"yields falsehood when quoted" yields falsehood when quoted
By anders pearson 15 Aug 2001
it took me a few years to get around to it and a few weeks to actually get through it, but i finally read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.
<p>it is definately one of the best books i’ve read in the last few years. it deals with the nature of self-awareness. as the author says in the preface: </p>
<p><p class="quote">“In a word, <span class="caps">GEB</span> is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle.”</p>
<p>his theories revolve around a concept of “strange loops” or “tangled hierarchies” which is not easily explained. in a roundabout attempt to make this evasive concept clear, <span class="caps">GEB</span> covers</p>
<p><p class="quote">fugues and canons, logic and truth, geometry, recursion, syntactic structures, the nature of meaning, Zen Buddhism, paradoxes, brain and mind, reductionism and holism, and colonies, concepts and mental representations, translation, computers and their languages, <span class="caps">DNA</span>, proteins, the genetic code, artificial intelligence, creativity, consciousness and free will.</p>
<p>the book is highly recommended if you have a passing interest in any of the above. furthermore, it serves as one of the most clearly written books on the mathematical underpinnings of computer science that i’ve ever read. it hits most of the important material and does it in a way that is accessible to people without a technical or math background. eg, although it doesn’t name it as such, it offers an amazingly lucid and elegant explanation of <a href="http://www.math.sc.edu/~sumner/numbertheory/induction/Induction.html">proof </a> by induction.<br />since <span class=”caps”>GEB</span> was written in 1979, it more or less predated the discovery (or at least popularization) of fractals and chaos theory. since the focus of the book is self-referential systems, i’d really be interested in seeing how, if it were re-written today, chaos theory would be integrated into it. </p>
<p>anyway, if you haven’t read it yet, go read it.</p>