I bought this when I was like 19 and going through some "i'm going to be a physicist" mental break and obsessing over michio kaku and wild theories and it made absolutely no sense to me at all. Do I need to try again now that I'm a grown adult?
Do you remember what you were confused about? The book does not assume the reader has any advanced math education (from what I remember) - it tries to teach you the relevant math itself. It is long and windy though, so maybe you read through too quickly or got bored. You'll probably have more success with it now that you're more mature.
I'm also struggling with it despite having it on my bookshelf for a while. Not an easy read. It's cited and referred to all over the place, so maybe it's worth getting through it.
I would say give yourself license to skip some stuff, the parable stuff (for instance) is either super fun or a chore, depending on the mood you are in. A lot of the Achilles stuff is more akin to poetry instead of an illuminating guide.
Same. It has the exact same junior high-school giddiness of excitement as The Martian, another book that I just couldn't tonally work my way through.
I don't mind books that explain concepts in fun ways, but I do find it jarring if I'm being treated like a child with an overbearing parent, telling me why I should be excited about something instead of just telling the story and letting me feel how I want to feel about it.
I share your experience and I've tried it three times. Couldn't get through any of his Metamagical Themas articles in Scientific American, either. I thought he was in love with writing, not communicating, and didn't want to remove a word once he'd put it down.
There's a point in the middle where he's building a foundation of formal systems that's a real slog. If you push through that, it gets progressively more interesting.
I wanted to love this book. I understood the concepts and found them legitimately thought provoking - I just disliked the writing style. He uses elaborate metaphors, strained socratic dialogue, peppered with cultural references and visual cues... and relatively few paragraphs actually articulating the core ideas. I only understood Godel's incompleteness theorem when I looked it up elsewhere. It's like he focused entirely on the mystical "look how deep all this stuff is..." story and forgot to actually explain the subject at hand.
GEB is one of the books that as an adult I have learned to not care about anymore. I've unsuccessfully tried reading it a few times (once made it a couple of hundred pages in) and came to the (personal) conclusion that if I want an intellectual challenge I'll just directly do maths instead of reading a semi-literary essay about maths.
Just like (some of) Joyce's work, GEB seems to me a puzzle who's main prize is the satisfaction of having understood it - obfuscation and abstruseness for their own sake.
For actually understanding Godel's work I would recommend Gödel's Proof (Nagel, Newman, somewhat ironically, prefaced by Hofstadter) or Philosophies of Mathematics (George, Velleman).
I love GEB. It is a masterpiece. But it is important to realize before diving into it that one of the things that makes it a masterpiece is that it is literary, that is, that it contains a wealth of detail that is, strictly speaking, unnecessary to the main point. Drawing a parallel between GEB and James Joyce's Ulysses is actually quite a good analogy. Indeed, Ulysses is almost nothing but "unnecessary detail", to the extent that it makes the book all but unreadable (which, I think, is no small part of its appeal). If you're waiting for either GEB or Ulysses to hurry up and get to the mother fucking point, you're going to be waiting a long time. In that regard, both books are good for techies to read because every now and then it's good to read something that drags you out of your comfort zone and futzes around in all kinds of obscure nooks and crannies before getting to the mother fucking point -- if indeed it ever does. Getting to the point can be important, but there is more to life (and literature).
I wonder if anyone on the Pulitzer Prize committee for GEB understood this was the idea he was attempting to communicate.
There seems to be a large market for books that make dumb people feel smart.
Ha I tried reading I Am a Strange Loop and found that meandering and verbose too. Didn’t finish it. He really labors the “greater than sum of parts” point for example. Ugh
Personally, I believe that the distinction between "unnecessary detail" and "the point" is mostly subjective and in the mind of the reader.
The point of a book is to get the reader to reach a certain understanding. Every brain is different and while one literary path might get some readers to that destination, other paths may be required for others. But there is no singular point of understanding that exists solely at the end of that path. The path itself is what builds that understanding.
Part of the art of writing is covering a large enough space of multiple paths to get most readers there without too many of them getting lost.
There is a very clear distinction between details and main point. If you assume that there is no main point in a text, you negate all that the writer is trying to communicate.
Maybe I've been reading books the wrong way my whole life, but I never assume there's a singular "main point" in the text. I mean, why would one waste time writing 100 or 1000 page text circling around some single point for the reader to guess, instead of spelling it clearly up front, and then arguing for it?
Often, writing is like a connect-the-dots drawing where those points are the written details and the point is the overall shape. Yes, there is a "main point" that is not those details. But it's the details that convey it. Subtract all of them, and the shape disappears.
For any given reader, some of those detail points won't resonate with them and will be basically ignored. But as long as there are enough other details, they will still trace the right shape and get the overall point.
A big part of the art of writing is figuring out which constellation of details will lead to the right shape being traced in the minds of as many readers as possible.
> Indeed, Ulysses is almost nothing but "unnecessary detail", to the extent that it makes the book all but unreadable
I was always apprehensive of reading Ulysses… until I did. And then I read some basic analysis of it and then read it again and now I’m slightly baffled why people find it _that_ difficult. Yes it’s not at all typical but it’s really not that hard and it’s definitely no Finnegan’s Wake. Now that’s a challenge!
I mean lots of the lore is just residual 16 year old’s getting into reading stuff. You read l’Estranger (translated), decide you’re an intellectual, and so have a go at Ulysses cos it’s the hardest one and so suitable for you, an intellectual. The internet has been a good transmission vector for the sentiment.
If your ideas about cooking come from watching Masterchef (analogously), you might treat the idea of making a beurre blanc as a similar act of conquest, triumph in the face of splitting adversity whilst a thousand-voice choir crescendos in the background as you whisk. But a million french housewives happily made it for decades having never been told it’s impossible, and indeed knowing better that it isn’t.
I love Ulysses and metafiction in general, but when people apply this kind of writing style to philosophy it drives me a bit up the wall. Philosophy at the end of the day is about arguing a point; it isn't about producing an aesthetic experience.
So why would you abuse your reader by making it a pain in the ass to figure out what you mean? I know there are some fancy arguments around stretching limits of language, but none of them seemed all that sensible to me. The only advantage I see to obscurantist writing is that it makes it impossible to critique the philosophers work. Any critique will just be met by the response that you didn't fully understand the author's argument. The Searle/Derrida debates are a great example of this. The upshot is that people spend all their time debating what you actually mean. Which I guess is good for the philosopher's brand, but doesn't advance knowledge much.
This isn't to say that you can't have beautiful writing in philosophy. I think Gaston Bachelard is a great example of both an elegant writer and a clear writer.
That being said, people really really love GEB, so it probably is worth reading regardless of these misgivings. One of these days I'll get to it.
Hahah the whole point of op is that there is value in not always having a point, but meandering, especially for techies. Are you set an proving him right?
I think it'd be more fair to say that GEB is just philosophical navel-gazing with the appearance of some deep philosophical truth... When the actual truth is they cheaped out on editorial staff :D
I got it, and read a portion of it. It was a meandering and badly written mess with no point. It felt like Seinfeld in science-ish form.
Do you have substantive critique? Because the fellow you're responding to is giving substance to his criticism, the parent comment is giving substance, the article is giving substance, and whether GEB has substance is apparently up for debate. If the person you're replying to is deadset on proving the parent right, you are dead set on proving nothing. Please tell us what you disagree with, and the particulars of why, or maybe leave the discussion to the adults.
OP: In that regard, both books are good for techies to read because every now and then it's good to read something that drags you out of your comfort zone and futzes around in all kinds of obscure nooks and crannies before getting to the mother fucking point -- if indeed it ever does. Getting to the point can be important, but there is more to life (and literature).
Commentor: Philosophy at the end of the day is about arguing a point; it isn't about producing an aesthetic experience. (Even though this statement directly against original post, it's so obvious to author that he does not feel the need to explain, but goes on a tangent how bad the writing is)
Me: Hahah the whole point of op is that there is value in not always having a point, but meandering...
Response: It was a meandering and badly written mess with no point.
Me: ...
You: Leave it to the adults.
Me: ...
You: You're not making a point!!!
(Considering the nature of the first comment and assuming you didnt do it on purpose, you ending with blaming me I'm not making a point is poetic to be honest)
I don't consider "there is value in not always having a point, but meandering" to be itself a point, mainly because you don't give a reason to suppose that that is the case or a reasonable case to consider. It seems itself to be rather meandering, circling a value and a raison d'etre without specifying either. It's the specification that makes it worth considering, as adults do know.
I can imagine it being received differently today, but I read it twice in the 80s. It blew my mind. Now you can’t swing a stick without hitting some referent or concept in its pages, but that’s the internet age, efficiently routing the arcane to hypernerds worldwide. It’s made the whole world boring.
Thanks for the context. I'd recently tried reading GEB but couldn't get into it much since I already knew the formal version of the concepts it discusses about. I also have experience of an earlier time when expert knowledge was much less accessible, and where I treasured books like this that tried to compress every ambition within them, since they brought a lot of threads for further edification together in them.
> Philosophy at the end of the day is about arguing a point; it isn't about producing an aesthetic experience.
So why would you abuse your reader by making it a pain in the ass to figure out what you mean?
This is a funny thing to say about a discipline that was more or less founded by Plato, who was notably obscurantist if not outright esoteric.
In any case, philosophy is not always about making a point and there is not always a point to be made. Sometimes it's just asking questions.
When philosophy starts with a real observation (...then words, then discussion), obscurantism is appropriate and expected. Because words can only fit a real observation badly.
When philosophy starts with words, a clear point is expected, for the obvious reasons.
This hasn't been my experience of Plato at all. I've always found his dialogs to be written with a surprising clarity. Is there a work in particular you're thinking of?
What part of Plato are you referring to? Republic is honestly written at a 10th grade English reading level. The most esoteric work of Plato is Timaeus, but most people do not see that as a foundational text in Western philosophy.
platon didn't speak english, because english wouldn't exist for fifteen more centuries, so he didn't write the republic at any english reading level. the various english translations of it vary greatly in their clarity and readability
i agree that the timaios is platon's most esoteric surviving work, and it's full of enormous amounts of nonsense, but i think it's still reasonably clearly written. sadly, it is a foundational text in not only western philosophy but eastern philosophy as well, and it took twenty centuries for most thinkers to reject most of its erroneous dogmas
First, the "reading level" of Plato depends on the translation, but that's not what I"m talking about. The way most people are exposed to Plato, they're assigned to read his most straight forward texts, but his dialogues are full of mysticism and ideas that he only hints at in the dialogues (particularly in Timaeus and Parminedes) which his students expanded on later. Plato was skeptical of the written word as a means of transmitting ideas and sort of held some ideas back exclusively for his students at the academy who continued to develop them.
Ah, nobody reads Kant anymore; and even if they do, they tend to read just the first critique, stick to the analytic and focus on the "important" sections. You have to read the whole thing! And then, if you're so privileged, and you have to time, nothing is more fruitful than going on towards the Groundwork for Metaphysics of Morals, and the Critique of the Power of Judgement. And once you've read that last book, maybe you will begin to understand Derrida. Or even better, you will begin to understand how to critique him.
Philosophy is defined by the human experience, it is asking questions that do not have readily proveable answers, of answers that are heavily contextual to the individual. The probability of the answers weighed in the individuals head. These probabilities and likeliness to believe more of one philosophy over the other is often primarily from the details.
Details are important because they are little parts that support the likelihood of the larger point being true. If the details don't work it's likely because the theory is innacurate.
> I know there are some fancy arguments around stretching limits of language, but none of them seemed all that sensible to me.
Did you read Robert Kegan "The Evolving Self"? It was pretty popular at HN some time ago. Robert Kegan stretching limits of language and he's got a reason: he introduces some notions like "culture of embeddedness" that you just can't define in a way like dictionaries do, one cannot simply get to a point. Kegan uses another approach, he gives his reader an experience that makes her to understand "culture of embeddedness".
Philosophy by definition deals with uncategorised (or poorly categorised) aspects of our world, with aspects that have no good language to talk about them. Anything that was categorised to a point when there is an accepted language to talk about it is not a philosophy, it is a science or something. Philosophy makes first attempts to categorise and when philosophers found a way then a new branch of science emerges.
When you try to talk about uncategorised things, you just can't talk about it. For example, lets assume that there are no widely accepted categorisation of colors, but you've developed one including names for colors like "blue", "red", "magenta" and so on. How you could communicate your ideas to others? The only way I know is to point to different examples of blue and say "blue", point to red and say "red". You need to lead your audience through experiences of blue/red/magenta while they train their neurons to classify them and only then you can refer to their experiences with words "blue", "red", "magenta" to convey the idea that they always appear in a rainbow in the same sequence. While you keep pointing at different colors saying their names, your audience will probably think, that it takes too long for you to get to a point.
I didn't read GEB, so I cannot say how this reason to "stretch limits of language" relates to it, but you've sad that you know no good reason for such stretching, and I hope that now you know at least one reason for it.
> So why would you abuse your reader by making it a pain in the ass to figure out what you mean?
A psychonaout or a shaman would argue some insights are only available on a drug infused spiritual trip.
Musicians talk of flow.
That state of discombobulation you dislike is not to meant to furnish you with answers but rather with new dots to notice and connect on your own. Not everything is a mathematical proof.
I think the real reason this sort of style isn't attractive is because many try to emulate it who lack the talent and then it truly is noise. It is a lot to ask from a reader and the value is rarely there that is well observed.
But sometimes the payoff is worth it. GBE resonates with a lot of people.
This. Philosophy is the grandparent of math. And if there is a point to math, then that there always has to be a proofable point.
I think the problem is a cultural conflict between sub-concious problemsolvers and "concious" problem solvers. The later expect a algorithm , step by step instruction from the former, who when this is demanded, use there subconcious to produce a plausible story. When asked for there inspirations to deduce the process yourself, you get a crows nest of shiny things, bits and pieces, not making a reasonable whole - but they infuriatingly at the end of day do.
Why not accept that there are things you can not directly communicate with and if you are hellbent on becoming such a thing, there is no step-by-step instruction.
> So why would you abuse your reader by making it a pain in the ass to figure out what you mean?
I think this statement is both wrong and irrelevant.
Wrong: if you look into GEB, you notice that is has many chapters. And each chapter works on some topic --- and the chapters itself aren't a pain in the ass to figure out what they mean. Not at all. Each chapter transports its goal quite nicely and timely.
Irrelevant: this book is not an academical paper. It's a book meant to amuse you, to enlighten you, to sharpen your thinking skills. An academic paper describing just how Gödel's work works can be a *LOT* thinner --- but, usually, is also a lot dryer.
It's actually the case that this book gives you many good things that help you to understand (and accept or dismiss) such academic papers easier. But even here, mind the "many", if you expect "all" from the book, then you'll be dissatisfied.
I also wouldn't say that GEB is a philosophical book, at least not in the way modern philosophy is understood. If you see it as a book dedicated to like ("philo") wisdom ("sophie"), then it is. But so are most after books in the IT field.
> Philosophy at the end of the day is about arguing a point; it isn't about producing an aesthetic experience.
I'd argue that point. Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) comes to my mind first. Art contains and conveys truth.
Nietzsche's work is also a good example about why it's foolish to argue too much about what an author meant. He wasn't always clear in his thoughts - just like us all - and his thinking changed considerably anyway.
Is it also valid to draw a comparison to Gravity's Rainbow, or parts 2 and 3 of The Divine Comedy? I ask, because those were on a tier of their own for being impenetrable (to me); I'm worried this will go the same way, but am otherwise intrigued.
Unrelated: Does anyone know of how to get an epub etc of this? Unavailable through Amazon etc.
I would suggest against an epub. I tried finding one too, only to realize the formatting of the book is ill-suited for anything but its original printed format (it’s far too particular for the epub format). Maybe give your local library a try?
Hell is just inherently more interesting to the human mind than paradise or purgatory. I read Ulysses with a book group and a leader that had read it in grad school and a number of books that exist to explain Ulysses. I read GEB as a fourteen year old with no internet access and it changed my life, but the ending isn’t that important. The proof of how the incompleteness theorem works and the stuff on Koans is I think most of the meat.
It is funny that you bring Ulysses into it. I’ve tried reading both GEB and Ulysses multiple times and had to concede defeat every time somewhere between the 100 and 200 page mark. The same goes for the satanic verses. I suppose my mind just wants a book to get to the point more than it wants to get to the end.
To be sure, you certainly didn't mean it this way, but for the sake of the poor guy who has seen GEB touted as one of these books that "every programmer/computer scientist/CS major has to read" and sees your post in the same light:
You don't have to read GEB. You will be a fine techie without reading it. And you'll be a fine person in general without reading it. There is no spiritual revelation you can only get from GEB or some important technical knowledge that you'll get that you wouldn't get from a normal CS degree program. Try it out and see if you enjoy Hofstadter's writing - if you do, you might be in for a really enlightening and enjoyable experience. If you don't, no worries - your time is better spent elsewhere - there is no need to put yourself through the pain of slogging through a >700 page book that you don't enjoy. There are many other perfectly fine entry points for learning about topics in computer science, cognitive science, or philosophy of mind.
Right. And to be sure, GEB might have Godel in the name, but it's not really a book about Godel's incompleteness theorems. It mentions them, but that is not really the main thrust of the book. It's not a book about Godel, Escher, and/or Bach, really (though of course it discusses the ideas of these three people a lot). Hofstadter, if I recall correctly, even says as much (or something along these lines) in the preface.
So of course, there are more to-the-point resources for the technical concepts that Hofstadter employs. It's an understandable misconception to have when people so often say GEB is a must-read for techies and when it has a name that includes "Godel". So remember - GEB is about Hofstadter trying to argue for a point about a particular thesis (how the mind ("I") arises from the brain), and to that end, he employs many different concepts (many of which are from computer science) and explains them poetically (at least, a lot of people think so). But teaching you these concepts is just a secondary, even tertiary, goal of his. If you find his writing engaging, it might be a more fun way to learn about that stuff - but if not, don't worry, GEB wasn't primarily written to teach you anyway. I'm sure even the biggest GEB fans will agree.
It sounds like you're making a distinction between the plot and the theme.
I'd argue the plot is entirely about Godel's incompleteness theorem. It's not just "mentioned in passing", the entire book is centered around a series of increasingly complex explanations that culminate in explaining the actual theorem itself.
But just like a good novel is way, way more than just the plot, GEB is way more than just the Godel incompleteness theorem.
Personally I didn't really find any other thesis or theme that compelling. However, I absolutely loved the clever ways in which he illustrated each concept. Others may have appreciated other aspects of it, and that's great too. Many people can enjoy the book for different reasons.
I shouldn't have said "mentioned" to insinuate "mentioned in passing", you are right. But no, though it plays a central role in his argument, GEB is not about Godel's incompleteness theorem (I believe Hofstadter even says as much in the preface, and he laments that readers didn't get the overall point of the book - though I don't have my copy with me to confirm, so I might be misremembering exactly what he says).
But anyway - you and anyone else of course are free to enjoy Hofstadter's explanations of Godel's incompleteness theorem - maybe you even think that it is the best/most interesting/most fun/most insightful explanation. I just mean to say that Hofstadter isn't writing this book primarily to explain technical concepts - his explanations are a means to an end. So someone who struggles to get through this book shouldn't feel bad - its main goal was never to be a "must-read for programmers" anyway.
The Godel proof chapter feels like the apotheosis of the book. The rest almost feels tacked on, e.g. the whole dna-computing ... , even the "strange loops" part, which I would not think is the main crux of the book.
Never understood this logical jump in reductio ad absurdum argument. "If one finds a contradiction, therefore the initial premise is wrong". The argument always assumes a binary state, either true or false. It excludes another valid state which is "undefined". The premise of the video above is effectively to prove that one can't build a machine that is capable of resolving a paradox. As if computers have limited capabilities and that they are uncapable to reason the way humans can. But that's not true. If you allow a machine to produce 3 answers, "yes", "true" and "unresolvable", then it is very much possible to build such a machine that produces such output, i.e. detects that a problem is indeed a paradox. By simply implementing this reductio ad absurdum algorithm.
In fact, there is an obvious way how to build a machine that tells whether the program will stop or not. One only needs to track all the states that the machine was in, and if a program enters a state that was already encountered before then it's obviously stuck. And there are only that many permutations of possible states that machine can be in. So a number (time) can be given of when the result will be guaranteed to be found (which of course could be beyond physical resources of the universe, but mathematics are fine not to take those into account)
This is totally true for some models of computation (including some studied in academic computer science), but it's not true for the models of computation that the halting problem applies to, like the Turing machine, which explicitly has an infinite tape and therefore has the potential for an unbounded number of machine states.
In fact, this unboundedness is a core part of what makes these models of computation so expressive. In the Gödel's incompleteness theorem analogy, you can say "there is an integer such that ..." or "there is no integer such that ...". In the Turing machine model, you can write programs that search for counterexamples to mathematical claims. Because these programs are written to try every integer, you can only tell if they eventually halt by yourself resolving the mathematical claim.
For example, we can write a program that tests the Goldbach conjecture or the 3n+1 conjecture by brute force. Determining if these programs' search through all integers will halt or not is equivalent to resolving the status of these conjectures!
Here's an example of a Python program whose halting behavior -- if run on a hypothetical Python interpreter with infinite RAM and the ability to make use of it -- is currently unknown. It looks for counterexamples to the 3n+1 conjecture, and it tries every integer to see if it's a counterexample.
start = i = 1
visited = []
while True:
if i in visited:
if 1 not in visited:
break
else:
print(start, visited)
visited = []
start += 1
i = start
continue
visited.append(i)
if i % 2:
i = 3*i + 1
else:
i //= 2
On an actual computer's Python interpreter, I believe this will eventually halt with a MemoryError exception (although I'm not at all sure that you can actually run it long enough to hit that, as it will probably take many years!), failing to resolve the mathematical question. That potential for the MemoryError is why it matters whether your model has infinite memory or not!
(You can make a considerably more memory-efficient version of this which should be able to search much further before hitting a MemoryError, but I don't expect it changes the ultimate fate of the program when run on a real physical computer.)
The halting problem asks, "Is it possible to write a program which correctly outputs YES or NO to the halting question for every possible input which is the code of a program?"
The binary requirement comes from the question, not a failure to think differently. The consequences of binary requirement with completeness (correct output for every input) is the point.
If you modify the question as you suggest, to output UNRESOLVABLE in exactly the cases where the input is a paradox, that doesn't work either. It is not possible to reliably detect every self-referential paradox, for reasons analogous to (but more complicated than) it not being possible to reliably say for every program if it will eventually halt.
Even so, it is possible to write a program which outputs UNRESOLVABLE in cases where that particular implementation of a halt-test program gets stumped and gives up despite there being another correct answer it hasn't found, or when it detects specific patterns. But that's more about hitting arbitrary limits of a particular implementation, so not as interesting theoretically. It is what you'd do in practice, if someone asked you to write a halting detector in the real world.
The halting problem computation model has unlimited memory. Sometimes people say this means you can "solve" the halting problem in practice because real machines have bounded memory, therefore finite states, which must eventually repeat if a program does not halt. But this isn't really a solution, because the halt-test program needs exponentially more memory than the input program would be allowed if run. However you look at it, that is not "in practice", it is prevented by computational inaccessibility, and it also doesn't satisfy the principle of the halting problem, which is to ask if halt-test can be written in the same kind of universal programming system as the programs it analyses. (Besides, you can run programs with unlimited memory, by always being willing to pause, upgrade machine, and resume, whenever current memory is filled.)
When analysed with denotational semantics, there actually is a third output called "bottom" (⊥) which means "mathematical value representing doesn't terminate". But even using mathematical approaches, there is no way to calculate when that's the output for all possible inputs to a correct halt-test function.
although, as schoen and jlokier have patiently explained, you're mistaken about the halting problem, it's a productive and interesting mistake, and others have taken your line of thinking a great deal further than you have even begun to imagine! you may be interested in reading about their work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitionistic_logic
I have not read Ulysses but I have read other works from Joyce and cannot imagine comparing him to Hofstadter. I put GEB in the same mental box as Sophie's World or the Mr. Tompkins books, where story is used as a means to the end of teaching something to an audience that would otherwise find the material unpalatable.
I've heard about this book so many times and was interested to read it. But I know that as a non native English reader, my track record against reading English proses is very poor, and looks like lots of value of the book is exactly in the prose? Maybe I'll have to skip this one, unless some brave souls have already translated it.
But if memory serves the translators of the Italian version removed a whole chapter of it (I might have to check details because I am far from both my author-signed English edition and the Italian one I bought many years later).
It's Indonesian, which as I have guessed, doesn't have one at least as far as I google it. But it's astonishing that this kind of book have so many translations! Even into Chinese, wow! I guess it's truly one of most influential book.
And the translations are actually very good, since Douglas Hofstadter worked directly with translators to ensure that as much of the wordplays and Easter eggs as possible are preserved (of which there are a lot)
The Dutch translation of GEB is excellent. I think others, e.g. the French, are also quite good/excellent, potentially because Hofstadter himself was quite involved in the translation process. Hell, much of GEB and especially his later books discuss translation extentensively, so it would be strange if there were authorized translations of GEB that were somehow lacking in quality.
Crucially the French translation was significantly rewritten, with contributions from Hofstadter. In doing so, the French version becomes a separate projection of the author’s original ideas, along a different vector than the original English version. The approach therefore illustrates the main point of the book, similarly to its cover. Very meta. :)
When systems (think "automated" systems like computer programs, mathematical axioms, formal systems, etc, where conclusions can be drawn/calculated "mechanically" from a few starting points) get large enough, they gain the ability to become self-referential. That is, they become expressive enough to encode statements about themselves. A hallmark of this are "incompleteness theorems" like those of Godel or the Turing halting problem.
The book argues that these "strange loops" (of a system onto itself) are behind the emergence of intelligence and consciousness, because physical matter itself gives rise to human intelligence, albeit being a mechanical system.
Good summary. Examples of GEB’s “fluff” are missing from this comment section, so I wanted to jump in and add one of my favorite. Bach encoded his own name in music notes in a piece, and when discussing that, Hofstadter encodes a sentence in the first letter of each paragraph in that chapter.
I can appreciate a book being obscure or dragging things out when it is trying to give the reader an aesthetic experience. But this point seem to be one that would easiest be communicated clearly and succinctly.
Or is the point "there is so much mystery in these systems that perhaps there is room for an explanation for consciousness"? Maybe then I would be more sympathetic.
Or perhaps I should just read the book before condemning it :)
the point of the book is to give supporting evidence and guide the reader to the conclusion through testimony of thought and historical anecdote.
in other words, GEB tries to coax the reader into a eureka moment, which is exactly why it has so many fans; it convinced each and every one of us that we were genius for just a split second.
GEB’s point is that self-reference - the ability for a system to “talk about itself” - is crucial for conciousness and for real artificial intelligence.
I loved GEB, I read it twice and found it mind-blowing.
That said, I don't think it was life-changing in the sense that it gave me any interesting perspective on life in any way. I didn't find any of the philosophies to be useful in that sense.
However, what the book does do, is manage to explain an incredibly complex, deep mathematical theorem while using almost no mathematical notation. It does it all mostly through similes and wordplay and art, which is quite brilliant.
One of the great things about the book is that even if you give up on the math, you can still appreciate each chapter as clever writing in its own right.
"The Dice Man" by Luke Reinhart. In my teens it didn't hurt that it had some pretty intense pornographic sex scenes, but the real takeaway - the idea that there is no "singular you", just a swirling multitudes who bob to the surface for attention depending on the context ... yeah, that changed my perspective on life.
Too bad about the misogyny. Might even have been racist, but I don't remember that.
> there is no "singular you", just a swirling multitudes who bob to the surface for attention depending on the context
Sounds a little like “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand” have you read that one?
Also,
> In my teens it didn't hurt that it had some pretty intense pornographic sex scenes
For me, that book is Lockpick Pornography - it’s a fairy horny story, but the main character struggling to figure out what to do about gender and sexuality, and the way that struggle starts out seeming like it’s about systemic oppression and heteronormativity but quickly spirals into the character just having a series of self destructive meltdowns is so so compelling. It even manages to have a bit of a happy non-ending.
Maybe the book went over my head but it didn't live up to my expectations. The book's thesis seemed to boil down to "isn't recursion cool, maybe it has something to do with consciousness". I did enjoy some of the digressions though.
I thought it was going to be first something like "isn't recursion cool" (like, look at these fractals in sea shells!!!!), until GEB actually tried to explain, in detail, how Godel's proof works. tbh, that's kind of what makes the book cool, it just assumes anybody with a passing interest in compsci would also love to dive deep into fundamental theorems of mathematics. Those sort of bold assumptions, and the author just doubling down on them (e.g. you're going love these dialogues!). Crazy that it won a Pulitzer too, a real bestseller.
GEB is crucial reading in that if you want to appear intellectually superior all you have to do is sprinkle “Ho ho! Much like the eternal golden braid I must say!” into conversation and no one will call you out on it or ask you to extrapolate (or if in the off chance that they do, you can say anything and still get away with it)
The best response to someone bringing up GEB in casual conversation is to look them dead in the eye and simply say “I have also read that book.”
This will instantly create palatable tension and a change of topic
Or you can read it and not tell anyone. This comment is a pretty pathetic attempt at shaming anyone who displays even a modicum of discourse higher than the baser level. Congratulations.
This is funny but GEB is also good so you wouldn't want it to go much further than this. Congratulations for getting there, now it would be great if you could focus that same energy on shooting down people trying to build upon or me-too this snark.
It is a good book, but it is a shame that so many pitch it as being a portal into a new and transcendent plane of understanding. Especially with it being a rather difficult read it leads to people trying to get more out of it than was in it to begin with.
To quote one of my professors from back in the day: “Life is short and you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to”
There is also the issue that it takes longer to read than you expect it to, even when taking into account that it will take longer to read than expected... ;)
This is my impression as well. Kinda similar in its "bragging rights" to The Art of Computer Programming.
GEB was a frustrating read. I mean, it's interesting in places, but it's just all over the place, jumping between many different topics. The central theme is meant to be the strange loops, but it's IMHO not very interesting concept and his application on the cognition is just author's personal conjecture.
It's utterly unlike TAOCP. One is a comprehensive algorithms reference full of (hard) technical problems. The other is an extended personal essay. (Neither one is worth "bragging" about reading in my opinion.)
"Reading" all of TAOCP would take literally years of intense effort even if you set aside all other activity. There are a lot of great problems inside, and plenty of dry humor, and I would recommend people try to at least skim sections of TAOCP which seem interesting or relevant to their work, but very few people are going to even nominally work through the whole thing, and the people who might are professional scholars of the topic.
Reading GEB can be done leisurely over the course of a few days or maybe weeks, depending on how much time someone spends reading every day. It's not quite as easy a read as a pulp novel or comic book, but it also doesn't take any inordinate amount of work to make basic sense of, or require any special skills or background understanding to start on. It's a fun book to hand to a ~13–16 year old.
I compared the two in the sense how it's fashionable to have them on your bookshelf, but IMHO few people actually enjoy them and understand them beyond the surface level.
This discussion is evidence that some people really liked GEB and other people found it boring or too unfocused. It can't be that many people who bought it just to look cool on a shelf. The people who found it boring should perhaps try to appreciate that sometimes other people can genuinely like things they don't like (and vice versa I guess).
Again, if you do any work with computer algorithms, it's worth checking out TAOCP at the library and skimming the sections relevant to your work. If you might need it as a reference, it's not a bad source to have at hand; I look things up in there maybe a few times a year for the past decade. Some parts are now a bit outdated in this fast-moving field, but it's still the best available survey source about some topics, and there are some nice explanations and a lot of great problems in there. Knuth is a pretty funny writer if you enjoy dry humor.
You are absolutely right. It was a great book to hand to a 21 year old me.
I've often read the hate on this site for this book. At least for me, I find the discussions and analogies to help me in thinking about, and eventually understanding the material. I contrast it with a graduate intro to Recursion Theory which can leave a reader feeling that they followed all the precise arguments but still somehow missed a lot.
I took the book with me on holiday and I couldn't put it down, almost literally reading right up until lights out each night. I was surprised and somewhat disappointed to be done in short time. The literary writing combined with the deep mathematical/philosophical meanings is entrancing.
I don't often get to meet people IRL who have read the book and wish I had more opportunities to discuss it. One (of the many things) that stuck out to me was the idea of foreground and background. Prime numbers to me is background that remains when you construct all the composite numbers, so technically they're 'non-composite' lacking the property of being a product of distinct numbers.
When someone enthusiastically mentions something they liked and wanted to talk about and you immediately take a shit on it, it's not really a surprise that this creates "palatable tension" and a change of subject (and likely a longer-term wariness to share when talking to you). If you really dislike discussing related topics, there are surely less condescending ways of expressing that.
They’re implying that many people use it as a way to take some moral high ground in a conversation, not knowing that others might also have acquired this ‘intellectual power’.
My experience is that when faced with what seems at first like pseudo-intellectual nonsense, it's usually more productive to either explicitly say I don't feel like discussing the topic, or else try to get someone into a serious conversation about the details, instead of trying to insult or shame the other person. Sometimes people are just bad at smalltalk / earnestly oblivious to the impression they leave / trying hard to impress for whatever reason, and aren't really trying to be pretentious even if they initially come across that way. YMMV.
Your response to somebody appearing to be intellectually superior because they bring up GEB is to act even more intellectually superior? It sounds like you feel you're so far beyond them, you won't even engage in a discussion about it.
> GEB is crucial reading in that if you want to appear intellectually superior... This will instantly create palatable tension and a change of topic
Ouch... Why would you assume that the other party's goal is to appear "superior", and not that they are legitimately passionate about something? Do you dislike when people are passionate about topics that don't interest you? Or do you just believe that it is fair to assume that everyone who outwardly likes this book is secretly doing so because they want to seem smart or something? Or something else?
This is very different from my experience. Whenever someone I was in a conversation with brought up GEB, it was always a great pleasure of mine. I'd get the chance to discuss the main ideas of the book, and the way I assimilated them. I tend to not even engage in conversations with people who do it mostly to show off the extent of their knowledge. I believe this second point is the important one. GEB is completely orthogonal to the problem you describe.
GEB is in my top three as well. But looking back at it and the other important books in my life, it seems that it matters very much when I read them, and where I was at the time. For example, the Lord of the Rings was hugely influential for me, in part because I bought it (in one volume paperback) with the sales of my first program, and read it in school (also during our English lessons, the good teacher let me do that when she saw what I was reading).
The most valuable thing about GEB for me was how self-indulgent it is. The book is entirely Hofstadter having fun: all those tricky dialogues, acrostics, puns where the setup and payoff are hundreds of pages apart, the marrying of form and content, just the overall tone of excited sharing…. Hofstadter has put a lot of himself into it—it's a deeply personal book—and it was revealing to me to see that one's emotions don't have to be set aside when writing, nor is it necessary for the kinds of feelings that mathematics evokes to be “translated” into more familiar ones.
(Edit: As an aside, Hofstadter's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is similarly self-indulgent, and a joy to read. Of course one ought to read a couple of other translations first and keep them nearby, to become familiar with the content, but in terms of sheer wordplay and outrageous rhymes, it tops anything.)
(Edit 2: Ha, a search reveals I posted a similar comment a little over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32830008https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32878471)
I loved the dialogues and the poems, with their various translations. The discussio around the "musical offering" is incredible, and helped me learn to appreciate music (not only Bach). This is one of my favourite books!
The math was insufferable, however. And I say that as a mathematician and programmer... I wonder if musicians and poetry translators will find "their" parts correspondingly unbearable?
I loved this book when I was young. Like 16 years old or so. I am still very interested in things like formal systems and automated theorem proving and that started with this book. However, when I now look at the main idea of the book I find it quite cringeworthy, because, besides when he is speaking about real mathematics and science, much of it is very speculative and probably just false. At best it can be thought provoking, but I think it is just not very nice to immediately answer the some very real questions with highly speculative answers. It snared up the admiration of my 16-year-old self pretty effectively, though.
The book itself is challenging and at times even cryptic. I watched the lecture after reading it, but in hindsight would have followed the course or read after.
This book played an important role in pushing me into a career in software. During the recession in 2009, I lost my industrial design job. And GEB started me down a rabbit hole learning more and more about software and learning to code. That turned into a great software career. I've also read hacker news just about every day since.
> I had a secondary goal in the back of my head... if you have a copy of GEB on your shelf collecting dust and you've never read more than a chapter or two, dust it off and see how it goes this time.
Dusted it off and after only a few pages, it's already a completely different read to when I read (a fraction of) it a decade or so ago.
I don't have my copy with me right now, so perhaps I'm misremembering, but I recall Hofstadter explaining in the preface of my copy that the point of his book was how the mind - consciousness - could arise from the brain (or something like that). I myself failed to get past the ~100 page mark (he went in depth explaining topics that I was already familiar with from other sources, which bored me. And I didn't really find the connections to art and music that insightful or interesting - but maybe I'm just too uptight). My understanding from skimming the book and reading some of Hofstadter's other works (including his response to Searle's "Minds, brains and programs" article) is that the book is trying to establish how complexity can emerge in systems with many simple moving parts via recursion (or something like that) in different scenarios, suggesting that this is how consciousness emerges from a complex web of neurons (the brain).
This seems a little wishy-washy to me. I don't see this as a good counterargument against Searle's argument that syntaxx alone is not enough to give rise to semantics. (I find Dennett's argument about intuition pumps a more convincing counterargument.) Maybe my understanding of Hofstadter's argument is too simplistic - I'm happy to be educated (I wasn't able to make it through even half of GEB after all).
And of course, that's not to say that GEB isn't a valuable book - it seems like most readers really enjoy it and learn a lot, even if they don't much care for the ultimate cognitive science/philosophy of mind position Hofstadter is trying to defend.
> it seems like most readers really enjoy it and learn a lot,
I think it's one of those books which most people actually don't enjoy that much, but don't want to admit it, because it has such an intellectual aura around it.
i think it's more that the people who talk about it most are the ones who really did enjoy it that much. (i assure you we exist, even if you prefer hanging out with the people who only pretend to have enjoyed it.) i suspect this is because, unlike hemingway and shakespeare and hegel, it's fairly rare for people to be coerced into reading hofstadter
I found this book dull, uninteresting and pretentious. Whatever it tried to say in what 1000 pages could have been said in 200. People will probably recommend it highly in this thread, but here is a vote to just leave it alone. It's just not good if you like pop sci but don't like pretentious fluff around it. It's the least inspiring and mind-blowing book I ever read. This could be related to having read a lot on the topics in the past so the subject matter was familiar, and having zero tolerance for the type of writing in it.
Not OP, but as someone who found GEB pretentious, I think the most mind-blowing books I have read were probably Kurt Vonnegut. Mother Night and Timequake probably at the top.
Well, part of the plot is about humanity’s slow and inexorable evolution through the passage of space and time, so the meditative slowness sets the pace quite appropriately.
GED (in my humble opinion etc), doesn’t really need some of the fluff. It’s a large book that’s easy to spot on the shelf, and it’s hard to avoid thinking that the publisher (and some readers) like it that way.
> 2001: A Space Odyssey could easily be trimmed to 25 minutes or less if all you care about is the plot. But should it?
Yes. Tell me that you just sat there watching it without being distracted by your thoughts at all. Being able to handle torture doesn't make torture good.
Did you make it to the part about the tortoise and hare problem where he suggests that the book may actually be finished at that point? With the rest of the book as noise that looks suspiciously coherent despite adding nothing new conceptually? At that point I had to read the second half to check LOL
> This could be related to having read a lot on the topics in the past so the subject matter was familiar
I think you've hit the nail on the head. For many people, this book is their first encounter with much of this material (as it was for me, so long ago.)
For you, it's like reading a tour guide of your home city. You're not the intended audience.
That's the usual refrain around hyper-preventious navel gazer books. The moment you criticize, your intellect is up for question, because "you didn't understand it".
This form of logical fallacy is the worst in economics and philosophy.
> stuntkite on July 5, 2018 | flag| favorite | next [–]
> 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. 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 consciousness because of his disabled sister I found to be something that changed not only how I interacted with people that were differently abled, but also changed how I saw my own disabilities. Sure it's more than a bit full of itself, but I can't for the life of me think how I would edit it any differently. It's honest from the place he was standing. With a lot of thought, a desire to share, and a perspective that no one else could just stumble on. IMO, it really does kind of have to be what it is.
> 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.
I've made a stab at GEB numerous times in my life, in very different stages of my life. I'm close to 60 now so I've HAD a few different stages. I haven't been able to get through it; maybe not even the first 300 pages.
I may try the "skip that bit" trick and tilt at this windmill once more.
(NB: I hated "The Three Body Problem" when so many seem to love it. I wonder if there's any correlation there.)
I feel exactly the same. It was like 1000 pages of patting himself on the back for being clever. I certainly didn't learn anything and there was very little art to his writing.
If you're not a reading-for-pleasure person, or GEB's topics just aren't your thing, you're not going to like the book. It's not a technical volume; it's not something you read for skills acquisition.
same sentiments. i was on 10th page and i was chuckling because i still got no idea what these geeks are talking about. definitely the day i realized im not that smart, too. haha.
Yeah, I don't think it is for me either. I tried a few times but always found that the style of writing is so strange: if this is a science book, I expect succinct style. Instead, I found the dialogs of Achilles and the turtle are just abominable. What the heck are the intention of the author? Just write it like a science text book and I will probably get it. Also, as a big fan of Bach this book has less than 5% content about Bach.
That's the "problem" right there. It wasn't a pop sci book. TBH while Gödel's incompleteness theorem might be seen as "science" subject, it is actually squarely in the realm of meta-mathematics, a branch of philosophy.
The "writing style" is what most would call "literature", which includes prose, poetry, stories, etc. It's not for everyone, for sure, but some people do enjoy it (I occasionally do, but I lose patience.) Calling it "pretentious fluff" sounds a bit extreme.
Yep. It's like a conspiracy theory cult. I quit after 50 pages and found it to be a pseudoscientific, dilettante intellectual circle jerk ad nauseum desperate for hidden meaning. I'd sooner spend time reading articles from [Big City] Review of [Each Others'] Books.
I enjoyed the first part of it, but then ground to a halt about two-thirds of the way through. It became just so much recursive navel-gazing, and I lost interest. Wasn't worth the effort.
I got this book when I was at the first semester of IT. Back in my university town, most students of IT or physics had this book, or lented it from a friend. And we discussed a lot about what was inside.
So I wasn't a seasoned academic, but the new-kid-on-the-block. And my goal while reading was never to understand Gödel. Or to like Bach's music (I actually dislike most of his music). Or to get into arts -- but hey, Escher I like.
My goal was to train my mind. To get into thinking models new to me, because they aren't taught in normal school.
Also, for me this book was an extension. Even while still in normal school, I went to the university library to read "Spektrum der Wissenschaft" (the german version of "Scientific American", but without the nationalism in the title). Many articles were over my top ... but the "Metamagicum" articles I deeply enjoyed. So when this book come out I expected some extension of these articles ... and I was not disappointed.
> I found this book dull, uninteresting and pretentious.
Yup, exactly my thoughts. But for some reason, the HN crowd keeps recommending it. Its gotten previously-- 5-10 years ago, it would be recommended in almost every book recommendation post
When I was working on m Masters degree in Electrical Engineering way back in 1978, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth :) I had a prof who was really amazing, he was a Comp Sci prof and he gave me a copy of GEB and it changed my life. OK, I'm probably overstating a bit, but that first edition copy, it's one of my prized possessions. Even to this day, every once in a while I pull it out and re-read a chapter.
Godel did not argue or show "there are fundamental epistemic limits to the universe". The universe is not a formal axiomatic system.
This repeats an very old, popular pop-philosophy misconception about Godel's theorems and GEB seems to have done nothing to help with this category error.
Whether or not the universe is (or, to split hairs, may be exactly expressed as) a formal axiomatic system, was very much an open question, one which Gödel helped answer conclusively in the negative.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadI do not know math well.
Maybe I should give it another try...
I don't mind books that explain concepts in fun ways, but I do find it jarring if I'm being treated like a child with an overbearing parent, telling me why I should be excited about something instead of just telling the story and letting me feel how I want to feel about it.
I will freely admit I am one of those who tried to read it multiple times, but couldn't grok it.
Just like (some of) Joyce's work, GEB seems to me a puzzle who's main prize is the satisfaction of having understood it - obfuscation and abstruseness for their own sake.
For actually understanding Godel's work I would recommend Gödel's Proof (Nagel, Newman, somewhat ironically, prefaced by Hofstadter) or Philosophies of Mathematics (George, Velleman).
The point of a book is to get the reader to reach a certain understanding. Every brain is different and while one literary path might get some readers to that destination, other paths may be required for others. But there is no singular point of understanding that exists solely at the end of that path. The path itself is what builds that understanding.
Part of the art of writing is covering a large enough space of multiple paths to get most readers there without too many of them getting lost.
Often, writing is like a connect-the-dots drawing where those points are the written details and the point is the overall shape. Yes, there is a "main point" that is not those details. But it's the details that convey it. Subtract all of them, and the shape disappears.
For any given reader, some of those detail points won't resonate with them and will be basically ignored. But as long as there are enough other details, they will still trace the right shape and get the overall point.
A big part of the art of writing is figuring out which constellation of details will lead to the right shape being traced in the minds of as many readers as possible.
I was always apprehensive of reading Ulysses… until I did. And then I read some basic analysis of it and then read it again and now I’m slightly baffled why people find it _that_ difficult. Yes it’s not at all typical but it’s really not that hard and it’s definitely no Finnegan’s Wake. Now that’s a challenge!
If your ideas about cooking come from watching Masterchef (analogously), you might treat the idea of making a beurre blanc as a similar act of conquest, triumph in the face of splitting adversity whilst a thousand-voice choir crescendos in the background as you whisk. But a million french housewives happily made it for decades having never been told it’s impossible, and indeed knowing better that it isn’t.
So why would you abuse your reader by making it a pain in the ass to figure out what you mean? I know there are some fancy arguments around stretching limits of language, but none of them seemed all that sensible to me. The only advantage I see to obscurantist writing is that it makes it impossible to critique the philosophers work. Any critique will just be met by the response that you didn't fully understand the author's argument. The Searle/Derrida debates are a great example of this. The upshot is that people spend all their time debating what you actually mean. Which I guess is good for the philosopher's brand, but doesn't advance knowledge much.
This isn't to say that you can't have beautiful writing in philosophy. I think Gaston Bachelard is a great example of both an elegant writer and a clear writer.
That being said, people really really love GEB, so it probably is worth reading regardless of these misgivings. One of these days I'll get to it.
I got it, and read a portion of it. It was a meandering and badly written mess with no point. It felt like Seinfeld in science-ish form.
Yeah, that is just typical for Pulitzer Prize winning books. /s
OP: In that regard, both books are good for techies to read because every now and then it's good to read something that drags you out of your comfort zone and futzes around in all kinds of obscure nooks and crannies before getting to the mother fucking point -- if indeed it ever does. Getting to the point can be important, but there is more to life (and literature).
Commentor: Philosophy at the end of the day is about arguing a point; it isn't about producing an aesthetic experience. (Even though this statement directly against original post, it's so obvious to author that he does not feel the need to explain, but goes on a tangent how bad the writing is)
Me: Hahah the whole point of op is that there is value in not always having a point, but meandering...
Response: It was a meandering and badly written mess with no point.
Me: ...
You: Leave it to the adults.
Me: ...
You: You're not making a point!!!
(Considering the nature of the first comment and assuming you didnt do it on purpose, you ending with blaming me I'm not making a point is poetic to be honest)
Just because you disagree with it doesn't make it less so.
This is a funny thing to say about a discipline that was more or less founded by Plato, who was notably obscurantist if not outright esoteric.
In any case, philosophy is not always about making a point and there is not always a point to be made. Sometimes it's just asking questions.
When philosophy starts with words, a clear point is expected, for the obvious reasons.
But that's two completely different worlds.
i agree that the timaios is platon's most esoteric surviving work, and it's full of enormous amounts of nonsense, but i think it's still reasonably clearly written. sadly, it is a foundational text in not only western philosophy but eastern philosophy as well, and it took twenty centuries for most thinkers to reject most of its erroneous dogmas
Some philosophers should be merely forgotten and, with luck, Derrida will be remembered(?) only as the Ozymandias of philosophers.
No genius ever understands what they are doing. They create objects which take on a life of their own, and we are left infinitely mystified by them.
Details are important because they are little parts that support the likelihood of the larger point being true. If the details don't work it's likely because the theory is innacurate.
Did you read Robert Kegan "The Evolving Self"? It was pretty popular at HN some time ago. Robert Kegan stretching limits of language and he's got a reason: he introduces some notions like "culture of embeddedness" that you just can't define in a way like dictionaries do, one cannot simply get to a point. Kegan uses another approach, he gives his reader an experience that makes her to understand "culture of embeddedness".
Philosophy by definition deals with uncategorised (or poorly categorised) aspects of our world, with aspects that have no good language to talk about them. Anything that was categorised to a point when there is an accepted language to talk about it is not a philosophy, it is a science or something. Philosophy makes first attempts to categorise and when philosophers found a way then a new branch of science emerges.
When you try to talk about uncategorised things, you just can't talk about it. For example, lets assume that there are no widely accepted categorisation of colors, but you've developed one including names for colors like "blue", "red", "magenta" and so on. How you could communicate your ideas to others? The only way I know is to point to different examples of blue and say "blue", point to red and say "red". You need to lead your audience through experiences of blue/red/magenta while they train their neurons to classify them and only then you can refer to their experiences with words "blue", "red", "magenta" to convey the idea that they always appear in a rainbow in the same sequence. While you keep pointing at different colors saying their names, your audience will probably think, that it takes too long for you to get to a point.
I didn't read GEB, so I cannot say how this reason to "stretch limits of language" relates to it, but you've sad that you know no good reason for such stretching, and I hope that now you know at least one reason for it.
A psychonaout or a shaman would argue some insights are only available on a drug infused spiritual trip.
Musicians talk of flow.
That state of discombobulation you dislike is not to meant to furnish you with answers but rather with new dots to notice and connect on your own. Not everything is a mathematical proof.
I think the real reason this sort of style isn't attractive is because many try to emulate it who lack the talent and then it truly is noise. It is a lot to ask from a reader and the value is rarely there that is well observed.
But sometimes the payoff is worth it. GBE resonates with a lot of people.
I think the problem is a cultural conflict between sub-concious problemsolvers and "concious" problem solvers. The later expect a algorithm , step by step instruction from the former, who when this is demanded, use there subconcious to produce a plausible story. When asked for there inspirations to deduce the process yourself, you get a crows nest of shiny things, bits and pieces, not making a reasonable whole - but they infuriatingly at the end of day do.
Why not accept that there are things you can not directly communicate with and if you are hellbent on becoming such a thing, there is no step-by-step instruction.
I think this statement is both wrong and irrelevant.
Wrong: if you look into GEB, you notice that is has many chapters. And each chapter works on some topic --- and the chapters itself aren't a pain in the ass to figure out what they mean. Not at all. Each chapter transports its goal quite nicely and timely.
Irrelevant: this book is not an academical paper. It's a book meant to amuse you, to enlighten you, to sharpen your thinking skills. An academic paper describing just how Gödel's work works can be a *LOT* thinner --- but, usually, is also a lot dryer.
It's actually the case that this book gives you many good things that help you to understand (and accept or dismiss) such academic papers easier. But even here, mind the "many", if you expect "all" from the book, then you'll be dissatisfied.
I also wouldn't say that GEB is a philosophical book, at least not in the way modern philosophy is understood. If you see it as a book dedicated to like ("philo") wisdom ("sophie"), then it is. But so are most after books in the IT field.
I'd argue that point. Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) comes to my mind first. Art contains and conveys truth.
Nietzsche's work is also a good example about why it's foolish to argue too much about what an author meant. He wasn't always clear in his thoughts - just like us all - and his thinking changed considerably anyway.
Unrelated: Does anyone know of how to get an epub etc of this? Unavailable through Amazon etc.
Actually, the original article did that. I just followed the author's lead here.
I can also recommend Metamagical Themas from Hofstadter. It's a collection of articles he wrote for Scientific American.
To be sure, you certainly didn't mean it this way, but for the sake of the poor guy who has seen GEB touted as one of these books that "every programmer/computer scientist/CS major has to read" and sees your post in the same light:
You don't have to read GEB. You will be a fine techie without reading it. And you'll be a fine person in general without reading it. There is no spiritual revelation you can only get from GEB or some important technical knowledge that you'll get that you wouldn't get from a normal CS degree program. Try it out and see if you enjoy Hofstadter's writing - if you do, you might be in for a really enlightening and enjoyable experience. If you don't, no worries - your time is better spent elsewhere - there is no need to put yourself through the pain of slogging through a >700 page book that you don't enjoy. There are many other perfectly fine entry points for learning about topics in computer science, cognitive science, or philosophy of mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92WHN-pAFCs
And it's an absolutely brilliant - and very direct - exposition of Alan Turing's Halting theorem.
(unfortunately I can't find analogues of this for many other related subjects)
Some people are saying that GEB is too convoluted, but the base material absolutely doesn't need to be.
So of course, there are more to-the-point resources for the technical concepts that Hofstadter employs. It's an understandable misconception to have when people so often say GEB is a must-read for techies and when it has a name that includes "Godel". So remember - GEB is about Hofstadter trying to argue for a point about a particular thesis (how the mind ("I") arises from the brain), and to that end, he employs many different concepts (many of which are from computer science) and explains them poetically (at least, a lot of people think so). But teaching you these concepts is just a secondary, even tertiary, goal of his. If you find his writing engaging, it might be a more fun way to learn about that stuff - but if not, don't worry, GEB wasn't primarily written to teach you anyway. I'm sure even the biggest GEB fans will agree.
I'd argue the plot is entirely about Godel's incompleteness theorem. It's not just "mentioned in passing", the entire book is centered around a series of increasingly complex explanations that culminate in explaining the actual theorem itself.
But just like a good novel is way, way more than just the plot, GEB is way more than just the Godel incompleteness theorem.
Personally I didn't really find any other thesis or theme that compelling. However, I absolutely loved the clever ways in which he illustrated each concept. Others may have appreciated other aspects of it, and that's great too. Many people can enjoy the book for different reasons.
But anyway - you and anyone else of course are free to enjoy Hofstadter's explanations of Godel's incompleteness theorem - maybe you even think that it is the best/most interesting/most fun/most insightful explanation. I just mean to say that Hofstadter isn't writing this book primarily to explain technical concepts - his explanations are a means to an end. So someone who struggles to get through this book shouldn't feel bad - its main goal was never to be a "must-read for programmers" anyway.
The Godel proof chapter feels like the apotheosis of the book. The rest almost feels tacked on, e.g. the whole dna-computing ... , even the "strange loops" part, which I would not think is the main crux of the book.
In fact, this unboundedness is a core part of what makes these models of computation so expressive. In the Gödel's incompleteness theorem analogy, you can say "there is an integer such that ..." or "there is no integer such that ...". In the Turing machine model, you can write programs that search for counterexamples to mathematical claims. Because these programs are written to try every integer, you can only tell if they eventually halt by yourself resolving the mathematical claim.
For example, we can write a program that tests the Goldbach conjecture or the 3n+1 conjecture by brute force. Determining if these programs' search through all integers will halt or not is equivalent to resolving the status of these conjectures!
(You can make a considerably more memory-efficient version of this which should be able to search much further before hitting a MemoryError, but I don't expect it changes the ultimate fate of the program when run on a real physical computer.)
The binary requirement comes from the question, not a failure to think differently. The consequences of binary requirement with completeness (correct output for every input) is the point.
If you modify the question as you suggest, to output UNRESOLVABLE in exactly the cases where the input is a paradox, that doesn't work either. It is not possible to reliably detect every self-referential paradox, for reasons analogous to (but more complicated than) it not being possible to reliably say for every program if it will eventually halt.
Even so, it is possible to write a program which outputs UNRESOLVABLE in cases where that particular implementation of a halt-test program gets stumped and gives up despite there being another correct answer it hasn't found, or when it detects specific patterns. But that's more about hitting arbitrary limits of a particular implementation, so not as interesting theoretically. It is what you'd do in practice, if someone asked you to write a halting detector in the real world.
The halting problem computation model has unlimited memory. Sometimes people say this means you can "solve" the halting problem in practice because real machines have bounded memory, therefore finite states, which must eventually repeat if a program does not halt. But this isn't really a solution, because the halt-test program needs exponentially more memory than the input program would be allowed if run. However you look at it, that is not "in practice", it is prevented by computational inaccessibility, and it also doesn't satisfy the principle of the halting problem, which is to ask if halt-test can be written in the same kind of universal programming system as the programs it analyses. (Besides, you can run programs with unlimited memory, by always being willing to pause, upgrade machine, and resume, whenever current memory is filled.)
When analysed with denotational semantics, there actually is a third output called "bottom" (⊥) which means "mathematical value representing doesn't terminate". But even using mathematical approaches, there is no way to calculate when that's the output for all possible inputs to a correct halt-test function.
I read it in Italian as a teen, the Italian edition is beautiful, and incredibly well translated (the book includes many puns and language tricks.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot
Ok, for us the lazy, what is mother fucking the point of GEB? A single HN karma point from me is on offer for the honest answers.
— Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, p. 363
The book argues that these "strange loops" (of a system onto itself) are behind the emergence of intelligence and consciousness, because physical matter itself gives rise to human intelligence, albeit being a mechanical system.
Or is the point "there is so much mystery in these systems that perhaps there is room for an explanation for consciousness"? Maybe then I would be more sympathetic.
Or perhaps I should just read the book before condemning it :)
in other words, GEB tries to coax the reader into a eureka moment, which is exactly why it has so many fans; it convinced each and every one of us that we were genius for just a split second.
ps. Haven't read the novel yet, it is in my queue.
That said, I don't think it was life-changing in the sense that it gave me any interesting perspective on life in any way. I didn't find any of the philosophies to be useful in that sense.
However, what the book does do, is manage to explain an incredibly complex, deep mathematical theorem while using almost no mathematical notation. It does it all mostly through similes and wordplay and art, which is quite brilliant.
One of the great things about the book is that even if you give up on the math, you can still appreciate each chapter as clever writing in its own right.
Too bad about the misogyny. Might even have been racist, but I don't remember that.
Sounds a little like “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand” have you read that one?
Also,
> In my teens it didn't hurt that it had some pretty intense pornographic sex scenes
For me, that book is Lockpick Pornography - it’s a fairy horny story, but the main character struggling to figure out what to do about gender and sexuality, and the way that struggle starts out seeming like it’s about systemic oppression and heteronormativity but quickly spirals into the character just having a series of self destructive meltdowns is so so compelling. It even manages to have a bit of a happy non-ending.
The best response to someone bringing up GEB in casual conversation is to look them dead in the eye and simply say “I have also read that book.”
This will instantly create palatable tension and a change of topic
To quote one of my professors from back in the day: “Life is short and you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to”
GEB was a frustrating read. I mean, it's interesting in places, but it's just all over the place, jumping between many different topics. The central theme is meant to be the strange loops, but it's IMHO not very interesting concept and his application on the cognition is just author's personal conjecture.
"Reading" all of TAOCP would take literally years of intense effort even if you set aside all other activity. There are a lot of great problems inside, and plenty of dry humor, and I would recommend people try to at least skim sections of TAOCP which seem interesting or relevant to their work, but very few people are going to even nominally work through the whole thing, and the people who might are professional scholars of the topic.
Reading GEB can be done leisurely over the course of a few days or maybe weeks, depending on how much time someone spends reading every day. It's not quite as easy a read as a pulp novel or comic book, but it also doesn't take any inordinate amount of work to make basic sense of, or require any special skills or background understanding to start on. It's a fun book to hand to a ~13–16 year old.
Again, if you do any work with computer algorithms, it's worth checking out TAOCP at the library and skimming the sections relevant to your work. If you might need it as a reference, it's not a bad source to have at hand; I look things up in there maybe a few times a year for the past decade. Some parts are now a bit outdated in this fast-moving field, but it's still the best available survey source about some topics, and there are some nice explanations and a lot of great problems in there. Knuth is a pretty funny writer if you enjoy dry humor.
I've often read the hate on this site for this book. At least for me, I find the discussions and analogies to help me in thinking about, and eventually understanding the material. I contrast it with a graduate intro to Recursion Theory which can leave a reader feeling that they followed all the precise arguments but still somehow missed a lot.
Or bragging rights to "The Anatomy of Lisp"!
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
https://github.com/spb59h2/spb5
Once you grok it for what it actually is (C++ pure virtual classes), COM is really pretty beautiful. Until you get to the DCOM stuff...
I don't often get to meet people IRL who have read the book and wish I had more opportunities to discuss it. One (of the many things) that stuck out to me was the idea of foreground and background. Prime numbers to me is background that remains when you construct all the composite numbers, so technically they're 'non-composite' lacking the property of being a product of distinct numbers.
When someone enthusiastically mentions something they liked and wanted to talk about and you immediately take a shit on it, it's not really a surprise that this creates "palatable tension" and a change of subject (and likely a longer-term wariness to share when talking to you). If you really dislike discussing related topics, there are surely less condescending ways of expressing that.
Ouch... Why would you assume that the other party's goal is to appear "superior", and not that they are legitimately passionate about something? Do you dislike when people are passionate about topics that don't interest you? Or do you just believe that it is fair to assume that everyone who outwardly likes this book is secretly doing so because they want to seem smart or something? Or something else?
(Edit: As an aside, Hofstadter's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is similarly self-indulgent, and a joy to read. Of course one ought to read a couple of other translations first and keep them nearby, to become familiar with the content, but in terms of sheer wordplay and outrageous rhymes, it tops anything.) (Edit 2: Ha, a search reveals I posted a similar comment a little over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32830008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32878471)
The math was insufferable, however. And I say that as a mathematician and programmer... I wonder if musicians and poetry translators will find "their" parts correspondingly unbearable?
This is a very good introduction to the book.
The goal of the book/lecture is to show how meaning emerges from not-meaning. So cool!:-)
Also at the end of the lecture 1 he says that the book was written like Bach’s works - like a piece of music with theme, repetitions, inversions etc.
Going to read it asap:))
Dusted it off and after only a few pages, it's already a completely different read to when I read (a fraction of) it a decade or so ago.
This seems a little wishy-washy to me. I don't see this as a good counterargument against Searle's argument that syntaxx alone is not enough to give rise to semantics. (I find Dennett's argument about intuition pumps a more convincing counterargument.) Maybe my understanding of Hofstadter's argument is too simplistic - I'm happy to be educated (I wasn't able to make it through even half of GEB after all).
And of course, that's not to say that GEB isn't a valuable book - it seems like most readers really enjoy it and learn a lot, even if they don't much care for the ultimate cognitive science/philosophy of mind position Hofstadter is trying to defend.
I think it's one of those books which most people actually don't enjoy that much, but don't want to admit it, because it has such an intellectual aura around it.
At some point in life one realizes that there is important stuff in good taste. “I just couldn’t call a bad book good.” To quote Dorothy Sayers.
For me this was one of those books that was more about the journey than the destination.
2001: A Space Odyssey could easily be trimmed to 25 minutes or less if all you care about is the plot. But should it?
GED (in my humble opinion etc), doesn’t really need some of the fluff. It’s a large book that’s easy to spot on the shelf, and it’s hard to avoid thinking that the publisher (and some readers) like it that way.
Yes. Tell me that you just sat there watching it without being distracted by your thoughts at all. Being able to handle torture doesn't make torture good.
I'm more of the opinion that 5 minutes of graphics that were probably impressive at the time could be cut.
No, but it probably means you're forcing yourself to watch/like it.
I never suggested expunging the movie. Regardless, excessively long movies/books expunge themselves unless they're famous enough to namedrop.
Now, tell me you sat there watching it without being distracted by your thoughts.
The thoughts were about the movie and its themes: evolution, violence, and yes even "how the f did they do this in the 60s"
"how the f did they do this in the 60s" - I consider that a distraction.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. For many people, this book is their first encounter with much of this material (as it was for me, so long ago.)
For you, it's like reading a tour guide of your home city. You're not the intended audience.
That's the usual refrain around hyper-preventious navel gazer books. The moment you criticize, your intellect is up for question, because "you didn't understand it".
This form of logical fallacy is the worst in economics and philosophy.
> stuntkite on July 5, 2018 | flag| favorite | next [–]
> 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. 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 consciousness because of his disabled sister I found to be something that changed not only how I interacted with people that were differently abled, but also changed how I saw my own disabilities. Sure it's more than a bit full of itself, but I can't for the life of me think how I would edit it any differently. It's honest from the place he was standing. With a lot of thought, a desire to share, and a perspective that no one else could just stumble on. IMO, it really does kind of have to be what it is.
> 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...
I may try the "skip that bit" trick and tilt at this windmill once more.
(NB: I hated "The Three Body Problem" when so many seem to love it. I wonder if there's any correlation there.)
and they're under a cc-by-nc-sa license, so share and enjoy; piracy is always an act of benevolence, but in this case it's even legal
(the mind you save could be your own)
That's the "problem" right there. It wasn't a pop sci book. TBH while Gödel's incompleteness theorem might be seen as "science" subject, it is actually squarely in the realm of meta-mathematics, a branch of philosophy.
The "writing style" is what most would call "literature", which includes prose, poetry, stories, etc. It's not for everyone, for sure, but some people do enjoy it (I occasionally do, but I lose patience.) Calling it "pretentious fluff" sounds a bit extreme.
I got this book when I was at the first semester of IT. Back in my university town, most students of IT or physics had this book, or lented it from a friend. And we discussed a lot about what was inside.
So I wasn't a seasoned academic, but the new-kid-on-the-block. And my goal while reading was never to understand Gödel. Or to like Bach's music (I actually dislike most of his music). Or to get into arts -- but hey, Escher I like.
My goal was to train my mind. To get into thinking models new to me, because they aren't taught in normal school.
Also, for me this book was an extension. Even while still in normal school, I went to the university library to read "Spektrum der Wissenschaft" (the german version of "Scientific American", but without the nationalism in the title). Many articles were over my top ... but the "Metamagicum" articles I deeply enjoyed. So when this book come out I expected some extension of these articles ... and I was not disappointed.
Yup, exactly my thoughts. But for some reason, the HN crowd keeps recommending it. Its gotten previously-- 5-10 years ago, it would be recommended in almost every book recommendation post
This repeats an very old, popular pop-philosophy misconception about Godel's theorems and GEB seems to have done nothing to help with this category error.