If you open up the '20th Anniversary Edition' of GEB, you'll see that the first thing Douglas Hofstadter does in the introduction - the very first thing - is grouse that nobody seems to understand what his book is about. Not even its publishers or readers who just absolutely love it.
A quick glance at the back cover will give you the same impression - even the glowing, two-sentence blurbs are hilariously vague, all of them variations on the theme of 'Well, that certainly was something! Yes, qui. As I work my way through this dense book, I am reminded of the Zen tale of 4 blind men and an elephant. To settle a dispute between townspeople over religion, the Zen master had 4 blind men and an elephant led in.
With the men not knowing it’s an elephant, the Zen master had each feel a part of the elephant. Each blind man gave a varying but inaccurate guess of what it was he felt. In conclusion, the Zen master exclaimed that we are all like blind men. We have never seen God, but can only gues. I could not with a clear conscience recommend this book to everyone, because I'm simply not that cruel. It would be like recommending large doses of LSD to everyone: some small minority will find the experience invaluably enlightening, but for most people it's just going to melt their brain.While you do not need to be a professional mathematician to appreciate this, you really have to like math a lot. You can't just sort of like it.
Un'eterna ghirlanda brillante.pdf Torrent. Download the torrent file. Italiano: Un'Eterna Ghirlanda Brillante; japon Godel Escher Bach Uneterna ghirlanda brillante. Godel, Escher, Bach: un'eterna ghirlanda brillante PDF Download. Benvenuto a Chekmezova - Godel, Escher, Bach: un'eterna ghirlanda brillante.
You can't just differ with the masses in not hating mathematics. Expand your mind! Not for the faint of heart & yet by no means dry.
Hofstadter makes some fascinating observations about emergent properties (such as intelligence) and diverts us into the extremely heavy mathematics of Godel via the self referencing systems that are Bach's fugues and Escher's 'optical illusion' style artwork.Before too many chapters have passed though you'll be firmly in number theory land, albeit doled out as painlessly as is possible with such stuff, leavened with imagined. From Randall Munroe. Mouseover says: 'This is the reference implementation of the self-referential joke.' -I know, I know, I know. I'm just kidding myself. I'm as likely to read this as a book on string theory. (Please don't.
Please don't tell me I have read a book on string theory, I'm trying to forget the whole sordid story.) But. I hope you like this.A friend of mine established The Harvester Press in the 1970s. He did it on a wing and a prayer, he was a young teaching a.
The reading of a book and its interpretation are determined in part by the cytoplasmic soup in which it is taken up. This reader’s soup consists of a large portion of metaphiction. This is how Hofstadter apparently intended to structure his work: a Lewis Carroll styled dialogue between Achilles and Tortoise (and friends) introducing a subject followed by a rigorous but popularly accessible explication of that topic. This is how I read Hofstadter’s book: as a crab canon. A crab canon, as our. This is quite a remarkable book: a repository of many brilliant, provocative and insightful ideas (although occasionally not fully developed), and a contributor of much food for thought in disparate areas such as neurosciences, AI, mathematical logic, computer science, molecular biology, even art and music. A unique endeavor that, while not always successful in the pursuit of a coherent and convincing elucidation of the author's theses, represents something of a classic that must be read for its.
Conversation overheard at a diner in Upstate NY between Rabbit and Dante. They have been arguing about the existence of God.
Dante has been arguing against the proposition.Rabbit: I have been recently reading a book which helps me to counter many of your points Dante. You should take a look at it.
Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter carries within it the seed of an answer to your skepticism. Hofstadter argues, using the pictures of Escher, the music of Bach and. Absolutely beautiful. GEB reads like a collection of sparks, produced when the mind is working at its primed, relaxed, hyper-aware and associative best. I read this over numerous nights, curled up in bed, each time feeling as if I was with a wonderful best friend, with whom I could discuss any topic or previously-unformed idea, exercise my memory indexing resources, and unabashedly release the inner infovore. Few things have allowed me to unwind, concentrate, and harness my mental energy as quic.
This book told me something about intelligence - the smartest thing to do is to avoid this book's overly lengthy babblings of a self-important graduate student who is way too impressed with himself. It took this guy over 700 pages to illustrate by analogy his not-particularly novel theory which he sums up (finally) as follows:'My belief is that the explanations of 'emergent' phenomena in our brains -for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will-are base. Me: Hmm I wonder what I think about this book!
I can't seem to make up my mind about these indecipherable theorems. I better ask the Meta-Enlightened! Or as he likes to be called, ME.-closes eyes and awaits the rise of the Meta-Enlightened among the colorful haze-the Meta-Enlightened one: Greetings Self! You summoned me?Me: Yes ME! I was wondering if you could help me review this book that I am readinge Meta-Enlightened one: With pleasure but unfortunately over here we tend to divide mental labo. This book was very disappointing, especially after recieving so much hype.
I was struggling along through it in a workman like fashion, trying to follow his arguments (which to me often seemed like so much dribble and unnecessary obfuscation and nothing like a fun puzzle), when I got really stuck and so I went to the MIT website and started reading the class notes on this book. That only made me more disgusted with the book, since it turns out that the book is riddled with historical errors wher. Deep geekery. Let's build logic from its component parts. And then after by-hand fabricating that nomenclature, we'll use it to talk about intelligence, problem-solving, heuristics, etc. Building up to general intelligence (generally) and artificial intelligence (specifically). Deep, heavy, at times extremely fun.
Took me five years to read it.And so somewhat in the spirit of the text:GEB is like this incredibly attractive, incredibly smart, incredibly funny/witty woman that you meet through a f. GEB is an astonishing achievement in popularizing mathematical philosophy (!), and among the few truly life-changing books I've read.
The central thesis is that under certain conditions sufficiently complex, recursive self-editing systems can develop arbitrarily complex behavior without reference to external organization - and given an author who spends his days coding AI systems, you can see where he's going.That's dense, dense stuff, but helped by the author's charming expository style and vas. This is an absolutely phenomenal work. Let me break it down for you. Topics covered: DNA and RNA replication, Artificial Intelligence, Zen Buddism, Eschers artwork, Computer programming, Bachs fugues, a whole host of literary paradoxes and critical thinking exercises wow fun!
Now let me tell you what all of this great information rests in, the framework of mathematics housed by Godels own theorems and proof. Luckily the author understands that not all of us think mathematically. Don't get.
After an entire tome about the workings of the mind and what it means to be intelligent, you'd think the author would be more self-aware by the end of the book than to say, 'indirect self-reference is my favorite topic'.No, Mr. Hofstadter, blatant self-reference is your favorite topic.I'm notoriously bad at distancing the creation from the creator, so perhaps I was biased from the start - reading the 20th anniversary intro was like listening to a narcissist who insists he's modest. I didn't fin. I have always wanted to be brilliant.
So this was the book I chose to make myself brilliant. Just brilliant.Alas, it didn't work.
It's taken me years (yes, literally years) to get through this tome. If you asked me what it is all about, I couldn't tell you, Alfie. I remain blitheringly stupid. That's why they make British baking shows, for dunces such as I.Tough read. This should be part of a Marines-type training course for readers. Much admiration for those who. Pretentious crap.
Hofstadter is about as interesting and insightful as a 14-year-old stoner who got a hold of some of his dad's reference books. The actual content of this book could fit in under a hundred pages, but Hofstadter feels it necessary to pack on pages upon pages upon pages of barely-relevant filler, much of it apparently just to show off with the fact that he read some classical Greek poetry once.To be fair, it is a very ambitious book, and one that could have turned out very interes. Synopsis: Two books, interwoven. The first is a series of comedic dialogues in which characters created by Lewis Carrol engage in friendly battles of wit and skill, or just conversations, each dialogue being modeled after music by Johann Sebastian Bach. The second is a prosaic exploration of the nature of artificial intelligence, self-reference, and free will. The two halves intertwine with eachother and refer to eachother.This book was made with great care, and is a masterpiece. It is the most.
Even the author has struggled to summarise what is the book about In the broad sense, it is a classic on a theory of information and formal systems for the readers without particular special knowledge in the area. It was written in the 70s, I think, and has won Pulitzer prize then. He approaches this subject from the variety of angles: logic, neuroscience, mathematics, music and visual art and finds a lot of analogies in these areas. The structure of the book is interesting: a chapter of a dialo.
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