GODEL, ESCHER, BACH

This is the most knowledgeable, thought evolving, mindful book ever written.I am not a very studios person, and definitely incompetent to actually suggest or evey try explaining what this book is about as of now.But as one of my best person, competent enough calls this book the devine knowledge, an alter perspective to the world", and so far I believe it too.

...a book so important, has been published thus...the quality of paper and of printing, scars the soul.I have tried to procure new copies of earlier editions but of no avail.Its a disgrace what "Basic Books" has done with producing this masterpiece...PS: (added jun 2023): am now reading "ai am a strange loop", also by Basic Books and its a delight to hold. The cover, the page quality, page colour, printing, everything....a true kane and abel situation wrt these two publications....

The book is amazing. And that is an understatement.Nothing more to say about the book.I am less than satisfied with the product.The page quality is suboptimal. The print quality is satisfactory and the fonts used are not really good.This book, on the inside, looks like a cheap local written book as the pages are thin and the fonts are low quality.For such a bulky book, the binding should be better. The binding was curvy from the beginning. As you can see from the picture.The pages are thin, and many times, lines from the opposite pages are visible.But I am grateful that I can read this book without spending a fortune (as that is the case for most foreign books). I am thankful for that.

No problem with print and packaging.If you wanna feel satisfied with your knowledge gained per book, I can bet this would yield highest score,and even you want to be happy go with this book.There might be biases there.Even if you love Artificial Intelligence, I mean you are fascinated by these days(Deep neural networks' so called "Intelligence") and you have no need for this, go with this.I just love the way in which Douglas Hofstadter express his views, one can read his other books like Surfaces and Essences, I am a strange loop 0, one would experience the best feeling.Here, I ain't getting any words, even to do mine semantic approximation.

The content of book is masterpiece ! You should read it once and slowly. Problem is with it's handling and binding - it should be better conditioned.

The book arrived in this state. Going by other reviews, I don't see a point of returning the book. I'll just get it bound myself.The content itself is a fantastic and immersive journey, although I have yet to read most of it.

One star minus for slight damages to this wonderful book! Product and packaging could be better! Delivery was excellent, though.

For self study _ people involved in developing cognitive data products

This book has a preface by the author. After twenty (20) or so pages, I was thinking, "Can I understand what he wrote about in the rest of this book?" but I persevered and read the whole book. This book is intense, like any philosophical book. His motive is to "suggest ways of reconciling the software of the mind with the hardware of brain" and that is quite an endeavor he succeeds at, sort of. No wonder he won the Pulitzer prize for this book. He talks of how he came to write and develop the book, and then, upon preparing for republication, he decides to not redo the book: it is what it is, from back then, any addition or correction would create a new book, and it can been seen every so often he imagines some stuff that we use daily, like spell correction, that were just not available back then. If he was to do that, he might as well write a whole new book, and that was not in the cards, nor was it the purpose of the new edition. Gödel goosed him to realize the notions he writes about, but Escher and Bach represent examples of what Gödel was writing and he is thinking about. As you read the introduction you realize this is one educated and well rounded fellow. He describes the development of Bach's preludes and fugues like a music teacher (I realized that I have a recording of Wanda Landowsky playing "The Well-Tempered Clavier" Book 1, preludes and fugues, but that did not help me understand as you will see). Bach worked up various themes and notions through his music and than then did some fancy finagling and out came some thing wild and crazy wonderful. I listened to the recording I have to no avail. This is something you get to know by playing and playing the tunes, a lot, for yourself, but Mr. Hofstadter's exposition explains what is what for you. Escher is easier (visual experiences are more important or easier to comprehend than aural experiences). The pictures are presented as examples of repetition or growth from one thing into another. The idea of repeating or self-reference is important: it is one thing that computers do not do. We can do imagining things as well, but at a more basic level we self-reference creating a hump of ability that computers have to accomplish if they are to get to be self aware or intelligent. As he said, he wants to understand the hardware of the brain, but in comparison, computers are simpler, but getting more complicated. He is working from the bottom up with computers: machine language, assembly, programing languages, etc. Fro our brains he is working from the top down, trying to see how the thoughts (software) we think get from one point to another. It is difficult because we do not have access to the basic growth of each thought (neurons firing). Logic tries, yet, as that one guy two (2) or three (3) thousand years ago said, "All I know is that I do not know anything." Mr. Hofstadter just comes to that thought in another roundabout way. I kept thinking of sex deviants doing what they do and that if we could look into their heads, we would be hard pressed to see where the impetus for their deviant behavior comes from, how it develops or why they do it. It is somewhere in there, but the thoughts (software) are so complicated that we can not see how it develops into what is expressed. I also think of how we all speak. We talk without thinking (something I am accused of constantly and embarrassingly), but in reality we just do not follow the thought process from what we hear and see, etc., to what we think of it, to what we will say, to saying it. Another thought is what is happening in the brains of mediators, you know, those Zen folks who quiet the mind, what is happening in there then? The mind is just amazing in what it does. Throughout this book Mr. Hofstadter writes of the mind and the brain like a psychologist, how it works and what it does. He also delves into genetics. His forte is math and all its intricacies. He develops a couple of different math models to illustrate Gödel's incompleteness theorem. The logic starts out straight forward enough, then veers off into some esoteric realm where the notion of paradox lives, and this is where we have to develop our math notions. We can study the properties of prime numbers or infinities, but we always must end up knowing we do not know everything, because our logic can not encompass paradoxes, and they will be somewhere in all we do, or something like that. As you can see, I was not able to understand his math models, but I think I got the jist of it. This book reminds me of another book published in 1978, "The Seven Mysteries of Life" by Guy Murchie. It is amazing that they talk of the same things in the same way and for the same reasons. Though this is a treatise on computers and artificial intelligence, and the other is a religious book, sort of, about the awesomeness of life. As for the artificial intelligence aspect, I like his development towards that goal, but, and I find no fault in the imagining of it, I am disappointed that computers will just be like us. It will not create a Spock like machine, or what science fiction has led us to hope for (see Isaac Asimov, "I, Robot" etc.). I did like his notion of combining genotypes to create new genes, but I am a guy and I like that sort of stuff. I find that I agree with someone who said, "There are much more fun ways to create intelligence, and it is not artificial." If artificial intelligence is not going to be all that great, it is only good to try to develop it for the exercise and the experience it will give us, but otherwise, eh, no big deal.

The shipping was fast and smooth, and the book Is amazing. Thanks!

Perhaps the most challenging and profound book I have ever read.The first 100 pages or so will make you feel dumb. My brain was fried from the information overload and the geniality of his propositions.It is incredible that Hofstader wrote this book when he was 33 and a handful of years before the internet was invented.

must read

Exactly as described; arrived on schedule; in excellent condition.