Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It is big and it is clever, 7 May 2007
This enormous book is a hymn to the "strange loop", a term coined by the author. Loosely, a strange loop occurs when, after moving up a level in a conceptual hierachy, one is brought strangely back to where one started. It's closely related to those paradoxes of self-reference which can occur when form and content become intertwined.
An example is the old joke about the park keeper angry that his park has been littered with leaflets entitled "Keep Britain Tidy". Another is building one computer system to test another computer system, and then needing a third system to test the one you've just built. Yet another is the Wikipedia entry of Douglas Hofstadter which, at the time of writing, contains a quote from Hofstadter stating that his Wikipedia entry is full of inaccuracies. (So, do you trust the entry enough to believe this quote claiming it's unreliable?) You get the idea.
Hofstadter sees these strange loops everywhere: in the music of Bach, the art of Escher and, most significantly, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, in which an algebraic system is used to prove a result about itself (rather than about numbers). After he's presented the various variations on these ideas, he then moves on to Artificial Intelligence, examining the "state of the art" as he sees it and discussing the implications of the earlier material for this subject.
Along the way he delves into various other diverse subjects such as the structure of the human brain or the challenges of translating a novel into different (human) languages. Much of this is fascinating stuff and if you are mathematically inclined, there is plenty to love about this book.
Given all the above, why not give the man 5 stars - what more could one possibly ask for?! Well, personally I have a number of objections to this work which I'll mention briefly before the crowd throws rotten fruit at me. Firstly, I am not sure that *all* Hofstadter's examples are on the ball. For example, the loop in Bach's "endlessly rising" canon is simply a consequence of there being 12 semitones in an octave, rather than any subtle paradox of self-reference. Similarly, the main theme from Bach's Musical Offering is not "Babbage" backwards, however you push it! In short, I suspect the author's obsessions can cause him to see patterns in the world around him which aren't really there.
Secondly, his would-be humorous writing style, quirky and lively though it is, will not be to everyone's taste ("Why, you don't say, Mr T!"). Thirdly, some readers will wish he had been more honest up-front about the book really being about AI (and something of a polemic, as evidenced by his almost mean-spirited attack on the philosopher John Lucas in several places): personally, it's not a subject close to my heart and I would have been rather more interested in delving into, say, what makes Bach's music beautiful and spiritual, as the cover suggests we will be doing. And fourthly, and most seriously, I am not convinced that Hofstadter is that great a pedagogue: the facetious style and inordinate length of the book can serve to obscure, rather than illuminate, his meaning.
These niggles notwithstanding, this book really is a fine achievement and, if you have the time and inclination (you'll need both in spades), likely to be a very rewarding read.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing, brilliant, flowing...quite good, really, 28 Jun 2000
This is a brilliant book. Back when I was in school, I used to borrow this book from the library during summer vacation, read it throughout the summer and return it in the autumn. For every year, I understood more and more :-) Mind, I was around 15-16 years old, so this was all new and exciting stuff. Now, several years later, I find that bits and pieces crop up in ordinary discussions - recursion, DNA/RNA mechanisms, fractals on a musical level, Zen philosophy,Number theory, AI and mind discussions - that I have long since gotten a sort-of grasp of, due to this book. This is also the book that led me to read "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" (another necessary book). Nowadays, 10 years later, I keep two copies of GEB on my shelf, one in english and one in swedish. Everybody need at least one...but you won't get mine!I guess I should comment on the way tha hofstadter manages to mae the most complicated subjects understandable, how he manages to find links and analogies in very interesting places, how one can read the book again and again and still find new things to ponder...But I won't. You need this book. Your brain need this book. If you haven't read it yet, Do.
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128 of 145 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
WARNING: Do not buy this edition! Go for a previous one!, 20 Dec 2001
By A Customer
Don't buy *this* edition of this wonderful book.
The paper quality is really bad (the paper is very thin, almost transparent), the whole book has shrunk in size, the text looks really cramped, the margins are smaller than they should be (I guess to save paper!) and to cut a long story short the aesthetic appeal the previous editions had is completely lost.
My recommendation: Try to find a copy of one of the previous editions if possible, and buy this edition if an only if you fail!
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