Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

This book will guaranteed rewrite your brain chemistry. Good if you like math, logic, art, music, programming and computer science concepts, or any intersection of the previous subjects and more.

GEB is pretty much the must-read book for anyone interested in computers and/or general philosophy of mind. Hofstadter has had a long, interesting career in the field of interesting mathematics and links between theory and real life. In his magnum opus, GEB, he explores what it is to be a self-thinking machine, and how, by looking at it from some other perspectives, we can learn a lot about how we think and do. The beginning of the book starts out by explaining some simple concepts, and then chains them together in ever-growing complexity. By the sections on natural-language processing, the symbolic logic can be a little overwhelming if you've not done symbol manipulation before.. Once powered-through (and assuming that you were able to either follow the logic, or trust in Hofstadter's reasoning chain), the book moves into more varied and easier to understand areas which demonstrate the Godel Theorem without going into the maths. I absolutely loved this book. It's a masterpiece of this generation. It takes some serious bending of the little grey cells to follow all of the logic, but the wonderful interplay of the music, art and maths is truly mind-expanding. Once you see what Hofstadter's pointing out, you simply can't un-see it. Pretty soon, you'll be making Quine-based quips, or looking for self-disproving theorems (like "This sentence is false"). Ahh, the beauty of a well-laid trap paradox! so, if you're scientific, technical or just plain interested in maths, then get this. It's a very weighty tome, and a recently added preface and some new sections make it even beefier. But it's so worth it. If I could draw parallels, I'd say it's as mind-expanding as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance... that sort of thing.

Brilliant. If you lean towards learning, this is the one book to bring to the desert island.

It's a little complicated for a beginner, and thus is it hard to read at some points that have complex ideology, except that, great book

Interesting book, very long. Had to reread sections to understand it but I might just be dumb.

I am still trying to work through it, it is absolutely huge and very, very, thought provoking, so I am trying to digest it in small doses to let my slow brain ruminate over it's passages

I find it difficult to say what this book is about. But in that, I am not alone. “GEB” was first published in 1979, and I read the 20th anniversary edition, which contains a 23-page Preface by the author which tries to explain the book. And still fails. However, let me make a clumsy (and probably vain) attempt at a summary. “An examination of the nature of human consciousness drawing on mathematics, logic and computer programming concepts – with side-notes on Artificial Intelligence – and featuring the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the art of M.C Escher and the Incompleteness Theorem of Kurt Godel.” It’s 742 pages long (excluding the Preface), and some of the arguments and propositions are quite difficult to follow. The author does inject humour into his prose, but nonetheless, parts of the work are rather turgid and somewhat recursive. If, however, you are up for giving your brain a thorough work-out, then “GEB” might be just the thing for you.

This is a really engaging book. It has twists and turns, rythms, conundrums and a great mixture of different media to keep you going in an exploration of the possibility of identity arising from 'machine-like' operants. There are great illustrations and a good use of humour that permeates the dialogue format that carries the book from section to section. You can learn alot from this tome and enjoy learning it.

A good book

Il faut avoir un bon sens de mathématiques et de l'anglais pour apprécier les phrases super-bien construites. Si c'est le cas ce livre est un bijou sans comparaison. Les paradoxes mathématiques inhérent dans la langue même dont on décrit la mathématique est clairement mis en avant. Et les liens avec l'art, que ça soit les dessins paradoxaux d'Escher ou la musique auto-référente de Bach, sont captivants.

It's amazing how much one can get out of this book. It covers pretty much everything... like all things. While I don't agree with everything in there, it's very fascinating and a fun read. It's one of those books where you can flip to any page and find a fantastic little gem. In saying that though you will want to read it cover to cover, as you can lose a bit of context jumping around. It's a book that tends to be recommended a lot to programmers, but I bought it for my wife when she was studying psychology and she loved it!

While reading this book , many times I stopped and smiled with joy from all its ingenuity

The book was in good condition and the shipping was fast.