I love GEB. It is a masterpiece. But it is important to realize before diving into it that one of the things that makes it a masterpiece is that it is literary, that is, that it contains a wealth of detail that is, strictly speaking, unnecessary to the main point. Drawing a parallel between GEB and James Joyce's Ulysses is actually quite a good analogy. Indeed, Ulysses is almost nothing but "unnecessary detail", to the extent that it makes the book all but unreadable (which, I think, is no small part of its appeal). If you're waiting for either GEB or Ulysses to hurry up and get to the mother fucking point, you're going to be waiting a long time. In that regard, both books are good for techies to read because every now and then it's good to read something that drags you out of your comfort zone and futzes around in all kinds of obscure nooks and crannies before getting to the mother fucking point -- if indeed it ever does. Getting to the point can be important, but there is more to life (and literature).
I love Ulysses and metafiction in general, but when people apply this kind of writing style to philosophy it drives me a bit up the wall. Philosophy at the end of the day is about arguing a point; it isn't about producing an aesthetic experience.
So why would you abuse your reader by making it a pain in the ass to figure out what you mean? I know there are some fancy arguments around stretching limits of language, but none of them seemed all that sensible to me. The only advantage I see to obscurantist writing is that it makes it impossible to critique the philosophers work. Any critique will just be met by the response that you didn't fully understand the author's argument. The Searle/Derrida debates are a great example of this. The upshot is that people spend all their time debating what you actually mean. Which I guess is good for the philosopher's brand, but doesn't advance knowledge much.
This isn't to say that you can't have beautiful writing in philosophy. I think Gaston Bachelard is a great example of both an elegant writer and a clear writer.
That being said, people really really love GEB, so it probably is worth reading regardless of these misgivings. One of these days I'll get to it.
> So why would you abuse your reader by making it a pain in the ass to figure out what you mean?
I think this statement is both wrong and irrelevant.
Wrong: if you look into GEB, you notice that is has many chapters. And each chapter works on some topic --- and the chapters itself aren't a pain in the ass to figure out what they mean. Not at all. Each chapter transports its goal quite nicely and timely.
Irrelevant: this book is not an academical paper. It's a book meant to amuse you, to enlighten you, to sharpen your thinking skills. An academic paper describing just how Gödel's work works can be a *LOT* thinner --- but, usually, is also a lot dryer.
It's actually the case that this book gives you many good things that help you to understand (and accept or dismiss) such academic papers easier. But even here, mind the "many", if you expect "all" from the book, then you'll be dissatisfied.
I also wouldn't say that GEB is a philosophical book, at least not in the way modern philosophy is understood. If you see it as a book dedicated to like ("philo") wisdom ("sophie"), then it is. But so are most after books in the IT field.
> So why would you abuse your reader by making it a pain in the ass to figure out what you mean?
A psychonaout or a shaman would argue some insights are only available on a drug infused spiritual trip.
Musicians talk of flow.
That state of discombobulation you dislike is not to meant to furnish you with answers but rather with new dots to notice and connect on your own. Not everything is a mathematical proof.
I think the real reason this sort of style isn't attractive is because many try to emulate it who lack the talent and then it truly is noise. It is a lot to ask from a reader and the value is rarely there that is well observed.
But sometimes the payoff is worth it. GBE resonates with a lot of people.
Hahah the whole point of op is that there is value in not always having a point, but meandering, especially for techies. Are you set an proving him right?
Ah, nobody reads Kant anymore; and even if they do, they tend to read just the first critique, stick to the analytic and focus on the "important" sections. You have to read the whole thing! And then, if you're so privileged, and you have to time, nothing is more fruitful than going on towards the Groundwork for Metaphysics of Morals, and the Critique of the Power of Judgement. And once you've read that last book, maybe you will begin to understand Derrida. Or even better, you will begin to understand how to critique him.
Philosophy is defined by the human experience, it is asking questions that do not have readily proveable answers, of answers that are heavily contextual to the individual. The probability of the answers weighed in the individuals head. These probabilities and likeliness to believe more of one philosophy over the other is often primarily from the details.
Details are important because they are little parts that support the likelihood of the larger point being true. If the details don't work it's likely because the theory is innacurate.
> Philosophy at the end of the day is about arguing a point; it isn't about producing an aesthetic experience.
I'd argue that point. Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) comes to my mind first. Art contains and conveys truth.
Nietzsche's work is also a good example about why it's foolish to argue too much about what an author meant. He wasn't always clear in his thoughts - just like us all - and his thinking changed considerably anyway.
> Philosophy at the end of the day is about arguing a point; it isn't about producing an aesthetic experience.
So why would you abuse your reader by making it a pain in the ass to figure out what you mean?
This is a funny thing to say about a discipline that was more or less founded by Plato, who was notably obscurantist if not outright esoteric.
In any case, philosophy is not always about making a point and there is not always a point to be made. Sometimes it's just asking questions.
This. Philosophy is the grandparent of math. And if there is a point to math, then that there always has to be a proofable point.
I think the problem is a cultural conflict between sub-concious problemsolvers and "concious" problem solvers. The later expect a algorithm , step by step instruction from the former, who when this is demanded, use there subconcious to produce a plausible story. When asked for there inspirations to deduce the process yourself, you get a crows nest of shiny things, bits and pieces, not making a reasonable whole - but they infuriatingly at the end of day do.
Why not accept that there are things you can not directly communicate with and if you are hellbent on becoming such a thing, there is no step-by-step instruction.
> I know there are some fancy arguments around stretching limits of language, but none of them seemed all that sensible to me.
Did you read Robert Kegan "The Evolving Self"? It was pretty popular at HN some time ago. Robert Kegan stretching limits of language and he's got a reason: he introduces some notions like "culture of embeddedness" that you just can't define in a way like dictionaries do, one cannot simply get to a point. Kegan uses another approach, he gives his reader an experience that makes her to understand "culture of embeddedness".
Philosophy by definition deals with uncategorised (or poorly categorised) aspects of our world, with aspects that have no good language to talk about them. Anything that was categorised to a point when there is an accepted language to talk about it is not a philosophy, it is a science or something. Philosophy makes first attempts to categorise and when philosophers found a way then a new branch of science emerges.
When you try to talk about uncategorised things, you just can't talk about it. For example, lets assume that there are no widely accepted categorisation of colors, but you've developed one including names for colors like "blue", "red", "magenta" and so on. How you could communicate your ideas to others? The only way I know is to point to different examples of blue and say "blue", point to red and say "red". You need to lead your audience through experiences of blue/red/magenta while they train their neurons to classify them and only then you can refer to their experiences with words "blue", "red", "magenta" to convey the idea that they always appear in a rainbow in the same sequence. While you keep pointing at different colors saying their names, your audience will probably think, that it takes too long for you to get to a point.
I didn't read GEB, so I cannot say how this reason to "stretch limits of language" relates to it, but you've sad that you know no good reason for such stretching, and I hope that now you know at least one reason for it.
Personally, I believe that the distinction between "unnecessary detail" and "the point" is mostly subjective and in the mind of the reader.
The point of a book is to get the reader to reach a certain understanding. Every brain is different and while one literary path might get some readers to that destination, other paths may be required for others. But there is no singular point of understanding that exists solely at the end of that path. The path itself is what builds that understanding.
Part of the art of writing is covering a large enough space of multiple paths to get most readers there without too many of them getting lost.
There is a very clear distinction between details and main point. If you assume that there is no main point in a text, you negate all that the writer is trying to communicate.
> Indeed, Ulysses is almost nothing but "unnecessary detail", to the extent that it makes the book all but unreadable
I was always apprehensive of reading Ulysses… until I did. And then I read some basic analysis of it and then read it again and now I’m slightly baffled why people find it _that_ difficult. Yes it’s not at all typical but it’s really not that hard and it’s definitely no Finnegan’s Wake. Now that’s a challenge!
I mean lots of the lore is just residual 16 year old’s getting into reading stuff. You read l’Estranger (translated), decide you’re an intellectual, and so have a go at Ulysses cos it’s the hardest one and so suitable for you, an intellectual. The internet has been a good transmission vector for the sentiment.
If your ideas about cooking come from watching Masterchef (analogously), you might treat the idea of making a beurre blanc as a similar act of conquest, triumph in the face of splitting adversity whilst a thousand-voice choir crescendos in the background as you whisk. But a million french housewives happily made it for decades having never been told it’s impossible, and indeed knowing better that it isn’t.
To be sure, you certainly didn't mean it this way, but for the sake of the poor guy who has seen GEB touted as one of these books that "every programmer/computer scientist/CS major has to read" and sees your post in the same light:
You don't have to read GEB. You will be a fine techie without reading it. And you'll be a fine person in general without reading it. There is no spiritual revelation you can only get from GEB or some important technical knowledge that you'll get that you wouldn't get from a normal CS degree program. Try it out and see if you enjoy Hofstadter's writing - if you do, you might be in for a really enlightening and enjoyable experience. If you don't, no worries - your time is better spent elsewhere - there is no need to put yourself through the pain of slogging through a >700 page book that you don't enjoy. There are many other perfectly fine entry points for learning about topics in computer science, cognitive science, or philosophy of mind.
When systems (think "automated" systems like computer programs, mathematical axioms, formal systems, etc, where conclusions can be drawn/calculated "mechanically" from a few starting points) get large enough, they gain the ability to become self-referential. That is, they become expressive enough to encode statements about themselves. A hallmark of this are "incompleteness theorems" like those of Godel or the Turing halting problem.
The book argues that these "strange loops" (of a system onto itself) are behind the emergence of intelligence and consciousness, because physical matter itself gives rise to human intelligence, albeit being a mechanical system.
GEB’s point is that self-reference - the ability for a system to “talk about itself” - is crucial for conciousness and for real artificial intelligence.
I've heard about this book so many times and was interested to read it. But I know that as a non native English reader, my track record against reading English proses is very poor, and looks like lots of value of the book is exactly in the prose? Maybe I'll have to skip this one, unless some brave souls have already translated it.
The Dutch translation of GEB is excellent. I think others, e.g. the French, are also quite good/excellent, potentially because Hofstadter himself was quite involved in the translation process. Hell, much of GEB and especially his later books discuss translation extentensively, so it would be strange if there were authorized translations of GEB that were somehow lacking in quality.
Is it also valid to draw a comparison to Gravity's Rainbow, or parts 2 and 3 of The Divine Comedy? I ask, because those were on a tier of their own for being impenetrable (to me); I'm worried this will go the same way, but am otherwise intrigued.
Unrelated: Does anyone know of how to get an epub etc of this? Unavailable through Amazon etc.
I would suggest against an epub. I tried finding one too, only to realize the formatting of the book is ill-suited for anything but its original printed format (it’s far too particular for the epub format). Maybe give your local library a try?
Hell is just inherently more interesting to the human mind than paradise or purgatory. I read Ulysses with a book group and a leader that had read it in grad school and a number of books that exist to explain Ulysses. I read GEB as a fourteen year old with no internet access and it changed my life, but the ending isn’t that important. The proof of how the incompleteness theorem works and the stuff on Koans is I think most of the meat.
It is funny that you bring Ulysses into it. I’ve tried reading both GEB and Ulysses multiple times and had to concede defeat every time somewhere between the 100 and 200 page mark. The same goes for the satanic verses. I suppose my mind just wants a book to get to the point more than it wants to get to the end.
Ha I tried reading I Am a Strange Loop and found that meandering and verbose too. Didn’t finish it. He really labors the “greater than sum of parts” point for example. Ugh
I wonder if anyone on the Pulitzer Prize committee for GEB understood this was the idea he was attempting to communicate.
There seems to be a large market for books that make dumb people feel smart.
I have not read Ulysses but I have read other works from Joyce and cannot imagine comparing him to Hofstadter. I put GEB in the same mental box as Sophie's World or the Mr. Tompkins books, where story is used as a means to the end of teaching something to an audience that would otherwise find the material unpalatable.
I found this book dull, uninteresting and pretentious. Whatever it tried to say in what 1000 pages could have been said in 200. People will probably recommend it highly in this thread, but here is a vote to just leave it alone. It's just not good if you like pop sci but don't like pretentious fluff around it. It's the least inspiring and mind-blowing book I ever read. This could be related to having read a lot on the topics in the past so the subject matter was familiar, and having zero tolerance for the type of writing in it.
That's the "problem" right there. It wasn't a pop sci book. TBH while Gödel's incompleteness theorem might be seen as "science" subject, it is actually squarely in the realm of meta-mathematics, a branch of philosophy.
The "writing style" is what most would call "literature", which includes prose, poetry, stories, etc. It's not for everyone, for sure, but some people do enjoy it (I occasionally do, but I lose patience.) Calling it "pretentious fluff" sounds a bit extreme.
> This could be related to having read a lot on the topics in the past so the subject matter was familiar
I think you've hit the nail on the head. For many people, this book is their first encounter with much of this material (as it was for me, so long ago.)
For you, it's like reading a tour guide of your home city. You're not the intended audience.
If you're not a reading-for-pleasure person, or GEB's topics just aren't your thing, you're not going to like the book. It's not a technical volume; it's not something you read for skills acquisition.
That's the usual refrain around hyper-preventious navel gazer books. The moment you criticize, your intellect is up for question, because "you didn't understand it".
This form of logical fallacy is the worst in economics and philosophy.
> stuntkite on July 5, 2018 | flag| favorite | next [–]
> I'd owned this book for many years and had a similar experience to OP. But one day someone gave me I am a Strange Loop, which I started reading and enjoyed way more. After getting in a little bit Hofstadter makes some apologies for GEB saying it was the sum of work of a very young person. I think he was 24? I think it's pretty incredible considering his age. The things that lead him to thinking critically about consciousness because of his disabled sister I found to be something that changed not only how I interacted with people that were differently abled, but also changed how I saw my own disabilities. Sure it's more than a bit full of itself, but I can't for the life of me think how I would edit it any differently. It's honest from the place he was standing. With a lot of thought, a desire to share, and a perspective that no one else could just stumble on. IMO, it really does kind of have to be what it is.
> So, I decided to put down IAASL and try to really get through GEB first.. like for real this time... and found an Open Courseware[0] on the book to follow hoping that would help me really cut through it. It did! The trick that did it for me was the prof's suggestion that you just skip the first 300 or so pages and he picked up from there.
> I'd thumbed through it and much like op had "looked" at every page, but once I skipped the first 300 and followed along with the course, it was like butter. There is something funny about all the intro dialogs that can fatigue by the time you get to the meat.
> That said, I really enjoyed his reflection on GEB in IAASL and enjoyed the read of IAASL a lot more. Regardless of what you think about what Hofstadter proposes, I think his contribution to critical exploration of the consciousness is artful and invaluable. I think it's fun, compassionate, and beautiful, and it really changed how I see myself and my environment.
> It sticks with me and I think about it a lot and it makes me happy to share it with people.
I got this book when I was at the first semester of IT. Back in my university town, most students of IT or physics had this book, or lented it from a friend. And we discussed a lot about what was inside.
So I wasn't a seasoned academic, but the new-kid-on-the-block. And my goal while reading was never to understand Gödel. Or to like Bach's music (I actually dislike most of his music). Or to get into arts -- but hey, Escher I like.
My goal was to train my mind. To get into thinking models new to me, because they aren't taught in normal school.
Also, for me this book was an extension. Even while still in normal school, I went to the university library to read "Spektrum der Wissenschaft" (the german version of "Scientific American", but without the nationalism in the title). Many articles were over my top ... but the "Metamagicum" articles I deeply enjoyed. So when this book come out I expected some extension of these articles ... and I was not disappointed.
> I found this book dull, uninteresting and pretentious.
Yup, exactly my thoughts. But for some reason, the HN crowd keeps recommending it. Its gotten previously-- 5-10 years ago, it would be recommended in almost every book recommendation post
Not OP, but as someone who found GEB pretentious, I think the most mind-blowing books I have read were probably Kurt Vonnegut. Mother Night and Timequake probably at the top.
Did you make it to the part about the tortoise and hare problem where he suggests that the book may actually be finished at that point? With the rest of the book as noise that looks suspiciously coherent despite adding nothing new conceptually? At that point I had to read the second half to check LOL
I enjoyed the first part of it, but then ground to a halt about two-thirds of the way through. It became just so much recursive navel-gazing, and I lost interest. Wasn't worth the effort.
I feel exactly the same. It was like 1000 pages of patting himself on the back for being clever. I certainly didn't learn anything and there was very little art to his writing.
same sentiments. i was on 10th page and i was chuckling because i still got no idea what these geeks are talking about. definitely the day i realized im not that smart, too. haha.
Yep. It's like a conspiracy theory cult. I quit after 50 pages and found it to be a pseudoscientific, dilettante intellectual circle jerk ad nauseum desperate for hidden meaning. I'd sooner spend time reading articles from [Big City] Review of [Each Others'] Books.
Yeah, I don't think it is for me either. I tried a few times but always found that the style of writing is so strange: if this is a science book, I expect succinct style. Instead, I found the dialogs of Achilles and the turtle are just abominable. What the heck are the intention of the author? Just write it like a science text book and I will probably get it. Also, as a big fan of Bach this book has less than 5% content about Bach.
I'm going to try and explain why it made a difference in my life as briefly as I can.
I read it in the early 90s as a teenager at a community college in the suburbs, along with the Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, at a point in my life when I was struggling with having a lot of doubt about Catholicism, and the _one_ thing that was keeping me from just giving up on religion entirely was that I just couldn't understand how the experience of _being_ could be anything but a spiritual soul, and those two books gave me the intellectual tools to basically completely rebuild my entire conception of what and who I was -- which is to say that I could finally see consciousness as the an emergent property of ordinary matter, and the relationship between consciousness and computation.
It's an experience you can only have if you read the right books at the right time in your life. You can only be exposed to any particular idea for the first time once in your life, and if they ideas in those books are not new to you, I'm sure you'll find GEB pretentious and ponderous or whatever, but for me it was like fireworks going off on every page. I read it and reread it and took notes on it and used it as a launching point for more reading for years afterwards.
edit with some extra thoughts: Keep in mind this book was written in 1979, when vanishingly few people had access to computers, let alone the internet. There was no wikipedia you could go to to scratch an itch about some topic. GEB is encyclopedic in scope and meandering because it _had to be_, he couldn't expect an audience who were familiar with _computers_ let alone artificial intelligence and set theory. It's really extraordinary that it's accessible as it is, given the breadth that it covered.
Today, given the advances in all the things he was talking about, I would think it's mostly interesting to read for historical reasons.
Funny, I did pretty much the same journey when I was young. As I grew older, I became disenchanted and eventually journeyed all the way back.
There are questions about conscience, the origin of the universe, the ultimate nature of reality, etc. that we haven't answered yet and perhaps never will. We have theories and we have models. We don't know which theories are correct yet and, if we eventually find a model that seems to work, we might not even be sure if it reflects reality or simply predicts it (like Newton's equations).
Furthermore, not all questions can be answered in this way. Every ethics system is grounded on metaphysics in one way or another: on concepts which are completely human-made, culturally-dependent, non-observable. Even the most Darwinian doctrines do this: genes don't actually "want" to be preserved and passed on, any more than rocks "want" to fall. Religions are simply more explicit about this than other belief systems.
Finally, it certainly doesn't help Dawkins and his followers that, despite claiming to be on the side of reason and truth, systematically let their judgements be influenced by their prejudices and preconceived notions. A more informed and grounded view of history would understand that a notion of the transcendent and the divine was the foundation for much of the progress of humanity.
So true. In the end, any truth is anchored in a beliefs system and you have to chose yours (or ignore that you've chosen one). Better chose one that helps you live a good and happy life...
I find Penrose's argument uncompelling: he doesn't see how ordinary physics could result in the sensation of beingness and experience, and we don't really understand quantum mechanics, therefore quantum mechanics is responsible for consciousness. (obviously, his book works on it for 500 pages so my summary is a parody, but that was the gist as far as I can remember)
The Lucas-Penrose argument is not generally accepted among philosophers. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean it fails - truth isn't a popularity contest - but it does indicate there are some subtleties at play here; it's not so obvious Emperor of the Mind/Shadows of the Mind succeeds in its argument.
I can't recommend The Selfish Gene enough. I wish it was mandatory reading in school or something. Contrary to GEB it is very accessible and a phenomenal introduction to the theory of evolution. It gets a point across, school books don't.
However, Richard Dawkins has become a very detestable person, cringeworthy culture warrior, rage beneficiary. So, make what you want with that info. Maybe consider a library or pirate the audio book.
I found the book a little depressing eg. the quote on the cover of some editions “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.”
He got a bit more upbeat in later books. I'm not sure Dawkins is detestable but he's a bit humorless at times. The Telegraph has quite a good article on his culture war stuff https://archive.ph/kNJXN
> However, Richard Dawkins has become a very detestable person, cringeworthy culture warrior, rage beneficiary.
Yeah.. My personal introduction to Dawkins was actually some TV documentary he made that covered about the same topics as the God Delusion, then I read the book itself. Only after that I read the Selfish Gene, which IMHO philosophically was a much more interesting book.
I did sort-of follow the "new atheism" movement for a time, the "four horsemen" and all that [1]. But it seemed to pretty quickly spiral into the cringy culture war thing you mention, so I stopped.
[1] I don't agree with many of the things Christopher Hitchens said, but damn he was a good orator and public debater.
Every book about the nature of consciousness has problems. It's not a solved problem. For me it wasn't the details but just laying out the landscape and I could see how to get there from here, if that makes sense.
GEB is crucial reading in that if you want to appear intellectually superior all you have to do is sprinkle “Ho ho! Much like the eternal golden braid I must say!” into conversation and no one will call you out on it or ask you to extrapolate (or if in the off chance that they do, you can say anything and still get away with it)
The best response to someone bringing up GEB in casual conversation is to look them dead in the eye and simply say “I have also read that book.”
This will instantly create palatable tension and a change of topic
When someone enthusiastically mentions something they liked and wanted to talk about and you immediately take a shit on it, it's not really a surprise that this creates "palatable tension" and a change of subject (and likely a longer-term wariness to share when talking to you). If you really dislike discussing related topics, there are surely less condescending ways of expressing that.
They’re implying that many people use it as a way to take some moral high ground in a conversation, not knowing that others might also have acquired this ‘intellectual power’.
I took the book with me on holiday and I couldn't put it down, almost literally reading right up until lights out each night. I was surprised and somewhat disappointed to be done in short time. The literary writing combined with the deep mathematical/philosophical meanings is entrancing.
I don't often get to meet people IRL who have read the book and wish I had more opportunities to discuss it. One (of the many things) that stuck out to me was the idea of foreground and background. Prime numbers to me is background that remains when you construct all the composite numbers, so technically they're 'non-composite' lacking the property of being a product of distinct numbers.
> GEB is crucial reading in that if you want to appear intellectually superior... This will instantly create palatable tension and a change of topic
Ouch... Why would you assume that the other party's goal is to appear "superior", and not that they are legitimately passionate about something? Do you dislike when people are passionate about topics that don't interest you? Or do you just believe that it is fair to assume that everyone who outwardly likes this book is secretly doing so because they want to seem smart or something? Or something else?
This is my impression as well. Kinda similar in its "bragging rights" to The Art of Computer Programming.
GEB was a frustrating read. I mean, it's interesting in places, but it's just all over the place, jumping between many different topics. The central theme is meant to be the strange loops, but it's IMHO not very interesting concept and his application on the cognition is just author's personal conjecture.
It's utterly unlike TAOCP. One is a comprehensive algorithms reference full of (hard) technical problems. The other is an extended personal essay. (Neither one is worth "bragging" about reading in my opinion.)
"Reading" all of TAOCP would take literally years of intense effort even if you set aside all other activity. There are a lot of great problems inside, and plenty of dry humor, and I would recommend people try to at least skim sections of TAOCP which seem interesting or relevant to their work, but very few people are going to even nominally work through the whole thing, and the people who might are professional scholars of the topic.
Reading GEB can be done leisurely over the course of a few days or maybe weeks, depending on how much time someone spends reading every day. It's not quite as easy a read as a pulp novel or comic book, but it also doesn't take any inordinate amount of work to make basic sense of, or require any special skills or background understanding to start on. It's a fun book to hand to a ~13–16 year old.
This is very different from my experience. Whenever someone I was in a conversation with brought up GEB, it was always a great pleasure of mine. I'd get the chance to discuss the main ideas of the book, and the way I assimilated them. I tend to not even engage in conversations with people who do it mostly to show off the extent of their knowledge. I believe this second point is the important one. GEB is completely orthogonal to the problem you describe.
Your response to somebody appearing to be intellectually superior because they bring up GEB is to act even more intellectually superior? It sounds like you feel you're so far beyond them, you won't even engage in a discussion about it.
Or you can read it and not tell anyone. This comment is a pretty pathetic attempt at shaming anyone who displays even a modicum of discourse higher than the baser level. Congratulations.
This is funny but GEB is also good so you wouldn't want it to go much further than this. Congratulations for getting there, now it would be great if you could focus that same energy on shooting down people trying to build upon or me-too this snark.
It is a good book, but it is a shame that so many pitch it as being a portal into a new and transcendent plane of understanding. Especially with it being a rather difficult read it leads to people trying to get more out of it than was in it to begin with.
To quote one of my professors from back in the day: “Life is short and you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to”
I loved this book when I was young. Like 16 years old or so. I am still very interested in things like formal systems and automated theorem proving and that started with this book. However, when I now look at the main idea of the book I find it quite cringeworthy, because, besides when he is speaking about real mathematics and science, much of it is very speculative and probably just false. At best it can be thought provoking, but I think it is just not very nice to immediately answer the some very real questions with highly speculative answers. It snared up the admiration of my 16-year-old self pretty effectively, though.
I loved GEB, I read it twice and found it mind-blowing.
That said, I don't think it was life-changing in the sense that it gave me any interesting perspective on life in any way. I didn't find any of the philosophies to be useful in that sense.
However, what the book does do, is manage to explain an incredibly complex, deep mathematical theorem while using almost no mathematical notation. It does it all mostly through similes and wordplay and art, which is quite brilliant.
One of the great things about the book is that even if you give up on the math, you can still appreciate each chapter as clever writing in its own right.
"The Dice Man" by Luke Reinhart. In my teens it didn't hurt that it had some pretty intense pornographic sex scenes, but the real takeaway - the idea that there is no "singular you", just a swirling multitudes who bob to the surface for attention depending on the context ... yeah, that changed my perspective on life.
Too bad about the misogyny. Might even have been racist, but I don't remember that.
When I was working on m Masters degree in Electrical Engineering way back in 1978, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth :) I had a prof who was really amazing, he was a Comp Sci prof and he gave me a copy of GEB and it changed my life. OK, I'm probably overstating a bit, but that first edition copy, it's one of my prized possessions. Even to this day, every once in a while I pull it out and re-read a chapter.
Same. It has the exact same junior high-school giddiness of excitement as The Martian, another book that I just couldn't tonally work my way through.
I don't mind books that explain concepts in fun ways, but I do find it jarring if I'm being treated like a child with an overbearing parent, telling me why I should be excited about something instead of just telling the story and letting me feel how I want to feel about it.
I wanted to love this book. I understood the concepts and found them legitimately thought provoking - I just disliked the writing style. He uses elaborate metaphors, strained socratic dialogue, peppered with cultural references and visual cues... and relatively few paragraphs actually articulating the core ideas. I only understood Godel's incompleteness theorem when I looked it up elsewhere. It's like he focused entirely on the mystical "look how deep all this stuff is..." story and forgot to actually explain the subject at hand.
I share your experience and I've tried it three times. Couldn't get through any of his Metamagical Themas articles in Scientific American, either. I thought he was in love with writing, not communicating, and didn't want to remove a word once he'd put it down.
I'm also struggling with it despite having it on my bookshelf for a while. Not an easy read. It's cited and referred to all over the place, so maybe it's worth getting through it.
I would say give yourself license to skip some stuff, the parable stuff (for instance) is either super fun or a chore, depending on the mood you are in. A lot of the Achilles stuff is more akin to poetry instead of an illuminating guide.
There's a point in the middle where he's building a foundation of formal systems that's a real slog. If you push through that, it gets progressively more interesting.
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So why would you abuse your reader by making it a pain in the ass to figure out what you mean? I know there are some fancy arguments around stretching limits of language, but none of them seemed all that sensible to me. The only advantage I see to obscurantist writing is that it makes it impossible to critique the philosophers work. Any critique will just be met by the response that you didn't fully understand the author's argument. The Searle/Derrida debates are a great example of this. The upshot is that people spend all their time debating what you actually mean. Which I guess is good for the philosopher's brand, but doesn't advance knowledge much.
This isn't to say that you can't have beautiful writing in philosophy. I think Gaston Bachelard is a great example of both an elegant writer and a clear writer.
That being said, people really really love GEB, so it probably is worth reading regardless of these misgivings. One of these days I'll get to it.
I think this statement is both wrong and irrelevant.
Wrong: if you look into GEB, you notice that is has many chapters. And each chapter works on some topic --- and the chapters itself aren't a pain in the ass to figure out what they mean. Not at all. Each chapter transports its goal quite nicely and timely.
Irrelevant: this book is not an academical paper. It's a book meant to amuse you, to enlighten you, to sharpen your thinking skills. An academic paper describing just how Gödel's work works can be a *LOT* thinner --- but, usually, is also a lot dryer.
It's actually the case that this book gives you many good things that help you to understand (and accept or dismiss) such academic papers easier. But even here, mind the "many", if you expect "all" from the book, then you'll be dissatisfied.
I also wouldn't say that GEB is a philosophical book, at least not in the way modern philosophy is understood. If you see it as a book dedicated to like ("philo") wisdom ("sophie"), then it is. But so are most after books in the IT field.
A psychonaout or a shaman would argue some insights are only available on a drug infused spiritual trip.
Musicians talk of flow.
That state of discombobulation you dislike is not to meant to furnish you with answers but rather with new dots to notice and connect on your own. Not everything is a mathematical proof.
I think the real reason this sort of style isn't attractive is because many try to emulate it who lack the talent and then it truly is noise. It is a lot to ask from a reader and the value is rarely there that is well observed.
But sometimes the payoff is worth it. GBE resonates with a lot of people.
Details are important because they are little parts that support the likelihood of the larger point being true. If the details don't work it's likely because the theory is innacurate.
I'd argue that point. Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) comes to my mind first. Art contains and conveys truth.
Nietzsche's work is also a good example about why it's foolish to argue too much about what an author meant. He wasn't always clear in his thoughts - just like us all - and his thinking changed considerably anyway.
This is a funny thing to say about a discipline that was more or less founded by Plato, who was notably obscurantist if not outright esoteric.
In any case, philosophy is not always about making a point and there is not always a point to be made. Sometimes it's just asking questions.
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I think the problem is a cultural conflict between sub-concious problemsolvers and "concious" problem solvers. The later expect a algorithm , step by step instruction from the former, who when this is demanded, use there subconcious to produce a plausible story. When asked for there inspirations to deduce the process yourself, you get a crows nest of shiny things, bits and pieces, not making a reasonable whole - but they infuriatingly at the end of day do.
Why not accept that there are things you can not directly communicate with and if you are hellbent on becoming such a thing, there is no step-by-step instruction.
Did you read Robert Kegan "The Evolving Self"? It was pretty popular at HN some time ago. Robert Kegan stretching limits of language and he's got a reason: he introduces some notions like "culture of embeddedness" that you just can't define in a way like dictionaries do, one cannot simply get to a point. Kegan uses another approach, he gives his reader an experience that makes her to understand "culture of embeddedness".
Philosophy by definition deals with uncategorised (or poorly categorised) aspects of our world, with aspects that have no good language to talk about them. Anything that was categorised to a point when there is an accepted language to talk about it is not a philosophy, it is a science or something. Philosophy makes first attempts to categorise and when philosophers found a way then a new branch of science emerges.
When you try to talk about uncategorised things, you just can't talk about it. For example, lets assume that there are no widely accepted categorisation of colors, but you've developed one including names for colors like "blue", "red", "magenta" and so on. How you could communicate your ideas to others? The only way I know is to point to different examples of blue and say "blue", point to red and say "red". You need to lead your audience through experiences of blue/red/magenta while they train their neurons to classify them and only then you can refer to their experiences with words "blue", "red", "magenta" to convey the idea that they always appear in a rainbow in the same sequence. While you keep pointing at different colors saying their names, your audience will probably think, that it takes too long for you to get to a point.
I didn't read GEB, so I cannot say how this reason to "stretch limits of language" relates to it, but you've sad that you know no good reason for such stretching, and I hope that now you know at least one reason for it.
The point of a book is to get the reader to reach a certain understanding. Every brain is different and while one literary path might get some readers to that destination, other paths may be required for others. But there is no singular point of understanding that exists solely at the end of that path. The path itself is what builds that understanding.
Part of the art of writing is covering a large enough space of multiple paths to get most readers there without too many of them getting lost.
I was always apprehensive of reading Ulysses… until I did. And then I read some basic analysis of it and then read it again and now I’m slightly baffled why people find it _that_ difficult. Yes it’s not at all typical but it’s really not that hard and it’s definitely no Finnegan’s Wake. Now that’s a challenge!
If your ideas about cooking come from watching Masterchef (analogously), you might treat the idea of making a beurre blanc as a similar act of conquest, triumph in the face of splitting adversity whilst a thousand-voice choir crescendos in the background as you whisk. But a million french housewives happily made it for decades having never been told it’s impossible, and indeed knowing better that it isn’t.
To be sure, you certainly didn't mean it this way, but for the sake of the poor guy who has seen GEB touted as one of these books that "every programmer/computer scientist/CS major has to read" and sees your post in the same light:
You don't have to read GEB. You will be a fine techie without reading it. And you'll be a fine person in general without reading it. There is no spiritual revelation you can only get from GEB or some important technical knowledge that you'll get that you wouldn't get from a normal CS degree program. Try it out and see if you enjoy Hofstadter's writing - if you do, you might be in for a really enlightening and enjoyable experience. If you don't, no worries - your time is better spent elsewhere - there is no need to put yourself through the pain of slogging through a >700 page book that you don't enjoy. There are many other perfectly fine entry points for learning about topics in computer science, cognitive science, or philosophy of mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92WHN-pAFCs
And it's an absolutely brilliant - and very direct - exposition of Alan Turing's Halting theorem.
(unfortunately I can't find analogues of this for many other related subjects)
Some people are saying that GEB is too convoluted, but the base material absolutely doesn't need to be.
Ok, for us the lazy, what is mother fucking the point of GEB? A single HN karma point from me is on offer for the honest answers.
The book argues that these "strange loops" (of a system onto itself) are behind the emergence of intelligence and consciousness, because physical matter itself gives rise to human intelligence, albeit being a mechanical system.
— Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, p. 363
I read it in Italian as a teen, the Italian edition is beautiful, and incredibly well translated (the book includes many puns and language tricks.)
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Unrelated: Does anyone know of how to get an epub etc of this? Unavailable through Amazon etc.
Actually, the original article did that. I just followed the author's lead here.
I can also recommend Metamagical Themas from Hofstadter. It's a collection of articles he wrote for Scientific American.
ps. Haven't read the novel yet, it is in my queue.
That's the "problem" right there. It wasn't a pop sci book. TBH while Gödel's incompleteness theorem might be seen as "science" subject, it is actually squarely in the realm of meta-mathematics, a branch of philosophy.
The "writing style" is what most would call "literature", which includes prose, poetry, stories, etc. It's not for everyone, for sure, but some people do enjoy it (I occasionally do, but I lose patience.) Calling it "pretentious fluff" sounds a bit extreme.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. For many people, this book is their first encounter with much of this material (as it was for me, so long ago.)
For you, it's like reading a tour guide of your home city. You're not the intended audience.
That's the usual refrain around hyper-preventious navel gazer books. The moment you criticize, your intellect is up for question, because "you didn't understand it".
This form of logical fallacy is the worst in economics and philosophy.
> stuntkite on July 5, 2018 | flag| favorite | next [–]
> I'd owned this book for many years and had a similar experience to OP. But one day someone gave me I am a Strange Loop, which I started reading and enjoyed way more. After getting in a little bit Hofstadter makes some apologies for GEB saying it was the sum of work of a very young person. I think he was 24? I think it's pretty incredible considering his age. The things that lead him to thinking critically about consciousness because of his disabled sister I found to be something that changed not only how I interacted with people that were differently abled, but also changed how I saw my own disabilities. Sure it's more than a bit full of itself, but I can't for the life of me think how I would edit it any differently. It's honest from the place he was standing. With a lot of thought, a desire to share, and a perspective that no one else could just stumble on. IMO, it really does kind of have to be what it is.
> So, I decided to put down IAASL and try to really get through GEB first.. like for real this time... and found an Open Courseware[0] on the book to follow hoping that would help me really cut through it. It did! The trick that did it for me was the prof's suggestion that you just skip the first 300 or so pages and he picked up from there.
> I'd thumbed through it and much like op had "looked" at every page, but once I skipped the first 300 and followed along with the course, it was like butter. There is something funny about all the intro dialogs that can fatigue by the time you get to the meat.
> That said, I really enjoyed his reflection on GEB in IAASL and enjoyed the read of IAASL a lot more. Regardless of what you think about what Hofstadter proposes, I think his contribution to critical exploration of the consciousness is artful and invaluable. I think it's fun, compassionate, and beautiful, and it really changed how I see myself and my environment.
> It sticks with me and I think about it a lot and it makes me happy to share it with people.
> [0] https://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/humanities-and-social-scienc...
and they're under a cc-by-nc-sa license, so share and enjoy; piracy is always an act of benevolence, but in this case it's even legal
(the mind you save could be your own)
I got this book when I was at the first semester of IT. Back in my university town, most students of IT or physics had this book, or lented it from a friend. And we discussed a lot about what was inside.
So I wasn't a seasoned academic, but the new-kid-on-the-block. And my goal while reading was never to understand Gödel. Or to like Bach's music (I actually dislike most of his music). Or to get into arts -- but hey, Escher I like.
My goal was to train my mind. To get into thinking models new to me, because they aren't taught in normal school.
Also, for me this book was an extension. Even while still in normal school, I went to the university library to read "Spektrum der Wissenschaft" (the german version of "Scientific American", but without the nationalism in the title). Many articles were over my top ... but the "Metamagicum" articles I deeply enjoyed. So when this book come out I expected some extension of these articles ... and I was not disappointed.
Yup, exactly my thoughts. But for some reason, the HN crowd keeps recommending it. Its gotten previously-- 5-10 years ago, it would be recommended in almost every book recommendation post
For me this was one of those books that was more about the journey than the destination.
2001: A Space Odyssey could easily be trimmed to 25 minutes or less if all you care about is the plot. But should it?
I read it in the early 90s as a teenager at a community college in the suburbs, along with the Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, at a point in my life when I was struggling with having a lot of doubt about Catholicism, and the _one_ thing that was keeping me from just giving up on religion entirely was that I just couldn't understand how the experience of _being_ could be anything but a spiritual soul, and those two books gave me the intellectual tools to basically completely rebuild my entire conception of what and who I was -- which is to say that I could finally see consciousness as the an emergent property of ordinary matter, and the relationship between consciousness and computation.
It's an experience you can only have if you read the right books at the right time in your life. You can only be exposed to any particular idea for the first time once in your life, and if they ideas in those books are not new to you, I'm sure you'll find GEB pretentious and ponderous or whatever, but for me it was like fireworks going off on every page. I read it and reread it and took notes on it and used it as a launching point for more reading for years afterwards.
edit with some extra thoughts: Keep in mind this book was written in 1979, when vanishingly few people had access to computers, let alone the internet. There was no wikipedia you could go to to scratch an itch about some topic. GEB is encyclopedic in scope and meandering because it _had to be_, he couldn't expect an audience who were familiar with _computers_ let alone artificial intelligence and set theory. It's really extraordinary that it's accessible as it is, given the breadth that it covered.
Today, given the advances in all the things he was talking about, I would think it's mostly interesting to read for historical reasons.
There are questions about conscience, the origin of the universe, the ultimate nature of reality, etc. that we haven't answered yet and perhaps never will. We have theories and we have models. We don't know which theories are correct yet and, if we eventually find a model that seems to work, we might not even be sure if it reflects reality or simply predicts it (like Newton's equations).
Furthermore, not all questions can be answered in this way. Every ethics system is grounded on metaphysics in one way or another: on concepts which are completely human-made, culturally-dependent, non-observable. Even the most Darwinian doctrines do this: genes don't actually "want" to be preserved and passed on, any more than rocks "want" to fall. Religions are simply more explicit about this than other belief systems.
Finally, it certainly doesn't help Dawkins and his followers that, despite claiming to be on the side of reason and truth, systematically let their judgements be influenced by their prejudices and preconceived notions. A more informed and grounded view of history would understand that a notion of the transcendent and the divine was the foundation for much of the progress of humanity.
The Lucas-Penrose argument is not generally accepted among philosophers. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean it fails - truth isn't a popularity contest - but it does indicate there are some subtleties at play here; it's not so obvious Emperor of the Mind/Shadows of the Mind succeeds in its argument.
However, Richard Dawkins has become a very detestable person, cringeworthy culture warrior, rage beneficiary. So, make what you want with that info. Maybe consider a library or pirate the audio book.
He got a bit more upbeat in later books. I'm not sure Dawkins is detestable but he's a bit humorless at times. The Telegraph has quite a good article on his culture war stuff https://archive.ph/kNJXN
Yeah.. My personal introduction to Dawkins was actually some TV documentary he made that covered about the same topics as the God Delusion, then I read the book itself. Only after that I read the Selfish Gene, which IMHO philosophically was a much more interesting book.
I did sort-of follow the "new atheism" movement for a time, the "four horsemen" and all that [1]. But it seemed to pretty quickly spiral into the cringy culture war thing you mention, so I stopped.
[1] I don't agree with many of the things Christopher Hitchens said, but damn he was a good orator and public debater.
I believe Hofstadter does as well and he's become critical of his earlier work.
The best response to someone bringing up GEB in casual conversation is to look them dead in the eye and simply say “I have also read that book.”
This will instantly create palatable tension and a change of topic
When someone enthusiastically mentions something they liked and wanted to talk about and you immediately take a shit on it, it's not really a surprise that this creates "palatable tension" and a change of subject (and likely a longer-term wariness to share when talking to you). If you really dislike discussing related topics, there are surely less condescending ways of expressing that.
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I don't often get to meet people IRL who have read the book and wish I had more opportunities to discuss it. One (of the many things) that stuck out to me was the idea of foreground and background. Prime numbers to me is background that remains when you construct all the composite numbers, so technically they're 'non-composite' lacking the property of being a product of distinct numbers.
Ouch... Why would you assume that the other party's goal is to appear "superior", and not that they are legitimately passionate about something? Do you dislike when people are passionate about topics that don't interest you? Or do you just believe that it is fair to assume that everyone who outwardly likes this book is secretly doing so because they want to seem smart or something? Or something else?
GEB was a frustrating read. I mean, it's interesting in places, but it's just all over the place, jumping between many different topics. The central theme is meant to be the strange loops, but it's IMHO not very interesting concept and his application on the cognition is just author's personal conjecture.
"Reading" all of TAOCP would take literally years of intense effort even if you set aside all other activity. There are a lot of great problems inside, and plenty of dry humor, and I would recommend people try to at least skim sections of TAOCP which seem interesting or relevant to their work, but very few people are going to even nominally work through the whole thing, and the people who might are professional scholars of the topic.
Reading GEB can be done leisurely over the course of a few days or maybe weeks, depending on how much time someone spends reading every day. It's not quite as easy a read as a pulp novel or comic book, but it also doesn't take any inordinate amount of work to make basic sense of, or require any special skills or background understanding to start on. It's a fun book to hand to a ~13–16 year old.
Or bragging rights to "The Anatomy of Lisp"!
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
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To quote one of my professors from back in the day: “Life is short and you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to”
That said, I don't think it was life-changing in the sense that it gave me any interesting perspective on life in any way. I didn't find any of the philosophies to be useful in that sense.
However, what the book does do, is manage to explain an incredibly complex, deep mathematical theorem while using almost no mathematical notation. It does it all mostly through similes and wordplay and art, which is quite brilliant.
One of the great things about the book is that even if you give up on the math, you can still appreciate each chapter as clever writing in its own right.
Too bad about the misogyny. Might even have been racist, but I don't remember that.
Maybe I should give it another try...
I don't mind books that explain concepts in fun ways, but I do find it jarring if I'm being treated like a child with an overbearing parent, telling me why I should be excited about something instead of just telling the story and letting me feel how I want to feel about it.