Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

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It's a hit!

When GEB was first published,the reviews and enthusiasm were endless. It's a brilliant introduction to recursion, said many. No, it's an introducti... (show more)

When GEB was first published,the reviews and enthusiasm were endless. It's a brilliant introduction to recursion, said many. No, it's an introduction to, and demonstration of Godel incompleteness, said others. It's a demonstration of the commonality of art and science, said others. And there's something about ants near the end, but we're not sure why.

Readers today echo the same sentiments. They're all right, in their own way- but none of these views really get at what Hofsteader was trying to do. Yes, GEB is a tuorial on Godel, Bach, ants, recursion and a dozen other esoteric topics, and it's a heck of an intellectual entertainment, but Hofsteader didn't just write GEB to show prove what a clever book he could write. At the core, GEB is, first and formost, a theory of Artifical Intelligence; all the bits on Godel, recursion and combinations are just a tutorial to bring the reader up to speed for what's about to follow.

When GEB was first published, the dominant paradigm in AI was top-down; you built inference engines, programmed them with high-level knowledge about systems, and tried to get them to generalize from their. To a small minority- including Hofstader- this begged the really important questions: Where did the ability to make inferences come from in the first place? How was knowledge represented?

A few pioneers then- people like John Holland- were looking at bottom-up models in which one posited the simplest levels of an organization- the individual elements and the rules of interconnection and communication. They reasoned that that's what the brain was, so if you couldn't derive AI from a model that echoed the brain, you weren't really proving anything. It was from this perspective that GEB was written, and given the state of AI at the time, it's not surprising that most readers- even the most enthusiastic among them- totally missed the point.

Today, the bottom-up, or connectionist paradigm is gaining new respectability, and the work over the last few decades in complexity theory has given us more insight into the mechanisms of connectionism. Reading GEB in that context, not only is Hofstader's thesis much clearer, but the book appears that much more brilliant and prescient, given when it was first written.

If you've never read GEB, read it it now, and then read George Dyson's "Darwin Among the Machines", Waldrop's "Complexity", Resnick's "Turtles, Termites and Traffic James", and John Holland's "Hidden Order". If you've read GEB before, take a look at those same books and then go back and reread GEB. You'll see it in an entirely new light. (show less)

 

 

by Michael Edelman

No, it's a flop!

Pretentious crap. Hofstadter is about as interesting and insightful as a 14-year-old stoner who got a hold of some of his dad's reference books. Th... (show more)

Pretentious crap. Hofstadter is about as interesting and insightful as a 14-year-old stoner who got a hold of some of his dad's reference books. The actual content of this book could fit in under a hundred pages, but Hofstadter feels it necessary to pack on pages upon pages upon pages of barely-relevant filler, much of it apparently just to show off with the fact that he read some classical Greek poetry once.

To be fair, it is a very ambitious book, and one that could have turned out very interestingly, but it's also plainly obvious Hofstadter just wasn't up to the job. The whole thing is a massive (and I do mean that literally) waste of time, though since it does have a knack for making dumb people feel smart, it will undoubtedly appeal to the xkcd crowd.
Even if none of them will ever actually finish the whole thing. (show less)

 

 

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  At about seven hundred and fifty pages, here's a book that gives a facade of typical long and technical doorstoppers. This is one of the longest books I've read, and yet it felt uncharacteristically like a breeze to traipse through. I was eager to find the time to finish the compound, stacked ideas Hofstadter presented elegantly in each chapter.

  An artifact from the early 80s, the book is really an old favorite of the time. I spoke to a number of people who remembered the impact of the book ... (show more)

  At about seven hundred and fifty pages, here's a book that gives a facade of typical long and technical doorstoppers. This is one of the longest books I've read, and yet it felt uncharacteristically like a breeze to traipse through. I was eager to find the time to finish the compound, stacked ideas Hofstadter presented elegantly in each chapter.

  An artifact from the early 80s, the book is really an old favorite of the time. I spoke to a number of people who remembered the impact of the book and the author during that time. Basically, the influence was limited in a liberal sense to the science and ethics worlds. I find it strange that the ideas in this piece are not still regularly referenced, for though technology and psychology evolve at a blinding rate relative to the rest of the world, Hofstadter speaks in both terms that are fluid and terms that are speculative and hauntingly accurate. In short, it seems he is slightly ahead of his time, and yet (again, surprisingly) he is also modest and open to debate.

  There is so much to be said about the themes in An Eternal Golden Braid. First of all, there are so many themes. Second of all, they are so well integrated, that the work appears as an exhaustive dissertation with a single focus. This single focus is debatable, but based on repetition, I believe Hofstadter aims to present the history, challenges and current state of computerized technology with regards to its most bold branch, Artificial Intelligence.

  Now, of course, one cannot simply talk of computer power in isolation when the goal is to predict the possibility of creating something so mechanically diverse and cascaded as the human mind (and body). Whereas many popular thinkers of the 20th century forget how complex an instance of anything can be, Hofstadter pushes to take as much into consideration as the bounds of his thoughts can include. In this way, the author has become a symbol for something I continue to notice about my thoughts when I consider the world. I enjoy that his reasoning about a hypothetical event involving simple physics can lead to a chain of self-rebuttals when many other traits or properties, however obscure or seemingly irrelevant, are taken into account as possibly altering the outcome of the event. This is something I do with my own hypotheticals, annoying though it may be to bystanders only interested in most likely outcomes (the pragmatic approach).

  One might notice the book also center-stages three well known thinkers: Kurt Gödel, M. C. Escher, and J. S. Bach. Hofstadter is a huge fan of fuzzy areas in sensory media, images, sounds, and modes of logic that invoke some strange feeling inside human beings. In this book, the most important is the blanket concept of isomorphism, the transfer of an idea from one form or output to another (i.e.: a metaphor in practice). Both Bach and Escher (and later in the book, Magritte) used isomorphisms in their arts to enhance the feeling, because they knew how powerful the connection was even if the listener could not at once notice what was happening. Such isomorphisms include: playing a melody, then playing it backwards later; presenting a melody, then presenting that melody later with a different starting note; drawing a picture of the artist drawing the picture; copying the details of the figure of a drawing in its ground, etc...Such repetition, especially in visual art, is easily recognizable by humans, but machines are not built to realize the tedium of their experience (or at least, few of them were in 1979, but still, on a higher level, there was repetition that the system was not able to pick up on, operating only on the levels which it was designed to work).

  By citing this argument as well as many others, Hofstadter assembles to posit that while Artificial Intelligence is ultimately possible -- since it is a mechanical thing however complex -- we humans have much longer than we think to go to get to the point where we can present computers that think as defined by the way we think. He also points out that as technology approaches singularity with human intelligence, the functionality and appearance of the mechanism doing the thinking becomes more and more of a direct isomorphism to the way humans think.

  This review is just a small taste of the worlds Hofstadter visits in his quest to unify (or is he reducing?) the channels of thought. Hofstadter dives into: language & meaning, ant colonies, sound waves, mirrored video output, formal systems & number theory, neural networks, DNA replication & protein links, active symbols & the idea of self, deciphering, puns, human vs. machine spatial reasoning, Zen koans, infinite regress, holism vs. reductionism, faith, patterns and isomorphisms between levels of context, and so so so much more.

  Even if you aren't all that into the deeper areas of this book, you will enjoy the fun dialogues inserted between each chapter which help to exemplify some thought in the previous chapter(s), and help to introduce an idea in the future chapter(s). These dialogues were inspired mostly by a Lewis Carroll dialogue between a Tortoise and Achilles concerning an example of infinite regress. each one carries the name of a Bach piece from his musical offering, historically explained in the introduction. But there's more! Almost each piece uses isomorphism to translate the structure of that Bach piece into how it would appear as a dialogue or words and concepts instead of notes and melodies. None is so entertaining and well written as the Crab Canon, which, like the crab, exits the way it enters, except backwards. (show less)

   

   

  by Tyler Keyes on Jun 11, 2009 at 07:45PM

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  The first part is a classic. It uses a playful in innovative format to discuss recursion, self-reference and pattern, among others, and how they emerge in the works of the logician Gödel, composer Bach and graphic artist Escher. The end goal - explaining the workings of the human mind - remains out of reach, but the book's clarity, wit, range and depth will keep you enchanted for a long time. The second part is a bit of a disappointment after that, but still readable and provides moments of e... (show more)

  The first part is a classic. It uses a playful in innovative format to discuss recursion, self-reference and pattern, among others, and how they emerge in the works of the logician Gödel, composer Bach and graphic artist Escher. The end goal - explaining the workings of the human mind - remains out of reach, but the book's clarity, wit, range and depth will keep you enchanted for a long time. The second part is a bit of a disappointment after that, but still readable and provides moments of enlightenment. (show less)

   

  by Ilkka Karanta on Jan 06, 2008 at 08:03PM

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