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Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern
Hofstadters collection of quirky essays is unified by its primary concern: to examine the way people perceive and think.
Paperback, 880 pages
Published
April 5th 1996
by Basic Books
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While this is clearly not a "better" book than the incomparable Godel Escher Bach, I would have to say that I enjoyed it more. Because I understood almost all of it the very first time through while GEB took me about a year to digest, chewing slowly over each cognitive morsel, sometimes metaphorically regurgitating it a few times before getting it through the cerebral equivalent of my lower intestines. Metamagical Themas is food for thought, but it’s simple sugars, perhaps a fruit sm...more
Hofstadter is best known for his 1979 Pulitzer prize book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, which I read during college. This 1985 book consists mostly of a compilation of articles from Scientific American in the early 1980's, along with updated post scriptums, and a few extra miscellaneous chapters on subjects not covered in those articles. He took over writing of the "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American from Martin Gardner in the early '80's, and when decidi...more
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While this is not exactly a review, I thought I'd leave a few comments here. I recently got this on Kindle, so I've been slowly revisiting a few choice bits here and there. For what it's worth, I was dumbfounded to see this was available on Kindle. Given that his most popular and best selling book Gödel, Escher, Bach is still not available for Kindle, I took it for granted that none of his books were available on Kindle (except, perhaps, I am a Strange Loop, published, if I recall correctly, aft...more
I don't recall how or where I got this book as a young teenager; I swear my aunt gave it to me but she denies it. This book is a collection of Hofstader's essays and columns, many of which were published in Scientific American. I'd say the first time I read this book I understood about an eighth of what he was talking about; I dare say if I read it again I might barely be above half. Not because the writing is difficult, but because the topics are diverse and deep. Hofstader's column in Scientif...more
This is (mostly) a collection of Hofstadter's Scientific American columns. As a result the content is even more diverse in this book than in Gödel, Escher, Bach, and reading a few columns in a row left me a little bewildered. A couple of the essays seemed a little dated. For example, he gives a discussion of large numbers with frequent references to Rubik's Cube - but maybe my dislike of the reference is just because I'm terrible at that thing.
That said, Hofstadter is a wonderfully i...more
That said, Hofstadter is a wonderfully i...more
This book is huge - like a massive dictionary - and packed with a bunch of essays on a range of topics too broad to even try to describe. Some of them were great and either made you laugh or think about things you hadn't before, though a few weren't as good. But overall, if you can make it through this book, it's worth the interesting journey.
I read this book in high school (A long time ago) and it was over
my head. As I progressed in life I have reread it many times and its a gem full of quirky essays about patterns and self-reference and paradoxes. Highly recommended for a ride into an forest of bizarre thoughts from a brillant thinker.
my head. As I progressed in life I have reread it many times and its a gem full of quirky essays about patterns and self-reference and paradoxes. Highly recommended for a ride into an forest of bizarre thoughts from a brillant thinker.
The thing I loved about this one is the playfulness involved. Sometimes I thought my head was going to explode from the weird wonderfulness of the ideas. The two chapters on self-referential sentences were absolutely delightful. Some I recall:
"It goes without saying that"
"Let us make a new convention that any thing shown in triple quotes, for instance '''I've changed my mind, when you reach the close of the triple quotes, just go directly to the p...more
"It goes without saying that"
"Let us make a new convention that any thing shown in triple quotes, for instance '''I've changed my mind, when you reach the close of the triple quotes, just go directly to the p...more
most of this is covered in Godel, Escher, Bach.[return][return]However [return]"A Person Paper on Purity in Language" [return]makes this worth reading... or you could just google for that article.
A collection of Hofstadter's columns of the same name for Scientific American. Additional notes/thoughts/comments from the author are added after each, where appropriate (which vary from a few lines to a few pages long). A variety of topics are covered, some of which were less interesting than others, but none were dull. It did feel a slight shame that the topic I most enjoyed (self-reference) was the first in the book - that led to a slight feeling of everything being downhill from there on, bu...more
This book changed my view of probability; the explanation of variants of the "prisoner's dilemma" altered my view of co-operative society; or at least how it OUGHT to co-operate
Moore recommends, Promethea: Book Five Promethea 5
It's been a long time since I read (parts of) this during a Rubik's Cube binge. It wasn't the giant cohesive work that GEB is, but a lot of the essays were pretty good.
It's really interesting how much Hofstadter (and many other people at the time these articles were written) worried about nuclear proliferation. Somehow that concern has faded from the forefront of our minds, but now we have terrorism and global warming to deal with instead. Those are definitely real issues too, but I have to...more
It's really interesting how much Hofstadter (and many other people at the time these articles were written) worried about nuclear proliferation. Somehow that concern has faded from the forefront of our minds, but now we have terrorism and global warming to deal with instead. Those are definitely real issues too, but I have to...more
Purtroppo Adelphi (che aveva i diritti per l'Italia) ha scelto di non fare l'edizione italiana ancora dieci anni fa :-(
Well I skipped the first section. I wasn't getting into that section. The second section has me thinking
Hard to follow; though I liked the bit about the history and workings of the Rubik's cube...
My God this is deep! But rewarding!
This book challenged me and expanded my understanding of many subjects. I explored iterative and recursive functions. It fundamentally altered my beliefs about consciousness. It closes with a surprisingly inspirational analysis of the prisoner's dilemma and other "games" and a call for superrational behavior from American citizens. Highly, highly recommended.
Captivating as always
Zen, AI (intelligence, not the other one), Chopin and Rubik's Cube all feature but it is the author's delvings into paradox and feedback which intrigued me.
Twenty years after first reading it, I am still confounded by the Unexpected Egg paradox.
Twenty years after first reading it, I am still confounded by the Unexpected Egg paradox.
There's some gems hidden in here, but it's pretty scattered. Be prepared for extensive and expansive discourse regarding calligraphy, typography and the design of fonts. Possessing a dysfunctional visual aesthetic sense and being generally wary of anything requiring more than UTF-8 and a console font to render meaningfully, I find these singularly uninteresting topics. Your meterage may very.
A useful companion read for when you've run out of Gödel, Escher and Bach, but it is so rambling -- even for a collection of vaguely philosophical essays and recreational math topics -- that its hard to get through. I got more out of the addendums to each chapter than the chapters themselves.
Just the thing to read before going to bed, if extracting the cube root of 17 is your idea of a soporific. Not recommended at that time for the excitable. Great for reading on a plane full of crying infants and drunken footballers. You will forget they exist.
A marvelous collection of Hofstadter's Mathematical Games columns from the magazine Scientific American, plus other essays, ranging from the music of Chopin, to the logical inconsistencies made possible by Self-Referential sentence structure, to social comentary.
I lugged this massive book around with me for awhile during my senior year of high school. I remember finding it rambling but brilliant. I was fascinated by his essays on typography and on the subtle sexism of English honorifics like "Mrs" and "Miss".
Terrific mental gymnastics. I've been reading it off an on for a year; last night I read a great chapter that was a guided imagery into variations on the theme of the Rubik's cube. The mind boggles at these people's creativity.
Loved it, but definitely NOT light reading. If you enjoy psychology, philosophy and complex ideas, try it out. If you're looking for a nice story to keep you occupied for a while, this book is not for you.
SPOILER ALERT:
This is actually one big practical joke to see if Douglas Hofstadter can trick you into being interested in typography. I admit, I fell for it too.
This is actually one big practical joke to see if Douglas Hofstadter can trick you into being interested in typography. I admit, I fell for it too.
christ! this book is hard to read. yet i cant stop trying. been reading it for going on fifteen years and can grok about 35% of it by now. well worth anyones time.
This book will definitely exercise your little gray cells. I've been working on it since last August, about 30 minutes a day while I eat my lunch at work.
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Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, thinking and creativity. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979, for which he was awarded the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.
Hofstadter is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. Douglas grew up on the ...more
More about Douglas R. Hofstadter...
Hofstadter is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. Douglas grew up on the ...more
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