Excuse me, I have to don a flame-proof suit now.

Just a question: what useful results for predicting and modelling a preexisting reality has Douglas Hofstadter produced? I mean, yes, GEB is... well, it's GEB. I find it quite dated and think that it skates by on having fun with patterns rather than explaining observed phenomena. I'm also a little aggravated that GEB includes no discussions of model theory, ordinal logic, and w-incompleteness, nor of algorithmic randomness and halting problems, nor of the Curry-Howard Isomorphism and how it matches computational systems to logical systems. It goes on and on about recursion and formal systems for a very long time without actually addressing the formal sciences that handle the various phenomena arising from talking recursively in logic!

Whereas something more recent like Universal Artificial Intelligence by Hutter succeeds on mathematical rigor and Probabilistic Models of Cognition on beauty of compression and presentation.