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Daniel's review

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
by Douglas R. Hofstadter

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24113.Godel_Escher_Bach_An_Eternal_Golden_Braid?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1167520215m/24113.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24113.Godel_Escher_Bach_An_Eternal_Golden_Braid?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13577.Douglas_R_Hofstadter">Douglas R. Hofstadter</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2613827?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 3 of 5 stars If you open up the "20th Anniversary Edition" of GEB, you'll see that the first thing Douglas Hofstadter does in the introduction - the very first thing - is grouse that nobody seems to understand what his book is about. Not even its publishers or readers who just absolutely love it. A quick glance at the back cover will give you the same impression - even the glowing, two-sentence blurbs are hilariously vague, all of them variations on the theme of "Well, that certainly was ... something! Yes, quite a wonderful something indeed."
 
 So how are you supposed to know whether to pick it up? Or put less delicately, how are you supposed to know whether reading all 740 dense, sprawling pages is worth your while? The short answer is: "Read this book if you like to think about thinking, as well as to think about thinking about thinking." The long answer makes me nervous - since the typical review of this book apparently misses the point entirely, I feel like I'm starting out on thin ice. Oh well, I'll take a crack at it anyway.
 
 At its heart, this book is about whether you can start with simple parts and from them, build a system which is so complicated that it becomes more than the sum of its parts in a significant sort of way. For example, scientists have a very clear understanding of how a single neuron functions. They even have a fairly good understanding of how neurons operate in groups to take on specific tasks, like wiggling your pinkie finger. But there are around a hundred billion neurons in a human brain and the structure quickly becomes preposterously complicated - groups of groups of groups of neurons, all acting in interconnected ways to produce conscious thought. How do we get something as complex as human consciousness out of something as simple and well-understood as a neuron?
 
 The answer Hofstadter likes is that the brain operates on many different interacting levels, and that conscious thought is a product of the complex interaction between all these levels. So in order to understand something you're reading, you depend on individual neurons operating in basically deterministic ways to move signals around your brain, but you also depend on groups of neurons in your vision centers to recognize text, as well as other groups of neurons on other levels to understand that text, and other groups of neurons on other levels to fit that new understanding into the context of the previous sentence, and so on. All of this applies equally well to artificial intelligence, which is Hofstadter's field. It's just that an electronic brain would be built from transistors and subroutines instead of brain tissue.
 
 The title is a little misleading - this book is not at all about how when you get right down to it, Kurt Godel, M.C. Escher, and J.S. Bach are totally interrelated, man. Their work is just useful in getting deeper down into that idea of interacting layers that produce complexity. For example, Kurt Godel was a mathematician who proved that in any self-consistent formulation of number theory, you could generate theorems that, while "true", were not provable in within that formulation. Basically, he showed that any formal mathematical system is necessarily incomplete in specific ways. Here's the part where things start to get craaaaazy: If you build a "well-formed" number theory labeled X, then X can be used to generate a proof of X's self-consistency only if X is inconsistent. The reverse is also true. And all this relates back to how a system can be more than the sum of its parts.
 
 These are definitely interesting ideas and very worth reading about, but whether GEB is worth reading is a harder question. It's a very well-written, well-researched book. I love that the author goes (way, way, way) out of his way to spend time explaining difficult ideas, rather than to assume a dull or disinterested readership. But sometimes that tendency to dig deeper can start to obscure the central point of a chapter. I think that's why so many people lose track of what the book is actually about - there really are a ton of fascinating ideas that are all given equal weight.
 
 The book hops between two different formats. The first is your standard, well-written, popular discussion of complex scientific, artistic, or philosophical ideas. In fact, Hofstadter is very good at this part. He excels at getting the reader interested in - and even excited about - some traditionally inaccessible stuff. The second format is a series of short dialogs between fictional characters, interspersed between every chapter, that help to allegorically enforce the ideas in whatever chapter. 
 
 Overall, this approach is very good at getting you to understand the complicated ideas Hofstadter is getting at. I found that my problems with the book weren't with the subject matter, which was fascinating and enjoyable, but with the author. Ol' Dougie H. loves this material. He loves it so much that he tries to infect you with his own personal sense of wonder and whimsy at how complex and beautiful art and life and science are. And of course he's right, but that's not the point. If he trusted you to feel these things for yourself, the book would be maybe 200 pages shorter. 
 
 As it is, his constant pedagogical wordplay and artful brain teasers started out fun but after page 400 they started making me tired. Also, those forced injections of wonder and whimsy start to take on the flavor of little plugs for the personal fantasticness of Douglas Hofstadter. For example, his discussion of the language processing functions of the brain is interesting, but did he really have to bring up the fact that he's fluent in Russian and translated Eugene Onegin? In a short book or a movie, cleverness can be fun and exciting. In a 740-page tome, not so much.
 
 I strongly recommend this book to a very narrow set of people. If you think you'd be interested in the subject matter AND you wouldn't mind playing simple word or math games in the service of understanding it AND the inner workings of a computer scientist's marvelous brain seem interesting to you, then definitely read this book. I enjoyed it and found it very fun and informative, overall. But if you read this review and you get the feeling you probably won't like this book, you're probably right.
 
 
 
 
 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/140760?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Daniel's review
rating:
recommended for: people who like thinking about thinking about thinking.

If you open up the "20th Anniversary Edition" of GEB, you'll see that the first thing Douglas Hofstadter does in the introduction - the very first thing - is grouse that nobody seems to understand what his book is about. Not even its publishers or readers who just absolutely love it. A quick glance at the back cover will give you the same impression - even the glowing, two-sentence blurbs are hilariously vague, all of them variations on the theme of "Well, that certainly was ... something! Yes, quite a wonderful something indeed."

So how are you supposed to know whether to pick it up? Or put less delicately, how are you supposed to know whether reading all 740 dense, sprawling pages is worth your while? The short answer is: "Read this book if you like to think about thinking, as well as to think about thinking about thinking." The long answer makes me nervous - since the typical review of this book apparently misses the point entirely...more

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message 1: by Scott

03/31/2008 06:31AM

Well, I said you'd never finish this book, and apparently you have. I ate three pairs of my finest shorts today.