In retrospect, that was really what did it for me. I held on to various forms of wishful thinking for a long time, because it seemed to me that minds and matter were fundamentally separate things, I couldn't see how it could be any other way--though I knew at that point that religious claims tended to be laughable, so I had some kind of vaguely half-assed do-it-yourself wishing-makes-it-so I believed in--and that implied the whole universe of dualism. Somehow I came away from it having relinquished that idea, and it, more than any other one book I'd read by that age, set the course for my intellectual journey.

And indeed, I was reading the twentieth anniversary edition, which even warned me up front: "In a word, GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?"

(Also, come to think of it, I'd have skipped ahead a long way on the philosophy of uploading if I'd read A Conversation with Einstein's Brain a few years earlier.)