Daniel Fortunov's Blog » Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

On Friday a colleague asked if I'd read "Gödel, Escher, Bach". I thought he was asking about them as individual authors, so I found it a peculiar question. I only knew of Gödel as an author, and Escher as an artist, and Bach as a musician. What he was actually referring to was Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter. He said it was captivating when he read it, at age 15.

My initial impression was "Wow, he read this? At age 15? What a geek!" I couldn't even manage Catch-22 at that age. (And this book looked bigger, thicker, had a smaller font, and seemed considerably more intellectually 'heavy' than Catch-22.)

The Library

The very next day I happened to be passing by the local library so I popped in to try and get this book. Their main copy was due back on 24 November 2006, and was therefore marked as lost, but they had a second copy located in the "2nd Floor Store (ask Library Staff)". So I went to the second floor and asked, but they could not find it. I went to look for it on the shelf, in case it had been put back in the general collection by mistake. No dice. I went back to the second floor, my hopes dashed.

Just as I was about to leave in disappointment the woman paused and said "unless..." then reached down beneath the counter and whipped out the very book I was after. It was a brick. A seven hundred and seventy seven page monolith. And it was falling apart. (Perhaps that's why it was under the counter — awaiting repairs.)

I still don't know what the purpose of this "Second Floor Store" is. I thought it might have been a reference collection, with no check-outs allowed, but that was not the case. She let me check it out. So now it's my seven-hundred and seventy seven page falling-apart monolith. For the next three weeks, at least.

The Book

The best way to describe this book is probably through a rather indirect and roundabout analogy, based on my experiences as a university gatecrasher...

During my undergraduate course I discovered that as a student of the university I was fully entitled to attend any lecture of my choosing (regardless of whether I was actually meant to be attending it for my degree course or not). I decided I had to take advantage of this, so I got some lecture schedules and started going to any lecture courses that sounded interesting. Some were lectures for students in other years; some were lectures for students doing Masters degrees.

On one amusing occasion I turned up to the first lecture for a particular course. It was scheduled not in a lecture hall, like most lectures, but a room. A small room. There were eight of us there, including the lecturer, and the room was full. With so few people it was actually feasible to check attendance. I'd never seen attendance taken before during my three years of undergraduate studies, but there's a first time for everything, right?

Of the seven students who were there, it turned out that only four of us were actually on the course. Myself and another guy were just on for the ride, and of the five others, one was "standing in" for his friend who was away on holiday. The lecturer was most amused, but he let us stay on.

The course was largely self-taught: he would dish out articles and papers by the handful, written by the likes of Charles Babbage, Marvin Minsky, Kurt Gödel, Terry Winograd, Ada Lovelace, and other such people who are really famous in their field but probably remain unknown to the average Joe. The topics were around fields such as artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, cognition, machine learning, and such. Generally very theoretical, philosophical and highly abstract.

We were expected to go away with these materials, and to read and understand them. The level of abstraction was pretty high though, and often more than my little brain could handle, so a lot of the materials passed me by. It was like getting lost in a fog, with these ideas slowly drifting further and further away from your realm of understanding. I couldn't grab hold of the ideas firmly because they were just fog to me. Sometimes I could see them, but they were feint, and it was only a matter of time before they would blend back in with the rest of the fog.

That's what this book seems like — a perfect partner to that course.

You probably have no idea what I mean. If you want to experience it for yourself go and read about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and you'll see what I'm talking about: Abstract, theoretical, fog.