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Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid View Larger Image | Douglas R. Hofstadter
Basic Books, Paperback, Published January 1999, 777 pages, ISBN 0465026567 | List Price: $22.00
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Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of "maps"
or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal
system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports
it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness
can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers
attain human intelligence. Gödel Escher and Bach is a wonderful exploration
of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction,
recursion, and much more.
Reviews
“EGB's greatest accomplishment is to show that the austere and frigid world
of pure mathematics is by no means as remote from the two worlds of art and music
as the humanist in the street believes it to be. Hofstader guides his uninitiated
reader through level after level of the mathematical funhouse, not only explaining
its layout but also conveying a sense of the wonder and the beauty that do, in
fact, reside there.
— Walter Kendrick, Village Voice
“I cannot begin to do justice to the wealth of suggestive analyses in
Hofstader's book. In its 700 odd pages, he reviews a wide range of mathematical-type
operations: 'recursion,' (an entity embedded within a larger version of the
same entity, like a story within a story); 'strange loops' (systems in which
one can start at a point and then work through a number of levels, only to find
oneself at the beginning again); systems reflecting upon or referring to themselves,
and numerous others. Patiently he explains and explores their manifestations
not only in their original, mathematical guise but also in the analogous realms
of music, verbal play, and pictures.
— Howard Gardner, Psychology Today
“Having taken Gödel, Escher, Bach off the shelf, I indulged myself by
rereading it for the first time in years. I enjoyed it and appreciated it more
than I did sixteen years ago. At that time, I did not sufficiently appreciate
the extraordinary patience and clarity and enjoyability of the presentation
of the basic structure of Gödel's theorem and its underlying concepts -- formal
proof, logic and metalogic, and self-reference. All this is presented in a form
accessible to the lay reader with no cheating or inaccuracy, and with the omission
only of the number-theoretic details of Gödel's proof. Having spent the last
thirteen years trying to teach and write, I now marvel at Hofstader's pedagogical
skill at presenting this difficult material.
— Ernest Davis, IEEE Expert
“A classic dinner-party game I like to play is to ask my guests what
science book published, say, during the past 25 years they would take if they
were to be stranded indefinitely on a desert island. For me the choice is easy:
I would grab a copy of copy of Douglas Hofstader's Godel, Escher, Bach (GEB)
before abandoning ship. Alternating witty, enlightening dialogues with chapters
on such meaty topics as self-reference, recursion, meaning in mathematics, wonderful
art of M. C. Escher, minds, thoughts, typesetting, Gödelian paradoxes, self-replication,
artificial intelligence and heirarchies, GEB is more like a summary statement
of most of modern cognitive science than a thematic book, more of a romp over
the modern intellectual landscape than a scholarly monograph. Yet it manages
to be all these things and more.
— John L. Casti, Nature
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