the years, the best explanation are not in those books anymore.

What is good for me is bad for you (as a matter of fact I find Gödel’s proof unmistakeaby clear).

The best explanation for a PhD candidate about to defend their thesis the next day is not the same as it is for, say, me.

But that reinforces the point I am making.

Plato is widely criticized by philosophers for doing just that. We cut him some slack, however, as he was one of the first to do so. Hofstadter, by contrast, was reusing a well-worn technique and had 2500 years of critiques of Plato and literary innovations to draw on.

Socratic dialogs do not have to be so one-sided. It's not difficult to make both sides of the dialog raise relevant, interesting, thoughtful points, and many Socratic dialogs post-Plato do this. It's sheer lazyness, incompetence, or intellectual dishonesty to make them one-sided.

Socratic dialog's have different uses. On the one end it can be used to consider serious existing counterarguments and provide answers to them. One is to explain one point of view and not to provide balanced opinion.

One-sided Socratic dialog that is like a 'happy path' without hairy counterarguments falls into the latter category. Hofstadter uses them to illustrate a concepts, not to go question them.

In fact the hole book is just attempt to repeat the same ideas again and again.

People who don't read books, or have restricted themselves into limited genres, subjects and styles are easily thrown off.

It's common to see very good writing as contrived or pretentious if it's not what you are not familiar with. Claims of elitism are used to paint actual skill and quality as negative.

So far as I can tell, without a graduate degree in physics, that book is a giant bucket full of minced-up grad-level math, and Penrose is a pretty terrible guide to it.

On the up side it made me think I should put some time and effort into understanding the math and the ideas. That was nearly fifteen years ago now, and it's turned out to be a lot of fun as an occasional side hobby.

On the down side, he completely fails to make even relatively simple concepts either simple or accessible.

When you spend your life surrounded by some of the smartest grad students in the world, you're going to have a very unrealistic idea of what the average human can understand. Of of how to explain things to the average human in a way that makes understanding more likely.

Infuriating book - but I'm still glad he wrote it, and that I tried to read it.

I will admit to getting a bit bamboozled quite often ...

The book is a puzzle. That's it. It's not the answer to life, the universe, and everything. It's a nice puzzle that illustrates how self-referential things relate to one another. Superficially. I'm okay with that.

Because it's a fun little puzzle, it engages people's minds in new ways. This is what has caused all of the praise over the years, not because it's some post-grad-level deep-dive into epistemology or something. I think the reviewer misses the point. The criticisms they make are actually features.

I could criticize the book as well. I struggled with it. But I wouldn't criticize it along these lines. They don't look very insightful.

Seriously, "puzzle" in the sense that things are assembled and related to one another to create mental constructs that are pleasing to contemplate. The solution is to read the book and work the puzzle. Or it's a duck. The duck thing might work better for some of the more literal-minded, including the author of the critique.

I admit that the tortoise and Achilles analogies get kind of weird, and sometimes feel a bit contrived, but I actually found them instrumental to the overarching theme of the book: self-reference.

The theme was a bit more clear in "I am a Strange Loop", but I still really enjoyed GEB, if for no other reason than it made me finally understand the concepts of "axioms" and "theorems" and whatnot.

That's not the point. So what if you don't get everything? Are you supposed to get everything in Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming on the first read?

The record-playing example is a wonderful metaphor for Godel's theorem, not a terrible one.

The Art of Computer Programming is a reference work so this isn't as trenchant a counterpoint as you might have thought.

> The basic idea behind the alternative analysis was similar to that proposed by Robert Stalnaker (1968). Let's say that an A-world is simply a possible world where A is true. Stalnaker had proposed that p □→ q was true just in case the most similar p-world to the actual world is also a q-world. Lewis offered a nice graphic way of thinking about this. He proposed that we think of similarity between worlds as a kind of metric, with the worlds arranged in some large-dimensional space, and more similar worlds being closer to each other than more dissimilar worlds. Then Stalnaker's idea is that the closest p-world has to be a q-world for p □→ q to be true.

But "13 is prime" is the most central example of a necessary truth; in this example there _are_ no p-worlds. So the fact that this sentence is, in fact, meaningful shows that the way we use language is doing something different from Stalnaker's model.

And of course, the connection between counterfactuals, analogy making, and general intelligence is one of Hofstader's research interests, and he comes back to it in a later chapter. This example of his again kindof makes fun of counterfactual reasoning about mathematical objects:

> Related to this notion of slipping between closely related terms is the notion of seeing a given object as a variation on another object. An excellent example has been mentioned already-that of the "circle with three indentations", where in fact there is no circle at all. One has to be able to bend concepts, when it is appropriate. Nothing should be absolutely rigid.

The very physical/analog nature of a record player makes it not hard for me to imagine a record designed to break a player, one can totally imagine one whose grooves jostle the arm so much it breaks (no idea if this is actually practical, it doesn't really matter).

I wonder if it doesn't work anymore now that fewer people have experienced a record player, although the author DID say he encountered it first 20 years ago and had trouble with it then, I dunno.

> can the problem of record-player-breaking-records be suitably addressed by redesigning record-players? If no, why not? What if we simply read the information from a record using a visual device with no moving parts?

Dude, it's a metaphor/analogy, it's not that hard to realize taking it that literally takes you out of it. No analogy can ever be carried to it's end and still be a good analogy or metaphor. That's why it's an analogy, not the thing analogized. (which is a lesson that is (ironically? intentionally?) consistent with the messages of GEB? The map is not the territory.)

Edit: I should say that this wasn't at all obvious to me when I was in college and thinking hard about incompleteness. The limitations of mathematics disturbed me deeply. These days, I think it's part of the beauty of mathematics that its limitations are its own result.

Sort of. Common reactions to the English version of the liar paradox are along the lines of 'that's meaningless so it doesn't imply anything' or 'so natural language is inconsistent, what do you expect?' Most of the work Gödel did was to find a way to encode meta-logic into formal language in such a way that he could then state the liar paradox in a format so ironclad that it could no longer be dismissed.

The other important part, of course, is that these results are inescapable.

That is pretty much what I thought of the book the first time I tried to read it but didn't get all the way through. The book, especially in the beginning, was super fun to read but it lost its charm for me after the first third.

One huge benefit to me from the book is a nice introduction to Bach's music. To this day I enjoy finding patterns in music.

I "know" I "should" work through it. I "know" I "should" enjoy it.

But I never follow through. This review gives me hope that maybe I'm not just a ludicrous failure, but that there are different ways to go.

Obviously, I do believe that, and I don't believe I'm a total failure, but still, I can't deny the nagging voice in the back of my head sometimes.

GEB (or Moby Dick) are intended to be read in entirety.

I'm extremely confused as to why this would be the case for TAOCP.

While I wouldn't recommend TAOCP for "just reading", I don't know why it wouldn't be recommended for study. Knuth provides a very interesting approach for algorithms analysis, deep in substance.

TAOCP, to me, is in a similar category - it's worth remembering Knuth essentially carved the field of study out himself. If you need a reference or textbook, there are by now better places to start. If you are interested in the field, you should definitely get a hold of TAOCP as well. But you can be a perfectly fine and educated programmer (let alone person) and never touch the thing.

For example, suppose you want to learn about Binary Decision Diagrams. I have before me TAOCP Volume 4A, which has 57 pages of text, 22 pages of exercises, 58 pages of answers, and a wealth of references. (Section 7.1.4, you can see the draft Fascicle 1B online: http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/knuth/) There are simply no other books or papers where you can learn so much about BDDs and ZDDs this well or easily. The writing is crisp and clear, and is really intended to teach, not to be a reference to look up.

Of course, a lot of people have simply no need to learn about zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams, so they can just simply not read TAOCP. But that's a different claim from saying that it's a reference work or not a good read on its topics.

That is a different claim and also one I didn't make.

I disagree with how you've characterized it. I'm unlikely to ever read all of TAOCP and, yes, the reason for that is that doing so would feel a little bit like a commitment to read the whole OED from cover to cover.

But in fact TAOCP isn't really a reference book and it is pretty rewarding, in a straightforward, professional sense. I dip in and out of it sort of at random and I can think of several times when doing so has made me sharper, or when I directly took something from TAOCP and ended up applying it.

My takeaway from this is that TAOCP is a super weird book, one we can't really put our finger on to characterize.

I'll be frank, I think that Knuth's analyses have surprisingly fresh and useful approaches, particularly compared with the other algorithms texts I've read. The usual texts are better at compressed results and a "Straight path" through, but as ways of thinking, I find Knuth more useful to study.

I wouldn't recommend TAOCP to anyone not interested in algorithms, mind.

GEB, on the other hand is... I dunno, an ok monitor riser if you don't have anything else handy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Smullyan#Selected_publ...

It impressed me, but was too difficult for me back then.

I would disagree. I found the dialogues absolutely beautiful and a big part of what makes this book so enjoyable.

I think it would be a mistake to treat this book as a textbook whose goal is to convey some material in the most efficient way.

His tastes in music, poetry, etc, are very conservative and rather conventional, he doesn't seem to make any effort to engage seriously with any modern work, and he tries to pass this off as edgy sophistication.

After the 50th repetition of "they were playing this awful Rock Music and my brilliant friend X remarked on how awful it was", it gets a bit old.

As directly useful reading to get someone more acquainted with a broad discussion of algorithms and logic without textbook depth of individual topics, I'd recommend _The_New_Turing_Omnibus_ by Alexander Dewdney and _The_Advent_of_the_Algorithm_ by David Berlinski. Probably the latter and then the former, actually.

I wouldn't call GEB a bad read. I think because of its high reputation people expect too much from it, like it should be the definitive book of truth about logic and proofs. It's one book, and if one reads it in the light of it being a fun romp through topics that are somehow loosely connected in the vein of James Burke I think it delivers rather well.

This. Maturing has moved me past books that I "should" like. Communication is important! If it takes you 500 pages of hot air to explain something simple, where will there ever be room for a complex idea? For nuance?

It's embarrassing how a ten minute CPG Grey can be better than many books I've read.

Not to change the subject, but Frank Herbert's work has a similarly undeserved reputation for depth, IMHO. The Dune series wants to be about so many interesting, connected things: consciousness, religion, ecology, psychology, politics and speculates about (non-scientific) connections between mind and matter. Herbert had the good taste to not describe every detail about the world, but all of his considerable artifice is a very thin veneer on what is ultimately a juvenile power fantasy. There is really nothing there, philosophically speaking, even though, to my young teenage self, it really felt like there was.

If I recall correctly, at some point there were copyright protection measures on some audio CDs got so aggressive that they would actually brick your CD-ROM drive if you were foolish enough not to have autorun disabled (I'm not even talking about the Sony Rootkit scandal). That's a quarter century after GEB was written though.

* The dialogs are overlong and obtuse * Some specific metaphors don't click * The author attacks various things which he feels Hofstadter belittles (avant-garde music, Zen)

He may be right about the dialogs, though as others have said perhaps it's better to read the chapters backwards. Or, even, metaphorically like the Crab Canon: dialog, chapter, and then dialog again.

He's clearly projecting his own perspective without thinking about the perspective of others when it comes to the metaphors. This won a Pulitzer, not everyone has a mathematical background and can straight up understand Godel when directly explained.

But it's the third part that is most troubling. These days it's fashionable to take some earlier cultural artefact, and assassinate it on the basis that every point of view is valid, genuine, and can't be criticised. I smell that same pattern in his counter-attacks on "avant-garde social commentary masquerading as music" and Zen. Hofstadter has an opinion on these. A strong, negative opinion. Attacking Hofstadter the way he does to me more smacks of a post-hoc character assassination than intelligent engagement with the material.

As an aside: I read Hofstadter (somewhere) say that he has spent a lot of his life after GEB trying to hammer home that it was about self-reference, self-reference, and nothing but self-reference. I think he even described "I am a Strange Loop" as being GEB but much more direct (I still need to read that one).

(I'm including a copy for reference and archiving since the web server publishing this link is written in MACLISP running under ITS on a PDP-10 emulator.)

http://up.update.uu.se/DSK%3AHUMOR%3BGEB%20REVIEW

The following review of "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid," Douglas R. Hofstadter, New York: Basic Books, appeared in "Fusion", Magazine of the Fusion Energy Foundation, Oct. 1979, pp. 61.

"Douglas Hofstadter, author of "Godel, Escher, Bach," has not had such a vaired experience with the antiscience movement as Bateson [Bateson, Gregory, "Mind and Nature--A Necessary Unity", preceding review in Fusion], but his brief career, nevertheless, is a clue to the message of his book.

Hofstadter is a computer expert in the field of artificial intelligence. This dismal discipline, which emanates from the Bertrand Russell-Karl Korsch networks, has been used primarily to develop brainwashing programs. Hofstadter claims to be part of his network through his close association with Marvin Minsky who, in turn, works closely with linguistician Noam Chomsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Politically these "artificial intelligence" academics link up to the Bateson circles through the various radical groups they mutually support.

Artificial intelligence is as nasty a discipline as its use in brainwashing implies. It is based on the premise that the operations of the human mind are essentially compatible with formal Aristotelian logic and thus can be replicated by a sufficiently complex computer.

......

Douglas Hofstadter's interminable driveling (777 pages) reiterates Bateson's point from the perspective on an attack on Kurt Godel's 1931 proof that any system determined by a fixed lawfulness (axiomatic login) is necessarily incomplete, hence incapable of solving problems that can be posed within its limits. The obvious conclusion to be reached from this proof is that there is a higher order of lawfulness (reason) that determines successive, reason-determined locally lawful systems. The British oligarchy never forgave Godel for this insight, which negate Bertrand Russell's attempted destruction of Georg Cantor's introduction of the concept of the transfinite into mathematics.

Hofstadter simultaneously slanders Godel and the musical genius Johann Sebasian Bach--whose recognition of the same principle in musical composition made Beethoven's subsequent breakthroughs possible--by lumping them with the psychotic Dutch draftsman M.C. Escher.

The paradoxes of formal logic, Hofstadter contends--for example, Epimenides's statement that all Cretans are liars--are really Zen koans. There is nothing new here that the eastern mystics and their systematized irrationality did not discover in bygone millennia. In fact, he says, the solution is to imbed simple axiomatic systems in more complex ones in regress. Once this is accomplished, presto, mind and the universe can be programmed into a computer.

(Reviewed by: John Schoonover)

OP completely missed the tongue-in-cheek reference to silence here.

So picked up GEB again a couple of years ago and found it much easier going. But then put it down again because most of the ideas, in addition to being very verbosely explained, are now old and there really wasn't a whole lot new there aside from elaborate explanation.

I imagine that the book served its purpose in its time although if not Hofstadter, someone else would probably have come along and put together the various ideas.

The dialogues are supposed to be whimsical and bizarre dream-like riffs on the topic at hand, a la Alice in Wonderland, not sharp teaching instruments.

I think Hofstadter did get the supposed point of Cage’s piece, or why would he have joked about whether people want to hear ambient noise or not?

The review gets good in the middle when it starts talking about Zen, and I agree with some of the conclusions towards the end. As another commenter pointed out, Hofstadter was young. In a way, the whole book is like an amateur piece of music or film or poetry, at times clumsy or campy but generally endearing. I understood this even as a kid.

https://altreason.com/i-am-a-strange-loop/

Proof of the undecidability of the halting problem in six sentences:

Assume that there exists a program H that solves the halting problem, that is, H takes two input parameters, a program P and an input I and returns true if P halts when run on input I, false otherwise.

Construct a program B that does the following: B accepts as input a program P and computes H(P,P), that is, it calls H as a subroutine to determine if program P halts when run on a copy of itself as the input. If the result from H is true then B enters an infinite loop, otherwise B halts (that is, B does the opposite of what P would do when run on a copy of itself).

Now consider what happens if we run B on a copy of itself. B will halt iff H(B,B) is false. But H(B,B) is false iff B doesn't halt, which is a contradiction. Therefore, our assumption is false, and H is impossible. QED.

Turing's original proof of this theorem was remarkable (and complicated) because in his day there were no computers. Not only did Turing have to more or less invent the idea of a program, but he had to conceive of the rather mind-bending idea of running a program with a copy of itself as input. Nowadays this is commonplace. The unix command "cat `which cat`" is one of the simplest examples of a program operating on itself as input. A compiler that compiles itself is another.

The proof of Godel's theorem involves showing that you can encode theorems and their proofs using just integer arithmetic. For example, you can use tricks like encoding the string "ab" as 2ᵃ3ᵇ.

The incompleteness theorem is very closely related to Turing's undecidability theorem, which shows that by encoding programs as strings and passing them as inputs to other programs you can create paradoxical self-referential problem statements that no program can solve in finite time. It also reminds me of the lambda calculus, which is something that really shows how far you can go by starting out with a barebones system and encoding everything else on top of it. The lambda calculus starts with only anonmour functions and is able to encode numbers, arithmetic, data structures, iteration and everything else with just that. Godel's theorem uses similar tricks to show that if you start with just integer arithmetic you can also go all the way to "turing completeness".

https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/30144c/geb_discus...

Can be read in a couple of hours and you'll know as much about Goedel's work as any GEB reader. Nowadays even comes with a Hofstadter intro but no bulk or talking animals.

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 got involved after attending a series of lectures on Goedel's incompeteness theorem. He came up with turing machines, showed that they cannot decide their own halting problem, and proved that they're equivalent to lambda calculus. Goedel tried to make a more powerful alternative to lambda calculus, called general recursive functions, but it also turned out to be equivalent to turing machines and lambda calculus.

This lead to the Church-Turing thesis, which claims that any effective/physical/realisable system of logic cannot be more powerful than turing machines/lambda calculus/general recursive functions. In this sense, we can still "solve" the halting problem by using a more powerful logical system (e.g. oracle machines), but the Church Turing thesis says that we can never carry out those calculation to get a true/false answer.

I like to think of incompleteness as a mathematical property, applying to all systems but allowing the "escape hatch" of switching to a more powerful system; and I like to think of the Church Turing thesis as a law of physics, that there is a limit to the logical power of any physical system (i.e. Turing completeness).

There's a nice summary at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnpcMCW0RUA