Why Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life. (2022)
Why Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life. (2022)
Musings on Hofstadter’s phenomenal book about computation, consciousness, and epistemology.
Dude speaks highly of Charles Koch and works for one of his nonprofits. Evaluate everything he says with that lens.
I lost immediate scientific respect when he said Gödel’s incompleteness theorems were equivalent to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The former establishes a logical boundary; the latter establishes a measurement boundary. They’re not the same. He also attempts to extend Gödel beyond axiomatic logical structures to the metaphysical. Again, not the same.
Pulling these two things together, the author of this post attempts to making sweeping generalizations about how his foundation is doing the right thing by working in the system rather than outside of it. Neither GEB nor his misunderstanding of it support his claim that bugs cannot be removed from a system without destroying a system. His argument is that we must work within the system because self reference. He then applies that to software where he actually gets something right by parroting best customer experience design (where we go outside the system to improve the system).
Dude’s a fucking nut. The book he’s talking about it okay.
I am a non-reader, so take maybe my opinion doesn't carry much weight, but I really enjoyed reading GEB as a teenager.
I think it might've been the last book that I read just for the sake of reading, and not with the intention of learning about a specific topic.
I have to say, this is exactly the kind of book a teenager will deem profound.
It's essentially the same chapter rephrased about 20 times and manages to stretch a rather simple idea (conceptually, not the proof behind it) way too long. 100 pages would have been enough.
Maybe I'm biased, because I read it after graduating in computer science, but to me it seemed rather meh. Yeah, recursion exists, yeah fractals are weird, yeah systems can't accurately describe themselves.
Yeah, recursion exists, yeah fractals are weird, yeah systems can’t accurately describe themselves.
That's basically all I remember from the book, I figured that I had just forgotten most of it. I was unfortunately one of those 13-year-olds who thought they were much smarter and deeper than they were, so the book being full of itself definitely tracks.
I've learned about group theory and isomorphisms, I've looked into how the incompleteness theorems work in depth in formal education.
All that made me do was run away from math for a while because everything is overwhelming, it feels like learning civil engineering by looking at a giant 18th century cathedral, having to learn every part of how to build it, and then building it yourself, and then moving on to more and more buildings until you can derive how to build a skyscraper by yourself.
Maybe I'm ready to get back into heavy math and should read the book, idk. Maybe I missed the forest for the trees that I've studied, so I missed out on some beauty by trying to analyze how every single tree works.
GEB is pop science, it's not math heavy at all
Interesting, I just finished this book. I tried it in high school, it seemed profound at the time, but I couldn't finish it. Now I'm an older software dev and it was much easier to read this time around, but I feel like I missed something. Did Hofstatder gloss a bunch of stuff in the final couple of chapters? Or did I just fail to grasp all the strange loop stuff and put it together on my own? Not sure. I still enjoyed it, and it gave me some good ways of conceptualizing brains, minds, thoughts, etc. Especially the ant colony stuff.
As a 40 something successful engineer who read GEB in my early 20's, calling it the most "influential" of my life would be telling on myself. It's a fine book, I'd absolutely encourage people from their mid-teens to their mid 20's to read it. I really enjoyed the examination of Bach's fugues in comparison with other mathematical concepts. But it's just not that profound. There isn't a lot of substance in the book, and much like Ender's Game, another great book, you should recognize it's limitations.
If you want a profound book that has a lot of hard math mixed with easy to understand concepts, I'd suggest Applied Cryptography, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781119183471, or The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives, https://www.amazon.com/Chemistry-Powder-Explosives-Tenney-Davis/dp/0913022004
This book is really interesting. I have been searching for it on gptצ'אט but I found it here.