Godel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid [Hardcover]

Reading and working with this book is like getting a college education on the cheap, a wonderful introduction to a variety of fascinating and enlightening subjects whose substance is only vaguely understood (if at all) by the average individual. It will clear these up for you quite nicely.

Written by artificial intelligence researcher Douglas R Hofstadter, the book, Godel, Escher, Bach won a Pulitzer Prize. It was called the "best non-fiction book of the 20th Century." No theologian of any age -- not Aquinas, not Tillich, not Nagarjuna, not Samkara -- has written more ingeniously about God and the mystery of consciousness.

Its 800 pages are difficult but fun.

Even if you don't do math or Zen koans, you can follow the book's development because before each chapter is a story which illustrates the chapter's theme. These fictions are themselves written as pieces of contrapuntal music. "Crab Canon," for example, reads the same whether you begin at the first or the last sentence.

One theme of the book is recursion, which can be described as a procedure which contains a smaller version of itself, like a story within a story. This theme prepares the reader to see how DNA, for example, is information which copies itself through generations -- DNA as both "software" and "hardware."

In this light, the book itself becomes a recursive revelation, a self-extracting document which the universe has brought forth. This suggests that the universe, too, is recursive.

This book illustrates how can we decode its sacred meaning from every and any situation.

If there ever were a book about which it might be said, not in any simple, literal sense, but in the most profound way possible, that it was written by God (if there is a God), this may be the book. How can such a claim be justified? The book pushes Hofstadter aside (or rather, inside) and itself answers in the most natural yet amazing way.

I would never give anything 10 out of 10.

My copy of this book is sitting on the desk to the left to me. It usualy lives on the bookshelves about 40cms to the left of that. It is battered, worn and the paper cover's torn. It is the 1980 Penguin edition. It's been read about 10 times. It's been skimmed a hundred times more.

Max Escher visited my life when I became fascinated with the process of lithography after initially discovering the work of William Heath-Robinson. J S Bach wrote some wonderful blues baselines which I shamelessly plagerised when doing my music O-level. Godel was a strange name (despite my background in mathematics).

I write computer programs for a living. Alan Turing has always been my hero (he died 3 months before I was born). Pictures and music have always been part of my life. Formal systems more so. Zen came in the 60s (via, indirectly, Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance").

There are those who find this book trivial and the jokes facile. There are those who find this book difficult and confusing. The former are those who lack the joy of a child finding magic in numbers and who have their own intellectual agenda to impose. The latter need encouragement: this book needs work, it makes you think and thinking has consequences. You do not need to accept Hofstadter's thesis (though it is a damn sight more convincing than that of Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Clothes), but you *must* find joy in its presentation. The only comparable book (though far more limited in its domain) is Raymond Smullyan's "What is the Name of this Book?".

The very exsitence of GEB adds colour to our lives and gives us, in Ian Drury's immortal words, "reasons to be cheerful". This book is the starting point for thought, converstation and discovery. It presents concepts as a process of revalation. It is the work of a unique mind. Some people don't like that. I do. Try it and see.