On 3/29/10, Ralph Dumain <rdum...@autodidactproject.org> wrote:
> Aside: I recall _Goedel, Escher and Bach_ as a load of New Age crap.
^^^^^^^
CB: No religion in it.
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Author Douglas Hofstadter
Country USA
Language English
Subject(s) Consciousness, intelligence
Publisher Basic Books
Publication date 1979
Pages 777 pages
ISBN ISBN 978-0465026562, ISBN 0140179976
OCLC Number 40724766
Dewey Decimal 510/.1 21
LC Classification QA9.8 .H63 1999
Followed by I Am a Strange Loop
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (commonly GEB) is a
Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter,[1] described by the
author as "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of
Lewis Carroll".[2]
On its surface, GEB examines logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher
and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, discussing common themes in their
work and lives. At a deeper level, the book is a detailed and subtle
exposition of concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and
intelligence.
Through illustration and analysis, the book discusses how
self-reference and formal rules allow systems to acquire meaning
despite being made of "meaningless" elements. It also discusses what
it means to communicate, how knowledge can be represented and stored,
the methods and limitations of symbolic representation, and even the
fundamental notion of "meaning" itself.
In response to confusion over the book's theme, Hofstadter has
emphasized that GEB is not about mathematics, art, and music but
rather about how cognition and thinking emerge from well-hidden
neurological mechanisms. In the book, he presents an analogy about how
the individual neurons of the brain coordinate to create a unified
sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization
displayed in a colony of ants.[3][4]
Contents [hide]
1 Structure
2 Themes
3 Puzzles
4 Impact
5 Translation
6 People featured in Gödel, Escher, Bach
7 See also
8 Notes
9 References
10 External links
[edit] Structure
GEB takes the form of an interweaving of various narratives. The main
chapters alternate with dialogues between imaginary characters,
inspired by Lewis Carroll's "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles", in
which Achilles and the Tortoise discuss a paradox related to modus
ponens. Hofstadter bases the other dialogues on this one, introducing
characters such as a Crab, a Genie, and others. These narratives
frequently dip into self-reference and metafiction.
Word play also features prominently in the work. Puns are occasionally
used to connect ideas, such as "the Magnificrab, Indeed" with Bach's
Magnificat in D; "SHRDLU, Toy of Man's Designing" with Bach's Jesu,
Joy of Man's Desiring; and "Typographical Number Theory", or "TNT",
which inevitably reacts explosively when it attempts to make
statements about itself. One Dialogue contains a story about a genie
(from the Arabic "Djinn") and various "tonics" (of both the liquid and
musical varieties), which is titled "Djinn and Tonic".
One dialogue in the book is written in the form of a crab canon, in
which every line before the midpoint corresponds to an identical line
past the midpoint. The conversation still makes sense due to uses of
common phrases that can be used as either greetings or farewells
("Good day") and the positioning of lines which, upon close
inspection, double as an answer to a question in the next line.
[edit] Themes
GEB contains many instances where objects and ideas speak about or
refer back to themselves (cf. recursion and self-reference). For
instance, TNT is an illustration of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
There is also a phonograph that destroys itself by playing a record
titled "I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X" (this being an analogy
to Gödel's incompleteness theorem), an examination of canon form in
music, and a discussion of Escher's lithograph of two hands drawing
each other. To describe such self-referencing objects, Hofstadter
coins the term "strange loop", a concept he examines in more depth in
his follow-up book I Am a Strange Loop.
To escape many of the logical contradictions brought about by these
self-referencing objects, Hofstadter discusses Zen koans. He attempts
to show the reader how to perceive reality outside the normal confines
of their own experience and embrace such paradoxical questions by
rejecting the premise — a strategy also called "unasking".
Call stacks are also discussed in GEB, as one dialogue describes the
adventures of Achilles and the Tortoise as they make use of "pushing"
and "popping" tonics. Entering a picture in a book would count as
"pushing", entering a picture in a book within a picture in a book
would have caused a double "pushing", and "popping" refers to an exit
back to the previous layer of reality. The Tortoise humorously remarks
that a friend of his (a weasel) performed a "popping" while in their
current state of reality and has never been heard from since; the
implied question is, "Did the friend simply cease to exist, or has the
friend achieved a higher state of reality?" Also, since the reader is
"pushed" into the world of Tortoise and Achilles, would the friend
have ascended to the same level of reality in which the readers of GEB
reside? Subsequent sections discuss the basic tenets of logic,
self-referring statements, ("typeless") systems, and even programming.
One puzzle (in the dialogue "Aria with Diverse Variations") is a
speculation concerning an author who writes a book and chooses to end
the story without actually stopping the text. That an author cannot
make a sudden ending (with regard to the story) come as a surprise,
when the fact that there are only a few pages left in the book is
obvious to the reader. Such an author might wrap up the main point,
and then continue writing, but drop clues to the reader that the end
has already passed, such as wandering and unfocused prose,
misstatements, or contradictions.
[edit] Puzzles
The book is filled with puzzles. An example of this is the chapter
titled "Contracrostipunctus", which combines the words acrostic and
contrapunctus (counterpoint). In a dialogue between Achilles and the
Tortoise, the author hints that there is a contrapuntal acrostic in
the chapter that refers both to the author (Hofstadter) and Bach. This
can be found by taking the first word of each paragraph, to reveal:
Hofstadter's Contracrostipunctus Acrostically Backwards Spells "J. S.
Bach". This is only the acrostic. The counterpoint acrostic is found
by taking the first letters of the acrostic (in bold) and reading them
backwards to get "J. S. Bach" (as the acrostic itself claims).
[edit] Impact
As of February 2010, Amazon.com reports that Gödel, Escher, Bach
ranked 586 in sales. Amazon also reported that it had been cited by 82
other books.
For Summer 2007, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created an
online course for high school students built around the book.
In its February 19th, 2010 investigative summary on the 2001 anthrax
attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that Bruce
Edwards Ivins was inspired by GEB to hide secret codes based upon
nucleotide sequences in the anthrax-laced letters he sent in September
and October 2001[5]. He used bolded letters, as suggested on page 404
of the book.[6] He attempted to hide the book from investigators by
throwing it in the trash.
[edit] Translation
Although Hofstadter claims the idea of translating his book "never
crossed [his] mind" when he was writing it, when approached with the
idea by his publisher he was "very excited about seeing [the] book in
other languages, especially … French".[7] He knew, however, that
"there were a million issues to consider" when translating,[7] since
the book relies not only on word-play but "structural puns" as
well—writing where the form and content of the work mirror each other
(such as the "Crab Canon" dialogue, which reads almost exactly the
same forwards as backwards).
Hofstadter gives one example of translation trouble in the paragraph
"Mr. Tortoise, Meet Madame Tortue", saying translators "instantly ran
headlong into the conflict between the feminine gender of the French
noun tortue and the masculinity of my character, the Tortoise".[7]
Hofstadter decided to translate the French character as "Madame
Tortue", and the Italian version as "signorina Tartaruga".[8] Because
of other troubles translators might have retaining the meaning of the
book, Hofstadter "painstakingly went through every last sentence of
GEB, annotating a copy for translators into any language that might be
targeted".[7]
Translation also gave Hofstadter a way to add new meaning and puns.
For instance, in Chinese, the subtitle is not a translation of an
Eternal Golden Braid, but a seemingly unrelated phrase Jí Yì Bì (集异璧,
literally "collection of exotic jades"), which is homophonic to GEB in
Chinese. Some material regarding this interplay is to be found in
Hofstadter's later book Le Ton beau de Marot, which is mainly about
translation.
[edit] People featured in Gödel, Escher, Bach
Lists of miscellaneous information should be avoided. Please relocate
any relevant information into appropriate sections or articles.
(December 2009)
Charles Babbage
John Cage
Georg Cantor
Alonzo Church
Frederick the Great
Douglas Hofstadter
Johann Kirnberger
René Magritte
Marvin Minsky
Johann Joachim Quantz
Willard Van Orman Quine
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Alfred Tarski
Alan Turing
Terry Winograd
Zhaozhou Congshen
[edit] See also
Computer science
Fractals
Tumbolia
Cognitive science
Chinese room
John Lucas
Quining
BlooP and FlooP
Wondrous numbers
Indra's net
Meta
Egbert B. Gebstadter
[edit] Notes
^ The Pulitzer Prizes for 1980
^ Hofstadter, cover.
^ By Analogy: A talk with the most remarkable researcher in artificial
intelligence today, Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gödel, Escher,
Bach Wired Magazine, November 1995
^ Consciousness In The Cosmos: Perspective of Mind: Douglas Hofstadter
^ http://www.justice.gov/amerithrax/docs/amx-investigative-summary.pdf
^ http://www.justice.gov/amerithrax/docs/j-geb-page-%20404.pdf
^ a b c d Hofstadter 1999, p. 16.
^ Hofstadter 1999, p. 17.
[edit] References
Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1999) [1979], Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal
Golden Braid, Basic Books, ISBN 0465026567 .
[edit] External links
GEB video lectures, MIT OpenCourseWare
Partial contents of 20th Anniversary Edition
Mårten's GEB site
Class about GEB, at the University of Michigan
Java 3D game based on the GEB triplets
Preceded by
On Human Nature Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction
1980 Succeeded by
Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach";
Categories: 1979 books | Cognitive science literature | Dialogues | M.
C. Escher | Mathematics books | Philosophy books | Pulitzer Prize for
General Non-Fiction | Puzzle books | Metafictional works
Hidden categories: Articles with trivia sections from December 2009 |
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