Customer Rating: 
Summary: What if there were no such thing as a hypothetical situation?
Comment: If pop culture threatens to turn your mind to mush or if Paris Hilton and Rush and Riley leave you wondering whether all those lovely convolutions and synapses evolved for naught, treat yourself to some brain candy. This is not a beach book. If you get it at the library you may be renewing it for a year. Hofstadter ties together Kurt Godel's Theorem (mathematical) with M.C. Escher's art and J.S. Bach's music in a wild intellectual rollercoaster that will leave your thinking muscles feeling frisky as a colt. Of the three heroes, Escher is probably most familiar. His hands drawing each other, endless waterfalls and a fascinating Mott the Hoople album cover have postered him into household art. The recursive loops that form the theoretical base for Escher are the stuff of Bach's genius, and echo in Godel's work. This plunks us smack dab into the invention of computers and the question: Is artificial intelligence possible? This statement is false. Fabulous, difficult, fun.
Customer Rating:
Summary: They must have had good hash back in the 70s
Comment: I love reading books, to me "factual" knowledge really tickles my fancy, however after reading this, and I am in page 420, I am literally entirely bored out of my mind. Although maybe 3 out of all the ideas and concepts he presents were interesting to me such as the caste system, and the discussion and comparison about the ant colony to the process in which the brain functions quite entertaining along with the record discussion between the tortoise and achilles (holy crap, this is like animal farm on weed),(which is what my two starts go to), the remainder of this book is quite annyoing.
I have never taken such a long time to read a book which is so hyped up to be nothing more than half baked ideas. I am not a mathematician by any means of the word, I personally stick to history books and science books and biographies based on FACTS. I seldom read a book based on an individual's ideas and interests and religious beliefs (UGH!).
I think it is quite amazing that he is able to drag on such a long discussion about someone's theorem, and for that I applaud him (and feel bad for Godel, he must be rolling over in his grave), but it is not for me. As a "regular" joe when it comes to Math/Logic, this books certainly has turned me away from ever wanting to delve into the subject again and I sincerely recommend the "average" reader to just rent it if this peaks your curiosity. I am still not sure as to whether I want to finish this book, because if I have to look at any more parenthesis and tabs and letters, numbers, drawings, I will punch myself in the face...
For those of you who like this book, more power to ya, not for me though. I will stick to my "FACTUAL" books, not "OPINION BASED BOOKS".
PS: IF YOU WANT A QUICK OVERVIEW OF GODEL'S THEOREM of INCOMPLETENESS without the "ETERNAL GOLDEN BRAID" portion of it and half baked ideas from the disco era, just google it and read up on it, it's maybe a few pages, so save yourself the waste of time.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Down the Rabbit Hole...
Comment: This is a difficult book.
Difficult to read. Difficult to understand. And, I'm finding, difficult to review. What's it about? Good question. The author, himself, isn't very clear on this point, describing it as "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll." I'm not sure I can do better than that. I will tell you this, however: if the book has a "point," it does seem to be that man's consciousness is ultimately mechanical and, therefore, that there is no reason that machines cannot finally be intelligent in the same sense that man is. (And, in fact, be as man in just about every internal way.)
While I take issue with this conclusion, and some of Hofstadter's reasoning along the way, I don't think that my debating his points is the basis on which a prospective reader should decide whether or not to pick up this book. Instead, the prospective reader should know: that this is a lengthy and deep work. It will take a *long* time to read properly, and most readers should not read more than a chapter a day. Many of the sections, and especially the various dialogues that preface the chapters, are quite clever. (These dialogues are usually between Achilles and the Tortoise, of Zeno's paradoxes, and their friends.) Some of the chapters grow incredibly technical. The subject matters vary, wildly and rapidly, and there will be points in reading where you will question your investment.
In the end, you will feel good for having pushed through the hard bits. It will coalesce, more or less, into a whole. Whether you finally agree with Hofstadter's conclusions or not, you'll have learned much and thought about important topics you might otherwise not have.
A good book, certainly not for everyone... but, if you're the "right" audience--someone deeply interested in questions of intelligence, mathematics, computer science and free will, and possessed of a bit of an ironic sense of humor--then this book cannot be recommended highly enough.
Five stars, for the work it represents, and the doors it opens to the reader.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Bound with the "braid"?
Comment: Can someone tell me, in plain English, what this book is about? On the little matter of determinism--is he for it or against it? He does not seem to have come to praise Godel, Escher, Bach for their strangeness but rather to bury strangeness and its resistance to materialism. He seems to be saying that strangeness is hardwired and can be programmed into a formal system by someone who sees it for what it is--in short, that computers will some day rise to the level of consiousness and self-reference. But wouldn't such a system be curved in upon itself and lack strangeness? If strangeness could be hard-wired into AI, would it still seem strange? Nothingness annihilates strangeness, but then the absense of strangeness is the actual limit of the theories of value seen in those who follow Heidegger. In order to eliminate the difference between soul and matter, they must give up the resistance of soul to the limitations of material existence; at which point "strangeness" becomes a matter of verbal virtuosity and conceptual sleight of hand. "Strangeness" becomes the same thing as cleverness. Or am I misreading this fascinating book?
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent book!
Comment: Hofstadter combines the awe in math, music, art, artificial intelligence, language and computers into one big book called GEB. Its takes the reader on an ecstatic journey with a clever use of parallels between the structure of math, music and finite but endless loops that appear in Escher's works. Dialogs between Achilles and Tortoise are very interesting.
Summary: What if there were no such thing as a hypothetical situation?
Comment: If pop culture threatens to turn your mind to mush or if Paris Hilton and Rush and Riley leave you wondering whether all those lovely convolutions and synapses evolved for naught, treat yourself to some brain candy. This is not a beach book. If you get it at the library you may be renewing it for a year. Hofstadter ties together Kurt Godel's Theorem (mathematical) with M.C. Escher's art and J.S. Bach's music in a wild intellectual rollercoaster that will leave your thinking muscles feeling frisky as a colt. Of the three heroes, Escher is probably most familiar. His hands drawing each other, endless waterfalls and a fascinating Mott the Hoople album cover have postered him into household art. The recursive loops that form the theoretical base for Escher are the stuff of Bach's genius, and echo in Godel's work. This plunks us smack dab into the invention of computers and the question: Is artificial intelligence possible? This statement is false. Fabulous, difficult, fun.
Customer Rating:
Summary: They must have had good hash back in the 70s
Comment: I love reading books, to me "factual" knowledge really tickles my fancy, however after reading this, and I am in page 420, I am literally entirely bored out of my mind. Although maybe 3 out of all the ideas and concepts he presents were interesting to me such as the caste system, and the discussion and comparison about the ant colony to the process in which the brain functions quite entertaining along with the record discussion between the tortoise and achilles (holy crap, this is like animal farm on weed),(which is what my two starts go to), the remainder of this book is quite annyoing.
I have never taken such a long time to read a book which is so hyped up to be nothing more than half baked ideas. I am not a mathematician by any means of the word, I personally stick to history books and science books and biographies based on FACTS. I seldom read a book based on an individual's ideas and interests and religious beliefs (UGH!).
I think it is quite amazing that he is able to drag on such a long discussion about someone's theorem, and for that I applaud him (and feel bad for Godel, he must be rolling over in his grave), but it is not for me. As a "regular" joe when it comes to Math/Logic, this books certainly has turned me away from ever wanting to delve into the subject again and I sincerely recommend the "average" reader to just rent it if this peaks your curiosity. I am still not sure as to whether I want to finish this book, because if I have to look at any more parenthesis and tabs and letters, numbers, drawings, I will punch myself in the face...
For those of you who like this book, more power to ya, not for me though. I will stick to my "FACTUAL" books, not "OPINION BASED BOOKS".
PS: IF YOU WANT A QUICK OVERVIEW OF GODEL'S THEOREM of INCOMPLETENESS without the "ETERNAL GOLDEN BRAID" portion of it and half baked ideas from the disco era, just google it and read up on it, it's maybe a few pages, so save yourself the waste of time.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Down the Rabbit Hole...
Comment: This is a difficult book.
Difficult to read. Difficult to understand. And, I'm finding, difficult to review. What's it about? Good question. The author, himself, isn't very clear on this point, describing it as "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll." I'm not sure I can do better than that. I will tell you this, however: if the book has a "point," it does seem to be that man's consciousness is ultimately mechanical and, therefore, that there is no reason that machines cannot finally be intelligent in the same sense that man is. (And, in fact, be as man in just about every internal way.)
While I take issue with this conclusion, and some of Hofstadter's reasoning along the way, I don't think that my debating his points is the basis on which a prospective reader should decide whether or not to pick up this book. Instead, the prospective reader should know: that this is a lengthy and deep work. It will take a *long* time to read properly, and most readers should not read more than a chapter a day. Many of the sections, and especially the various dialogues that preface the chapters, are quite clever. (These dialogues are usually between Achilles and the Tortoise, of Zeno's paradoxes, and their friends.) Some of the chapters grow incredibly technical. The subject matters vary, wildly and rapidly, and there will be points in reading where you will question your investment.
In the end, you will feel good for having pushed through the hard bits. It will coalesce, more or less, into a whole. Whether you finally agree with Hofstadter's conclusions or not, you'll have learned much and thought about important topics you might otherwise not have.
A good book, certainly not for everyone... but, if you're the "right" audience--someone deeply interested in questions of intelligence, mathematics, computer science and free will, and possessed of a bit of an ironic sense of humor--then this book cannot be recommended highly enough.
Five stars, for the work it represents, and the doors it opens to the reader.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Bound with the "braid"?
Comment: Can someone tell me, in plain English, what this book is about? On the little matter of determinism--is he for it or against it? He does not seem to have come to praise Godel, Escher, Bach for their strangeness but rather to bury strangeness and its resistance to materialism. He seems to be saying that strangeness is hardwired and can be programmed into a formal system by someone who sees it for what it is--in short, that computers will some day rise to the level of consiousness and self-reference. But wouldn't such a system be curved in upon itself and lack strangeness? If strangeness could be hard-wired into AI, would it still seem strange? Nothingness annihilates strangeness, but then the absense of strangeness is the actual limit of the theories of value seen in those who follow Heidegger. In order to eliminate the difference between soul and matter, they must give up the resistance of soul to the limitations of material existence; at which point "strangeness" becomes a matter of verbal virtuosity and conceptual sleight of hand. "Strangeness" becomes the same thing as cleverness. Or am I misreading this fascinating book?
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent book!
Comment: Hofstadter combines the awe in math, music, art, artificial intelligence, language and computers into one big book called GEB. Its takes the reader on an ecstatic journey with a clever use of parallels between the structure of math, music and finite but endless loops that appear in Escher's works. Dialogs between Achilles and Tortoise are very interesting.