Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
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Book Reviews of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Book Review: Unbelievably Clever
Summary: 5 Stars
It's the gifted individual who can make math fun: it takes a complete master to do the same with Godel's Theorem.
Godel, Escher, Bach was first recommended to me by my piano accompanist three years ago. I flipped through it--it looked too bizarre and eclectic to bother with. Three years later, when I finally did start reading it, I couldn't put it down.
Hofstadter is entertaining, fascinating, earnest, and--above all--unbelievably clever. The puns littered throughout, the triple-decker meanings, the symphonic weaving of the work is enchanting from start to finish. I can't imagine anyone not gaining something from this book, not seeing the world differently after it was finished. Logic seems different to me, music different, truth and math and reality different.
And there are moments of just the purest wonder within, moments when I felt almost hyponotized, ready to find out that I was a character within somebody else's book, maybe a Djinn or a God Over one.
I admit that even in this easily digestible presentation, I couldn't fully understand the Godelian proof--though I grokked the gist of it. It's no matter though--there's so much within here that I won't spell it out or explicate it, only point out that it is what is claims to be: a synthesis of the three titular men, a work of gold.
Book Review: AI's hardest problem...
Summary: 5 Stars
Whenever I read a book in translation I often wonder if it's the translator I love or hate, or the author themselves. Literature in translation is essentially a complete re-writing of the book itself. Consider Lewis Carroll: How does one go about translating seemingly endless word play and words that are often made up? Now consider the fact that Alice in Wonderland had been translated into over 50 languages. If you could read all 50 languages, some would approximate your understanding of "Alice", and some would appear tangenital, or worse, dishonest to the original.
Machine Translation (MT) is considered AI's hardest problem, and Hofstadter goes to painstaking length to show just why this is so. Despite marketing rhetoric he points out why such a solution is years in the making if it ever occurs at all (to a satisfactory degree - meaning literature, not technical documents). Though many who have read "Gödel, Escher, Bach" or "Metamagical Themas" are sometimes disappointed in this book, to me it is part of the evolution. And being a word geek, a polyglot, and in the constant companion of one who makes translation a living, I have to say this book rates above those other tombs on my list. But be forewarned, you are leaving the world of complex algorithms and entering a world where just such analysis is not forthcoming.
Book Review: A readable Mobius strip
Summary: 5 Stars
If you have never read this book, then I'd like to say that it has a lot of the most greatest knowledge out there. It doesn't just deal with math, art, and music, but also with zen, philosophy, self-ref, self-rep, holism, reductionism, and everything else that is considered pure knowledge of cognitive science and general intelligence. I don't know why some of the people rating it have no idea of what's it about; it's not about Godel's theorem like many think it is, it's about consciousness and how the power of the mind and the "I" comes out of the inanimate matter that creates us. That's not it, the second part of the book talks about computer programming and AI. Can a computer program ever have a sense of self or compose meaningful music? Hofstadter's response to the second one was: "Only if that AI could go through the maze of life on it's own, fighting it's way through it and feeling the cold of a chilly night, the longing for a cherished hand, the inaccessibility of a distant town, the regenaration after a human death, the...and only then can it be considered to do so."This book really has more than that. I can't say all of the things mentioned in it, not in this tiny little review, but I can say that you should probably read it and hopefully understand it because it truly is a masterpiece.
Book Review: Making accessible the essential laws of nature.
Summary: 5 Stars
I read it once some 15 years ago, and it is still hauntingly the finest book that I've ever read.GENIUS shows us how the laws and structure of one discipline repeat themselves across seemingly disparate studies. Hofstadter convinced me that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem are cut from the same cloth. Both describe the limits of a finite system in defining something greater than itself.
It is RARE GENIUS that makes such connections accessible to the minds of average people (that's me!). Douglas Hofstadter showed me that these principles of Physics and Mathematics extend up the chain of the sciences to Biology and Sociology. For me, this book painted a simple illustration:
I do not exist without each cell in my body doing its certain work. But I have no better chance of understanding what the organism of my society is doing than one of my cells has in understanding what the organism of me is doing. This is an utterly simple concept. So, why didn't I think of it?
It is also a humbling thought about the structure of our existence. So on this twentieth aniversary, I'm back to get a copy of the book for the my favorite thinker --- my Mom.
Douglas Hofstadter is the greatest Philosopher of our time. Treat yourself to his thoughts...and smile.
Book Review: Eternal Golden Braid - Finally, Truth in Advertising!
Summary: 5 Stars
Science and art have never been less accessible. They have become obscure private languages, requiring rites of initiation and proficiency in coding and decoding. But while art has largely remained the preserve of an elite - science has been popularized by both its practitioners and a host of talented observers and reporters. The reason is that science is all-pervasive while art is still a museum thing. In the genre of popular science there is nothing that comes close to this book. It combines music and literature with formal logic and computer science. It is poetic while being rigorous, breathless without deteriorating to pseudo-science. In short: a masterpiece. The book strives - and succeeds - to demonstrate that ostensibly disparate phenomena like ant colonies, Bach's music, the structure and functioning of the brain, and programming languages - have more in common than we imagine. Uncovering these strains of similarity and strands of common order is done in a systematic but highly entertaining manner. The book is as taut as a thriller and as fun as "Alice in Wonderland" that it so often quotes. A treat untouched by the almost three decades that elapsed since it was first published. Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited".