Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
'What is a self, and how can a self come out of inaminate matter?' This is the riddle that drove Hofstadter to write this extraordinary book. Linking together the music of J.S. Bach, the graphic art of Escher and the mathematical theorems of Godel, as well as ideas drawn from logic, biology,...
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'What is a self, and how can a self come out of inaminate matter?' This is the riddle that drove Hofstadter to write this extraordinary book. Linking together the music of J.S. Bach, the graphic art of Escher and the mathematical theorems of Godel, as well as ideas drawn from logic, biology, psychology, physics and linguistics, Douglas Hofstadter illuminates one of the greatest mysteries of modern science: the nature of human thought processes. 'Every few decades an unknown author brings outa book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event. This is such a work' - Martin Gardner.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780140289206 (0140289208)
Publish date: March 30th 2000
Publisher: Penguin
Pages no: 777
Edition language: English
(Original Review, 1980-09-24)Before we ask "Are dolphins intelligent?" we must ask "What is intelligence?" Doug Hofstadter, in his book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid", presents a way of looking at intelligence that is not as restrictive as most current definitions. (I highly recomme...
Preface to GEB's Twentieth-anniversary EditionOverviewList of IllustrationsWords of Thanks--Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden BraidNotesBibliographyCreditsIndex
If I were clever enough, I would write this review as a fugue. This is the formal structure that Hofstadter uses throughoutGödel, Escher, Bach. Whether the whole book is a fugue, I'm not smart enough to tell. But the fugue is used as a metaphor for layers of brain activity, thoughts, superimposed ov...
This is a book of brilliant insights separated by hundreds of pages of tangents. It touches on a ridiculous number of topics: number theory, music theory, fugues, art, physics, linguistics, literature, cognition, calculus, logic, programming, recursion, molecular biology, Zen, and much more. Many of...
I read this so long ago that I really think I need to re-read it.