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Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Name: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Rating: 5 (17 reviews)
Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
ISBN: 9780465026562

Douglas R. Hofstadter · 1999 · 777 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll
Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of "maps" or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. Gödel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.

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recommended by 17 people

sourced from public statements

Andrej Karpathy
“This book is a must read or at least must selectively skim for anyone interested in intelligence. Some of the ideas regarding intelligence and how it should be implemented are perhaps slightly outdated (you would see much more statistical reasoning if you asked experts today), which is largely absent in "old AI" approaches to intelligence.”
Naval Ravikant
“The Beginning of Infinity reminds me the most of Gödel, Escher, Bach in that it is very wide-ranging and stitches together ideas from many different disciplines. It’s very difficult to understand and follow completely. Everyone claims to have read it, but, as far as I can tell, very few people understand it.”↗
Kevin Kelly
“Over the years, I kept finding myself returning to its insights, and each time I would arrive at them at a deeper level.”↗
Chris Hayes
“The book changed my life! Curious if college-aged students still read it.”↗
Demis Hassabis
“A really big scientific book for me was when I was writing Theme Park, obviously I was working on AI and building AI for the game, but I was also reading books like Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Hofstadter, which I suppose is more of a philosophy book, but it’s an incredible piece of work, tying together Gödel’s incompleteness theorem about mathematics, with Escher’s drawings and Bach’s fugues and showing that they’re all related in some way, this repeating cycle of patterns, this infinite patterns that they all exhibit, and then he tied it to consciousness, and intelligence, and it was just really inspiring for me and made me think about these deep questions, and I was discussing this with a lot of my friends. We were writing games together, and we were doing that 24/7 and we would discuss these things about what the limits of AI could be, if we could not just use it for what we were doing in games, but actually advance it to the level where it would become the same level as human, and they just felt like the sky was the limit.”↗
Dan Davies
“@t0nyyates @Gilesyb @jdportes Strong recommend. It's also the kind of book you can dip in and out of.”↗
Tom Critchlow
“@nickcammarata Godel escher bach is pretty beautiful. IIRC douglass learned typesetting manually to lay out the book just as he wanted it. More recently - this is a wonderful book”↗
Dan Brown
“For anyone interested in the interrelation of different sciences and art forms, this book can be used as an eye-opening appetizer, a main course, or a delicious desert. I’m the son of a mathematician and a musician, so the interrelations were right up my alley.”↗
Santiago Siri
“@owocki whenever i get asked a book to recommend, "gödel, escher, bach" always tops the list in my mind.”↗
Joanna Rutkowska
“A book about Mind, disguised as treatise on Formal Systems and Reasoning, camouflaged as work on Beauty, ultimately talking about Mind... ❤”↗
Nat Eliason
Dan Heisman
David Deutsch
Sahil Lavingia
Scott Young
A. J. Jacobs
Steve Jurvetson