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'Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid' by Douglas Hofstadter

Our Lady Has Left the Building

10:58 / 05.06.04

Bookbrain here.

I started reading this last weekend and am thirty pages in so far. I'm hoping that if the maths gets too weird, I can survive on the prose. Has anyone else read this? If I'd thought about it enough in advance I could have proposed it as a Barbelith Book Club book, but it does look as if it's the sort of thing that would be of interest here.

14:12 / 06.06.04

The Kenneth Grant of popular science, that one. I've dipped into it, never made it all the way through yet. Enthusiastically started it with full intentions of making it through to the end on several occasions, but always got sidetracked and moved onto other things. I'd be up for giving it another go though, perhaps a barbelith book reading tyoe of thing would give me the impetus to make it all the way through. What I've read of it I really like, although it is a bit mad.

Psi-L is working in hell

16:21 / 06.06.04

I've just started to read this too...an already nervous of the mathemetics...I'm sure Meme Buggerer also mentioned he was reading this...would be good to talk about as we all go along...perhaps with some mutual encouragement I'll not start another book half way through and instead reach the end of this one as is often the way....

22:59 / 06.06.04

I read this about ten years ago, so I am a little hazy on the details. But I did buy it for MC a little while ago and so I might leaf through it and contribute as I go.

It really is quite good, in a self referential, style and substance, Aesop's fables kind of way.

Henningjohnathan

18:09 / 14.06.04

I've never been able to finish it either, but it sets your brain a-buzzin'. All Hofsteader's books are very insightful into the nature of consciousness and the difficulties describing and understanding it. I think his book THE MIND'S 'I' is a little easier to take on.

05:52 / 15.06.04

Book is nothing short of genius. I've read and reread it over the years, both at-a-go and in delectible little fragments. In fact, I would go so far as to say that back in the day, when I first read it, it classed as one of those books that instituted broad-spectrum shifts in my thinking. Now, mind you, I was 16, but I still think GEB is a really great book. Full marks for style and substance (worth it for the dialogues alone).

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

17:03 / 16.06.04

I started reading bits and peices when I was younger (mainly the dialouges) and recently started re-reading it. When people politely ask me what it's about, I really didn't know how to answer them until I read the introduction by the author, who claims he's trying to show how something like conciousness can come from "inanimate" material, or rather, a lump of biological tissue. Something along the lines of conciousness being a reflection of the brain's reflection of reality, which is just a reflection of something else. Pretty sweet, really.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

10:22 / 21.06.04

Bollocks, I had to bail out at about page 75. I'm not that good at maths anyway and the metamaths was doing my head in. Plus the fact that Hofstadter was writing for university students, 'obviously therefore ---p--e-------- but not -----' what? why? Don't make me hurt you! I could understand the idea of ---p--e-----' but I couldn't divorce it from the idea that I shouldn't read that as 3 + 2 = 5. I need something simpler, 'My first counting book' perhaps.

13:50 / 21.06.04

Do you want a pointer, Flowers? If so, give me a better idea where it is, cos my page numbering is different from yours.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

13:08 / 23.06.04

Nah, I gave up. My head just doesn't like it when we go away from maths and into the realm of algebra.

15:17 / 23.06.04

I'm about halfway through this book, now. I've taken several extremely short breaks already to read slightly less math intensive texts (the excellent Boy George autobiography, a collection of Roald Dahl shorts and the most recent Harry Potter bumfluff, off the top of my head). I started off fairly enthusiastically with respect to the formal system stuff but balked at the idea of learning his entire personally created TNT formal system which he claims he designed to be as mathematically comprehensive as Russel and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica (another mathematical folly). It didn't seem to matter; when I skipped ahead to the conclusion without doing the gruntwork I discovered I'd already pretty much guessed what the result would be anyway (at least for the purposes of using TNT as an example). So from my personal experience, Flowers, I'd say just skip the bits that bore you and trust better mathematicians than ourselves to do the hard work for you.

I've mainly been enjoying the dialogues and the pictures, anyway.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

11:43 / 24.06.04

To be honest, I wasn't that keen on them either. I think that, by reading the introduction to the 20th anniversary edition, including his section on what the books about, I may have got some of the important ideas without actually having to them struggle through the text.

11:54 / 12.07.04

That was certainly my experience of the book. I might write one on consciousness being like guitar feedback which would be more palatable. It could have a cover CD.

20:58 / 03.08.04

I got through the intro on this one, realized the rest of the book was devoted to proving a bunch of ideas I was planning to develop myself and doing so far better than I ever could, and put it down with a resentful sneer. It looks right good, I'm just annoyed as its a book I'd have written. Well, were I a math supergenius, anyway.