I going to say this up front, this book attracts the kind of people from r/iamverysmart . As a book that deals with lofty ideas surrounding math and consciousness, this book has attracted a certain aura about it that attracts people (particularly people who look like me) who want to understand the hidden secrets of the world.

All that being said I really liked this book.

So, what makes me different those guys? Well at least I hope the difference is that while we both might like this book, we both don't like it uncritically. While I definitely enjoyed many parts of this book, I am by no means treating this as a kind of bible for me to follow as a zealot (seriously, take a look at the endorsements on the back cover). This review is my attempt to convince you of that fact, while giving general thoughts.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid is a rip-roaring whirlwind of a book by Douglas F Hofstadter in which he attempts to give an account for the nature of consciousness. The primary tool he uses to do this is analogy. He uses ideas like Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (a ground-breaking result in the field of foundational mathematics) and works by artist M. C. Escher and composer J. S. Bach to get across what he sees as the essence (the titular 'Golden Braid') of 'the self'. The board span of analogies Hofstadter uses makes the experience of reading this book similar to that of a pinball constantly bouncing between different topics with hidden trap doors ready to connect to other seemingly unrelated ideas. Juggling all of these disparate topics in one book could easily have be done sloppily, but if you’re willing to buy the premise, he pretty well pulls off that aspect of the book.

One of the consistent threads that run throughout the book is the theme of self-reference. For those who have encountered Gödel’s Theorem (a great intro to it can be found here) it and many works by Escher and Bach have this quality that they might refer to themselves in a way that adds much more complexity and depth than would otherwise. This particular form of complexity arising from self-reference Hofstadter sometimes calls a Strange Loop (which also happens to be part of the title of another book of his "I am a Strange Loop" where he explores this idea further). He spends a great deal of the book giving a pretty rigorous explanation for the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem. It takes a large chuck of the book to do since it’s such a subtle yet technically laden result, but one that has a lot of repercussions. While reading this book, the star of the show seems to be Gödel’s Theorem, with Escher and Bach as supporting cast (This feeling is borne out in his account of his writing the book from the preface). Nevertheless, the detours into art and music theory are a nice respite from some of the dense number theory.

I'm going to be honest, I'm not entirely convinced by the central premise of the book. Firstly, and this might can be a little unfair since this book is simultaneously treading the line between academic and accessible, matter-of-fact and speculation. However, I don’t think he makes it clear enough that even if he was totally correct with al of his claims there would still be large swaths of problems to do with understanding consciousness that would still be left unexplained. This is the so called "Hard Problem" of consciousness which (although you might argue against me here) I don't see this book giving answers too. What it does do it give an original account for the road towards answering the functional aspects of consciousness. How a sufficiency complex collection of matter can build some "understanding" of itself. Now the word "understanding" is fraught because we easily start going into Hard Problem territory, but suffice it to say, I think his account on this front is nevertheless interesting.

The sections on AI is where this book really shows its age. Written at the time before the wide-spread proliferation of the internet and other technological advancements, some of its claims on AI have since demonstrably shown to be false. If you want an up-to-date explanation of the state of AI, I don't think this is the book for that. Nevertheless, despite its age, I think it still does a decent job at giving thought-provoking analogies towards computation and intelligence.

One of my favorite sections of the book was actually the 20th anniversary preface written by Hofstadter. I read it after reading the book itself and I'm glad I did. Not only does he spoil large sections of the book (yes, I'm anal about spoilers), but reading it after the fact allows me to retrospect on the different sections of the book and see how my view of them changes given Hofstadter's reflections. A particularly interesting aspect of the book that I was glad Hofstadter dwelled on in the Preface was his acknowledgment of some tacit sexism he sees that this book might be reinforcing. Part of this included the fact that every fictional character included in the book was gendered male. I want to quote a paragraph from the preface here when he contemplated writing in or ret-coning in female characters:

"All I could say was, "Bring in females and you wind up importing the whole world of sexuality into what is an essentially a purely abstract discussion, and that would detract attention from my book's main purpose." This nonsensical view of mine stemmed from and echoed many tacit assumptions of western civilization at that time (and still today). As I forced myself to grapple with my own attitude, a real started in my mind, with one side of me arguing for going back and making some characters female, and the other trying to maintain the status quo. [...] The side that wound up winning was the sexist side"

I really want to give props to Hofstadter for this section. I think this section resonated with me because there was some genuine humility about the worldview of the younger version of Hofstadter who wrote that book. I really relate to looking back on your past self and feeling like they are a completely different person, one who you disagree with on a lot of things, while simultaneously relating with them on a deeply personal level and understanding that you are a product of that person's thoughts and actions. It's a shame that Hofstadter didn't have this change of heart before the writing of GEB since I have no doubt that this attitude, subtle as it may be, no doubt influenced the many young men (particularly the r/iamverysmart crowd) who read this book and reinforced their "sense of what is a 'normal' human being and what is an 'exception'".

To finish up, I think I liked this book for what it is, a fun romp. The age of this book is starting to show around some of its edges, but ultimately, it's a classic text that achieves what it sets out to do with flair and style.