Godel Escher Bach
A key inspiration for Only22333
This book short title GEB was published over 40 years ago, but it opened my mind to all manner of thoughts and ideas. I am still recovering from the shock!
What is it all about? After 20 years the author Douglas Hofstader was still amazed how many different interpretations were put on the book. In the preface to the 20th Anniversary edition he wrote a preface saying
A slight longer quote from the preface read
How does the author elucidate these ideas?
Some of the motley topics GEB delves int include
Fugues and Canons
Logic and Truth
Geometry
Recursion
Syntactic Structures
The Nature of Meaning
Zen Buddhism
Paradoxes
Brain and Mind
Reductionism and Holism
Ant Colonies
DNA
Proteins
The Genetic Code (but the book was written before the Human Genome project was even imagined)
Artificial Intelligence
Creativity, Consciousness and Free Will
All of these ideas are woven into an Eternal Golden Braid of a story.
The chapters alternate between formal exposition and argument and Carrollian dialogue mainly between Achilles and the Tortoise, two characters in the Greek Philosopher Zeno’s Paradox borrowed by Lewis Carroll and re borrowed in turn by Hofstadter.
GEB on Amazon
You can buy the book on Amazon in English or several other languages if you feel like a challenge… Try your luck with the French, Spanish, German, Japanese edition if you wish.