Tahp

Look, nothing I can say about GEB will be news to anyone reading LessWrong, but I wrote all this up to organize my thoughts, so I might as well post it here for anyone who hasn't read the book or wants a wave of nostalgia about that time they got obsessed with it as a teenager. I have been trying to read Douglas Hofstadter's famous book Gödel, Escher, Bach (henceforth GEB) for ten years. I decided that I was going to try reading it from the beginning for the third or fourth time a few months ago, and I finally read the whole thing this time. Every previous time I tried to read it, I found the narrative intellectually compelling and delightfully playful, and yet I would have difficulty picking it up again for some reason. The thing that kept me coming back was the formal logic. I love a surprising logical consequence, and the set theory in the early chapters stoked my curiosity. Intellectually, I wanted to know where the setup of typographical formal systems was going, but I didn't have the willpower to get the words into my brain for the longest time. I'm glad that I finally did. To explain why the book is so difficult to get through, it might help to explain its structure. The book alternates between dialogues and chapters. The dialogues read like scripts for a play and consist of fantastical dialogues between Achilles, Tortoise, and others which are relevant to the following chapter. The dialogues are explicitly structured after Bach fugues. They are amusing, clever, and self-indulgent. They often have explanatory power. Sometimes I feel like they unnecessarily padded the word count. Many things in the book do this, but I don't think Hofstadter could have written this book without all of the tangents he explores. For example, he has an extended chapter about DNA and protein synthesis which doesn't really demonstrate anything that the typographical number theory chapters did not already do, but it certainly carves more deeply the outlines of what he means by stran