Sign in with Facebook
Loading...
2nd out of 30 books
—
7 voters
Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern
Hofstadter’s 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
(first published 1985)
Friend Reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
Community Reviews
(showing
1-30
of
2,676)
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 smoothie to GE...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 deciding for a n...more
view 1 comment
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
Pick up this book, and you will find yourself returning to it again and again. Not only is Metamagical Themas a great source (and resource) in itself, but it will lead you to other fascinating books--to wit books that deal not only with science but with literature and music. I owe Hofstadter a debt of gratitude for providing me with his wonderful introduction to the works of Allen Wheelis.
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 imaginative a...more
That said, Hofstadter is a wonderfully imaginative a...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.
Totally incredible. If you want to get closer to/further away from understanding the world and yourself while being entertained and amazed, read this book. Or just parts of it. It's a series of columns on different topics, no need to be intimidated by the 800 pages.
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 period at the end of the sentence, and ignore eve...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 period at the end of the sentence, and ignore eve...more
A supreme joy. I can dip into this book anytime, and gain something from what I read (even if I can't entirely grasp it).
"The Tale of Happiton" is one of the best pieces regarding nuclear disarmament I have read.
"The Tale of Happiton" is one of the best pieces regarding nuclear disarmament I have read.
Read this BIG book after college. Enjoyed it then...about 30 years ago! Just wondering if any of my friends online are familiar with it? We are going through our books. Thinking of reading it again...
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
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 wond...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 wond...more
I loved this book. I read it years and years ago. It was like a gift. In fact, it was a gift now that I think about it--the real kind, with a a bow.
Purtroppo Adelphi (che aveva i diritti per l'Italia) ha scelto di non fare l'edizione italiana ancora dieci anni fa :-(
The second book I would bring to the moon after GEB :) My favorite chapter is the one on self-reference.
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!
Reading this again and again
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.
First, read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. If you love that, then read this, which is mostly a collection of the author's columns from Scientific American.
Apr 21, 2012
Ruhegeist
marked it as to-read
perhaps this before GEB.
There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Be the first to start one »
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 campus of St...more
More about Douglas R. Hofstadter...
Hofstadter is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. Douglas grew up on the campus of St...more
Share This Book
No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »
“It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”
—
29 people liked it
“I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.”
—
9 people liked it
More quotes…
