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Mark Lawrence's Reviews > Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
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Expand your mind! Not for the faint of heart & yet by no means dry.
Hofstadter makes some fascinating observations about emergent properties (such as intelligence) and diverts us into the extremely heavy mathematics of Godel via the self referencing systems that are Bach's fugues and Escher's 'optical illusion' style artwork.
Before too many chapters have passed though you'll be firmly in number theory land, albeit doled out as painlessly as is possible with such stuff, leavened with imagined philosophical debates between ancient Greeks and other proxies. I seem to remember Achilles spends a lot of time talking to a tortoise...
Number theory requires no great resource of mathematical knowledge - just an extremely agile and open mind. If you let him Hofstadter will show you how Godel destroyed Betrand Russell's Principa Mathematica - his attempt to logically deduce all of mathematics from a set of axioms. Godel shows us that (I paraphrase drastically) that all logical systems allow statements about natural numbers that are true but unprovable within the system.
And somehow this isn't even what the book's about...
As the pages turn you will be steadily more tested and at some point it will become apparent you've not been paying close enough attention. However, even without taking pen to paper and labouring through the instructive exercises you can get a pretty decent glimpse at some exciting and fundamental thinking.
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Hofstadter makes some fascinating observations about emergent properties (such as intelligence) and diverts us into the extremely heavy mathematics of Godel via the self referencing systems that are Bach's fugues and Escher's 'optical illusion' style artwork.
Before too many chapters have passed though you'll be firmly in number theory land, albeit doled out as painlessly as is possible with such stuff, leavened with imagined philosophical debates between ancient Greeks and other proxies. I seem to remember Achilles spends a lot of time talking to a tortoise...
Number theory requires no great resource of mathematical knowledge - just an extremely agile and open mind. If you let him Hofstadter will show you how Godel destroyed Betrand Russell's Principa Mathematica - his attempt to logically deduce all of mathematics from a set of axioms. Godel shows us that (I paraphrase drastically) that all logical systems allow statements about natural numbers that are true but unprovable within the system.
And somehow this isn't even what the book's about...
As the pages turn you will be steadily more tested and at some point it will become apparent you've not been paying close enough attention. However, even without taking pen to paper and labouring through the instructive exercises you can get a pretty decent glimpse at some exciting and fundamental thinking.
Join my Patreon
Join my 3-emails-a-year newsletter #prizes
..
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Finished Reading
January 24, 2012
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Hélène
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rated it 4 stars
Jan 24, 2012 12:16PM
i still recall how much grumpy and frustrated with myself i felt while reading this book! :) really stimulating
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Never read this. Thanks for pointing it out.
One of my favorite books of all time
This is a book I am both intrigued and intimidated by.
Read this in college. The deep dive into Bach's fugues melted by brain a little, but it helped me understand critical thinking. -- KO'D
2nd everything you said. Read this 15 years ago and still think about it regularly.
Desperately needs a decent limited/special edition, too!
Just heard of this now, thanks to you! Since I love Bach and Escher, maybe I will be fascinated by this.
I'm just trying to read outside of the fantasy genre but... it seems as though that is just illegal. Now I need to go down a rabbit hole starting with Book of the Ancestor, which leads me to some other book, then I find Kingkiller, then I'll watch ten Daniel Greene videos, then I'll watch some random outdated fantasy news, and...the cycle never ends.
Just heard about this book. It was written in 1999–is it every bit as relevant in 2023?
Jared wrote: "Just heard about this book. It was written in 1999–is it every bit as relevant in 2023?"I don't know about "every bit" but it still has a lot to say to most interested parties. The AI issue is unresolved.
